THE AFRICAN OTHER

Consideration of the prevalent workings of the colonial regime in the African context gives rise to critical philosophical questions of justice, the self and the other. Who is the “African Other”? Who is justified to call themselves African, and who may speak out for or about Africans? If colonialism and apartheid have not, to use Du Bois’s term, “labelled” one as a black African, and therefore as a being of another, lesser kind, if one has not suffered the injustice to be made the “African Other,” can one really say one is an African? If one is no real African in this sense, can one at least choose to be who one is not – can one choose to be an African? How does one speak out against “othering” Africans? Can one ever do justice to the experience of the subaltern other in abstract terms of philosophical analysis? How does one speak about those who are othered by regimes of injustice? In what sense is othering an injustice? How can justice concern itself with the otherness and othering of the other?

These are recurrent and puzzling philosophical questions. They are very much alive, prompted by current postcolonial discourse on otherness and incited by recent publications in philosophy on decolonization, transformation and Africanization, particularly in the present African context, but not exclusively so.¹ Contemporary postcolonial discourse on otherness comes from critical reflection on intersectional modalities of exclusion in race, nationality, culture, class, gender, sexuality, religion and, to a lesser extent, species.² This includes criticism of the injustice committed by colonial conceptual frameworks, methodologies and practices, which make exclusion possible on various intersecting levels. Modern colonialism was, as Paul Taylor puts it, an “[ … ] intersectional project: it mobilised, manipulated, shaped and reshaped the meanings and practices that we refer to in ideas such as race, gender, sexuality, nation and class.” (Taylor 213) The critical result is “the various supremacist projects that helped to make the world we now inhabit – privileging white, propertied, heterosexual men over other kinds of people, robustly imagined as other kinds.”³ A seminal feature of the disastrous impact of colonial injustice is its systematic formation of categories that have radically shaped the identity of people and their world. It is worthwhile quoting Taylor extensively on this point:

Modern colonialism was, as much as it was anything else, a complex regime for the formation of certain kinds of human subjects. It was a system for making selves that would imagine the world and their places in it in ways that fit with, say, the co-optation of white labour with visions of imperial adventure and with the expropriation of black, brown and red land and labour through arguments about savagery and civilisation. (214)

This citation points succinctly to the problem that this collection addresses. The title, “The African Other,” may appear othering. However, it is intended to draw renewed attention to the way Africans have been made “the others.” Colonialism was a system, to use Taylor’s phrasing, for “making African selves” to be subjects of another, lesser, kind, “the others,” and deprived of the benefit and protection of the law. The problem is that the colonial system is still alive in the “postcolony”⁴ and calls for renewed thinking, for critical questioning, criticism and resistance of the continued influence of colonial projects on our practices. This goes not least for “societies where negative racial stereotypes, ostensibly and explicitly deplored, are covertly and illicitly reinforced.”⁵

The need to address and resist the workings of the colonial regime might appear to be a matter of high priority within the realm of academic philosophy. This is what the number of recent discussions and publications in philosophy on decolonization, transformation and Africanization at least seem to suggest. But this picture is deceiving. As Paul Taylor points out, for instance, “[ … ] postcoloniality is not on the agenda or even on the radar of Angloanalytic philosophy, even among scholars concerned with subjects – such as global justice – that seem to point towards it” (212). This also goes, more than one might expect, for philosophy in South Africa and in many other African countries, where philosophical curricula, especially, still reflect the prevailing dominance of the colonial legacy of Western philosophy. This epistemic colonial hegemony is illustrated by recent data on the curriculum and other offerings at philosophy departments in Southern and West Africa in a recent (2018) paper on “The State of African Philosophy in Africa” by Etieyibo and Chimakonam. In summary, their observation is “[ … ] that (1) philosophy programs in many of the universities in sub-Saharan Africa are westernized; (2) there are minimal courses offered in African philosophy in those universities” (Etieyibo and Chimakonam 85). Ramose, after De Sousa Santos (Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide 92), calls this predominance epistemic murder, or epistemicide: “The epistemicide committed at colonisation was left virtually intact by ensuring that the coloniser’s epistemological paradigm shall remain dominant” (Ramose 548). Epistemicide is an illustrative term for the prevailing subjugation to the colonizer’s epistemological paradigm and concomitant displacement of African thought. African thought has become the thought of the excluded African other. Academic attempts to decolonize the African other thus seem to have failed, particularly among those purported to be most critical – the philosophers.

This collection can be considered as part of a much-needed philosophical response to the recurrent postcolonial call to uproot the prevalent workings of the colonial regime, with a close focus on the African context. More precisely, it is about problems of justice, the effect of injustice on the formation of the self, and strategies of resistance against injustice.

Philosophical consideration of the prevalent workings of the colonial regime gives rise to inconveniently self-critical questions of justice and identity. Can one self-identify with black Africans if one has not suffered the injustice of anti-black racism? If one has not suffered because one is black, one cannot fight racism as black people do. Biko was right. Who, then, may call themselves real Africans, and who may speak out against the othering of Africans? More personally, should a male of European ancestry like me, privileged by the state of apartheid and its systematic legal and epistemic injustice against black citizens, be the guest editor of a special issue on the injustice of othering Africans?⁶ Was I not recently on the other side of justice? How can I speak out against othering Africans if I did not undergo the injustice of anti-black racism?

These questions reflect other, more general, questions. Who or what is “the other”? Does “the other” refer to the inner strangeness of the self, perhaps in a way that haunts it and that it repudiates by projecting it onto others? Or does it perhaps refer to the othering gaze of another person, which, internalized, produces resentment towards oneself?⁷ Or, else, does it refer to the strangeness of the other; his or her radical alterity? In what other ways is the other othered? Again, in what sense is othering an injustice, and how can justice be a concern for the otherness and othering of the other?

Some of these questions, including those concerning our relations with the other – legal, ethical, historical or psychological – have been at the forefront of past and current studies in philosophy and in other disciplines such as psychology, cultural studies, and history.⁸ The contributions in this collection address a range of questions concerning the othering of Africans in the postcolonial context, specifically by focusing on philosophical issues of justice and the self. This focus distinguishes this collection from other volumes on the other, postcoloniality and African philosophy.⁹

Not each contribution deals explicitly with both justice and the self. Some focus on problems of justice, others on issues of subjectivity. At a cursory glance, it appears that there is no obvious link between justice and the self. As the variety of contributions show, justice and the self each take on different meanings in different practical contexts. This reflects the fact that these concepts have a diversity of meanings in the history of philosophy. This variety also shows, particularly in postcolonial discourse, that we are challenged to ask critical questions concerning the prevalent legacy of dominant Western concepts and practices, questions which invite diversity in thinking. However, the problem of African othering suggests a connection between justice and the self, which seems to run through a diversity of their uses. This connection goes back to the classic definition of justice as such. According to its classic definition, justice is the sustained quest to render to each person his or her due.¹⁰ This rather abstract notion of justice – as quest to render to each self its due – raises both questions of a metaphysical and legal nature with regard to just and unjust, due or undue, approaches to other selves. This link between justice and the self allows for a diversity of uses and of connections between both terms.

The contributions can be divided roughly into three broad sections – without taking them to fit neatly into or to be confined to these sections, or strictly to follow in this specific sequence. So, most broadly, the first three contributions (Okeja, Allsobrook, Lauer) deal with critical issues of justice; the second set of contributions (Lamola, Naicker, Flikschuh) address problems of the formation of the self in unjust conditions; and the last four contributions (Bernasconi, Cloete, Tabensky, Du Toit) analyse strategies against othering.

1 problems of justice

Uchenna Okeja’s “Justice through Deliberation and the Problem of Otherness” considers the challenge that negative constructions of otherness pose for the pursuit of justice through deliberation. He argues that deliberation has been central to the pursuit of justice in African societies. A critical question that he raises is whether justice is realizable through deliberation, if one or more parties to deliberation regard other parties as absolute others, particularly as the “embodiment of everything abhorrent or aberrant.” He shows that in practices variously called “palaver,” public meetings or village assemblies, people endeavour to exercise justice through deliberation. This means that when parties disagree during a deliberation they may choose to go their separate ways, or they may agree to reconvene on another date. Through consideration of two models of deliberation – irenic and agonistic deliberation – he argues that the nature of any deliberation determines whether it must contend with the challenge of otherness. More generally, he argues that deliberation as a means to justice ultimately is contingent upon intersubjective affirmation of a basic principle, namely, the principle of humanity. He concludes that the shortcoming of the deliberative model of justice consists in its inability to deal with the rejection of dialogue based on certain notions of otherness.

In “Consensual Recognition of Universal Rights in African Custom” Chris Allsobrook argues that South Africa’s Bill of Rights is informed by Eurocentric Enlightenment principles, developed at the height of slavery and colonialism, which privilege European cultural norms, judging others inferior, to justify their conquest. Africanist critics of the Eurocentrism of hegemonic universal rights argue that Africans do not share the Western concept of rights. Rights in African ethics are commonly distinguished from Western rights, according to the distinct ideas of personhood, which ground them. According to Allsobrook, this critique, from personhood, sacrifices universality for cultural specificity. He argues that universal rights are better supported by consensual rights recognition. Allsobrook shows how normative justification of rights from consensual rights recognition is consistent with deliberative ideas of justice in African ethics. Africanist criticism, of individualist bias in Eurocentric interpretations of rights, supports the contention that rights are justified between people, not in personhood. He concludes that consensually accredited, recognized critical norms are preferable to rules derived from personhood, for the normative justification of universal rights from African ethics.

Helen Lauer’s “Implicitly Racist Epistemology: Recent Philosophical Appeals to the Neurophysiology of Tacit Prejudice” explores why examples of mainstream philosophy of cognition and applied phenomenology demonstrate the implicit bias that they treat as their subject matter, whether or not the authors of these works intend or approve of so doing. She shows why egalitarian intuitions, which form the basis for ideal models of justice appealing to elites in racially stratified societies, provide an inadequate framework for illuminating and dismantling the mechanics of racial discrimination. Lauer applies recently developed results in social choice theory to cases where racial bias is perpetuated through institutionally orchestrated collective decision making. She argues that the “discursive dilemma” theorem suggests why the analysis of subliminal attitudes is irrelevant to correcting the racial injustices presumed to follow from implicit bias in societies where negative racial stereotypes, ostensibly and explicitly deplored, are covertly and illicitly reinforced.

2 formations of the self

In “Breaking the Gridlock of the African Postcolonial Self-Imagination: Marx against Mbembe” M. John Lamola challenges Achille Mbembe’s analysis of the effect of colonial and neo-colonial injustice on African subjectivity in Mbembe’s book On the Postcolony. Mbembe declared that his book was written at a time when the study of Africa was caught in a dramatic analytical gridlock as traditional critical frameworks and discourses on the condition of postcolonial Africa seemed inadequate and ineffectual. Mbembe identifies specifically Marxian analysis of colonization as such an incapable critical framework of analysis. Lamola shows that Mbembe introduces, as an alternative to these “failed” traditional paradigms, a deconstructive experimental hermeneutic that leads him to the explication of colonial alterity in libidinal, representational and semiotically analogous language. Lamola challenges the efficacy of these post-structuralist semiotics and phenomenological extrapolations as a way out of Mbembe’s perceived “cul-de-sac” in African postcolonial “self-imagination.” Lamola turns around Mbembe’s dismissal of Marxian theory and demonstrates, on the contrary, that it is an analytical paradigm, which most radically diagnoses the injustice of colonization, and prevailing neo-colonialism, as it affects the African subject.

Veeran Naicker’s “Ressentiment in the Postcolony: A Nietzschean Analysis of Self and Otherness” examines the deployment of Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment by three major thinkers in postcolonial theory, namely, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and Achille Mbembe. His argument is that while postcolonial theory has used ressentiment in a way that potentially accounts for how contemporary moral culture conditions racism, nativism and xenophobia, this deployment remains incoherent. Naicker contends that the postcolonial deployment of ressentiment begins with an incoherent reading of Nietzsche by Fanon, a mistake which is creatively appropriated by Said and Mbembe. In their postcolonial use of ressentiment, Nietzsche’s insights are discarded and the term is transformed through Hegelian and psychoanalytic schematics, which take morality to be a universal and prescriptive code, the very problem that Nietzsche was attempting to overcome. Fanon, so Naicker contends, takes ressentiment to explain how colonial projection, or the racial gaze, is internalized by the colonized subject to produce a relation of self-hate. Said and Mbembe, so he shows, adopt the term to explain how colonial moral schemas are internalized and inverted to produce a reactive relation to the other on the basis of a good/evil moral schema. According to Naicker, the solution for all three thinkers is an overcoming of Manichean racism through inculcating a set of universal values based on reciprocal recognition. He objects that these thinkers change the meaning of the term in their postcolonial discourse; however, they still claim to be using the term as originally configured by Nietzsche. Naicker’s contention is that these thinkers also fail to indicate how ressentiment can be overcome or lead to recognition by providing a transitional space between markedly different ontologies of natural and social life. He argues that the deployment of ressentiment marks neither a Nietzschean turn nor a coherent transformation for problems in the postcolony.

In “Can I Choose to be Who I am Not? On (African) Subjectivity” Katrin Flikschuh engages Abraham Olivier’s recent distinction between “being” and “choosing to be” within his phenomenological approach to subjectivity in general and to African, communal subjectivity in particular. She recapitulates and problematizes aspects of Olivier’s reverse phenomenological analysis, briefly contrasting it with more orthodox African approaches to the ontology of the self. She then concentrates on the distinction between being who I am and choosing to be who I am not. Olivier argues that even if I am no African, I am still free to choose to be an African; thus, I remain free to choose who I am not. Flikschuh argues that I can indeed choose to be who I am not, subject to the proviso that I cannot choose to be who I am. She closes with some reflections on the moral significance of conscientiously choosing to be who I am not and what sense this question makes in the context of post-apartheid South Africa or a broader African context.

3 strategies against othering

Robert Bernasconi’s “A Most Dangerous Error: The Boasian Myth of a Knock-Down Argument against Racism” argues that a genealogy of the English word racism shows that its dominant sense was shaped by Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Ashley Montagu around 1940 to establish a broad consensus against a narrow form of antisemitism found among some anthropologists in Nazi Germany. Their strategy, so he explains, was to challenge the biological concept of race on which racism, on their account, was said to be parasitic. This strategy was subsequently adopted by UNESCO in 1950 and is still advocated by many today. However, Bernasconi contends that this strategy was not formulated to address anti-black racism and its limitations were quickly exposed by black thinkers like Oliver Cromwell Cox and Frantz Fanon. They understood that the problem was a form of systemic racism that could not be separated from the economic inequalities produced by slavery and colonialism. Bernasconi concludes that racism cannot be reduced to a system of thought open to scientific refutation; thus, the problem is misdiagnosed from the outset.

In “Steve Biko: Black Consciousness and the African Other – The Struggle for the Political” Michael Cloete argues that the legacy of Steve Biko remains to this day a “contested” legacy, not only on account of his reputation as a political activist but also because of profound scepticism regarding the philosophical status and integrity of his thought. Cloete seeks to engage with Steve Biko, the philosopher, not only to debunk the position that endeavours to reduce his thinking to the level of mere political activism, given his identification with the Black Consciousness Movement and the radicalism of black student politics, but also to demonstrate that his appropriation of Black Consciousness philosophy is deeply rooted in an African humanist philosophy that provides the normative context for his interrogation of white supremacy in colonial-apartheid South Africa.

Pedro Tabensky’s “Rebellion and Revolution” focuses on a central aspect of Albert Camus’s thinking, embodied in the distinction, in The Rebel, between rebel and revolutionary. Tabensky argues that Camus’s is a philosophy of rebellion and that he thinks that revolutions are a distorted expression of our need to rebel against that which we cannot accept. Consequently, Camus’s views should serve as a counterpoint to those who think that an all-or-nothing approach to social change is desirable, including those who, for instance, are too quick to justify murderous campaigns allegedly aimed at justice. Tabensky contends that the issue here is not the one embodied crudely in the reactionary (or conservative)/radical dichotomy. The issue, so he concludes, is, rather, a defence of the need to rebel within limits, not so much to preserve the old against the threat of the new but, instead, to preserve basic human decency from the dark side of outrage, without dismissing what is crucial about outrage and emancipatory struggles.

In “The African Animal Other: Decolonizing Nature” Louise du Toit formulates as her main claim that traditional Western and currently dominant understandings of the figures of “Nature” and “Animal” underlie and structure different forms of oppression and should be critically confronted. She argues that the racial-sexual subjugation of the colonized African draws symbolically on the traditional Western symbolic subjugations of Animal and Woman. It is Woman’s sexual body that links humans to the domain of the animal, and Man’s intellect that distinguishes and separates humans from that same domain. Consequently, Woman merges with the chaos and fleshiness of Animal and Nature. Du Toit further shows how, with the emergence of race as a category of classification and colonial justification, the African is placed at the furthest remove from Western Man, the epitome of reasonable humanity. As a result, particularly African Woman is seen as the Animal Other. The colonial-“civilizing” project, which is purported to institute a certain flight from Nature and Animal, was rather bound to fail, especially black African Woman. Du Toit demonstrates in detail how this symbolic project finds concrete expression in the uncontrolled sexual and other forms of exploitation of the Black Woman’s body, as much as in the rampant destruction of nature and animal in the colony. As the main aim of her contribution, she looks at ways to confront and dismantle this highly destructive symbolic. To this end, she deploys Merleau-Ponty’s careful reintegration of the intelligible into the sensible, and his understanding that the human mind is a function of the “flesh of the world” itself. Thus human intelligence is viewed as a kind of fold in the flesh of being and as merely a moment in “nature’s own self-unfolding expression.” Du Toit ends with a brief comparison between Merleau-Ponty’s thinking and some concrete examples of extra-Western or extra-colonial Southern African understandings of Animal and Nature, and with the hope that this dialogue will be developed further.

• • •

All in all, these contributions consider in diverse ways the intersectional manifestations of colonial injustice in the postcolony, its formative effect on African subjectivity, strategies to resist it, and the need for critical reflection on concepts of justice and the other. Injustice in the postcolonial context of Africa refers to a set of specifiable conditions that come with specific tensions, notably the burdens of being shaped by just these conditions.¹¹ The fact that the colony is still so deeply engrained in institutions, and enmeshed in our practices, makes it difficult to uproot. The shaping effect of unjust conditions on the self remains a major ongoing challenge and the call for philosophical reflections on justice a seminal issue. This call concerns both those whom colonial injustice has made the African other and those who benefit from not being othered. What they share is perhaps, no matter who we are, that we are free to choose to join the fight against injustice in all its intersectional manifestations.

Notes

I am indebted to M. John Lamola, Chris Allsobrook and Ian Olivier for critical comments on a first draft of this introduction.

1 See, for instance, Mogobe Ramose’s recent special issue of the South African Journal of Philosophy (SAJP), entitled “Africanising the Philosophy Curriculum in Universities in Africa” (2016), Edwin Etieyibo’s collection Method, Substance, and the Future of African Philosophy (2018), and Elvis Imafidon’s volume African Philosophy and the Otherness of Albinism: White Skin, Black Race (2018). See also Pedro Tabensky and Sally Matthews’s collection Being at Home: Race, Institutional Culture and Transformation at South African Higher Education Institutions (2015).

2 On the issue of other species, see Du Toit’s contribution “The African Animal Other: Decolonizing Nature” in this collection.

3 Taylor 214; my emphasis. See also Lamola’s analysis of Mbembe’s take on the formative effect of the postcolonial project in his book On the Postcolony in this collection (Lamola, “Breaking the Gridlock of the African Postcolonial Self-Imagination: Marx against Mbembe”).

4 Mbembe 102–04.

5 Cited from Helen Lauer’s contribution to this collection entitled “Implicitly Racist Epistemology: Recent Philosophical Appeals to the Neurophysiology of Tacit Prejudice.”

6 This question was put to me in a slightly different format a couple of years ago when I opened the annual conference of the International Society for African Philosophy and Studies (ISAPS). The topic was African Identity.

7 This refers to Fanon’s view – see Naicker’s discussion in his contribution to this collection entitled “Ressentiment in the Postcolony: A Nietzschean Analysis of Self and Otherness.”

8 Western philosophers who have worked on such questions include, among others, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler. African postcolonial discourse is propounded by philosophers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Kwasi Wiredu, Paulin J. Hountondji, P.O. Bodunrin, Ifeanyi A. Menkiti, Kwame Gyekye, Lucius Outlaw, V.Y. Mudimbe, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Mabogo More, Mogobe Ramose, Homi Bhabha, Paul Taylor, Lewis Gordon and Achille Mbembe, to name but a few.

9 See, for instance, the recent collections mentioned in the first endnote.

10 We find this core definition of justice, for instance, in Plato’s Republic, and in Institutes of Justinian, a codification of Roman Law from the sixth century ad. The reference to the latter I draw from the entry on Justice in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. This understanding of justice is also found in African classics, which draw a strong connection between rights and human dignity, for instance, in Wiredu’s “Moral Foundations of an African Culture” and Gyekye’s “Person and Community in African Thought.” For a discussion of African concepts of justice, see both Okeja and Allsobrook in this collection.

11 I take the phrasing here from Taylor (214).