Prologue: A View from London
In his address to the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester on October 4, 2016, the British Foreign Secretary and former Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, made the following remarks:
Johnson was rightly mocked for referring to Africa as a country. However, the political punch of his statement was not in what could be regarded as a gaffe, no matter how embarrassing, especially coming from the Foreign Secretary of a major European colonial power that formerly colonized nearly half of the continent—referring to Africa as a country is so widespread in everyday speech that it does not, and should not, now surprise any African or student of African affairs. Rather it is, in addition to his stylized rendition of history, and tone-deaf celebration of British imperialism, and neoliberal ideologies of governance and free-market fundamentalism, located in the claim that Africa only recently “entered the global economic system,” a statement that in itself is based on a number of problematic assumptions.I urge you not to look at the problems, but to look at the successes that these free institutions have helped to engender. For all its difficulties, life expectancy in Africa has risen astonishingly as that country has entered the global economic system. In 2000, the average Ethiopian lived to only 47—it is now 64 and climbing; in Zambia, the increase has been from 44 years to 60 years. In 1990, 37 percent of the world’s population lived in poverty; that is down to 9.6 percent today—and yes, that is partly thanks to UK spending on development aid; £300 million a year to Ethiopia alone. But above all it is our economic ideas, our beliefs, our values that continue to lift the world out of poverty. (My emphasis)
First is the widespread belief that the problems typically associated with Africa—poverty, development failure, armed conflict , so-called state failure, and so forth—are partially due to the continent’s exclusion from the global economy. This idea, which dominated perceptions of the continent in the 1990s and early 2000s, insists that the global economic system in the age of globalization operates on an inclusion/exclusion logic, and this has, as a result of a combination of factors, revealed the “structural irrelevance” of Africa to the global informational economy (Castells 1996). For example, the perverse idea of war as an alternative system of making profit and for inserting the continent in transnational processes through the shadowy business and criminal activity narrative is informed by this notion. Africa is excluded, the proponents of this perspective maintain, and the only way it can access the global economy is through parallel trans-border criminal activities like gunrunning, blood diamonds, and warlord politics (Berdal and Keen 1997; Berdal and Malone 2000; Duffield 2001; Keen 1998; Reno 1998). The Economist summed up this perverse perception in a May 2000 cover story that labeled Africa “the hopeless continent,” a region plagued by extreme poverty, pervasive development and state failure, armed conflicts that leave genocidal violence in their wake, and so forth. This Africa, as it would come to be understood in not only Western policy making circles but also in everyday speech, media representations, and academic discourses—even those that claim to be critical of these narratives—represents a danger not only to itself but also to the West, especially in the aftermath of 9/11, as conflicts in what is regarded as the continent’s failing states came to be defined as “zones of lawlessness open to exploitation by criminals and terrorists” (DFID 2004, p. iii).
Second is the assumption that the salvation of such a troubled continent lies in Western modernist interventions, that is, in Western ideas, values, and belief systems, specifically neoliberal ideologies of governance and market mechanisms, that according to Johnson are lifting the world out of poverty and helping to engender economic and social progress in Africa. This idea that has now emerged as a parallel discourse to that of “failure and exclusion” is encapsulated in the so-called Africa Rising narrative, which paradoxically gained prominence with a 2011 cover story by the same magazine that had, a decade earlier, declared Africa a “hopeless continent.” A 2010 McKinsey Global Institute report titled “Lions on the Move: The Progress and potential of African Economies” had in fact prefigured the arguments that would come to be the mainstay of the “Africa Rising” narrative. The idea is that since 2000, a number of African economies have experienced strong and rapid economic growth and have proved resilient to external shocks, such as the 2008 financial crisis, and this has made the continent an emerging and attractive region for investment, with the potential of becoming a major economic force in the coming decades. Desirous for a different narrative, other than the standard litany of lack, failure, and crises, African governments, which had in fact been attempting to rebrand the continent, seen, for example, in ideas like “ African Renaissance,” the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), and so forth, jumped on this “Africa Rising” bandwagon. In May 2014, for example, the Mozambican government hosted an IMF conference of the same title, intended to take stock of Africa’s economic performance, and the key policy challenges they face, as well as consider how to share the purported benefits of such economic progress among its people.
Central to this “ Africa Rising” narrative is the assumption that the continent’s isolation has ended or is ending and that its economic performance owes to its reintegration in the global economy, an idea that also credits Western liberal governance ideals and market mechanisms and the efforts made by Western governments and their aid agencies to end Africa’s isolation, help with governance reform, improve its political and macroeconomic stability, and create a healthier business climate, and these have made or are making Africa “predestined to enjoy a long period of mid-to-high single-digit economic growth, rising incomes and an emerging middle class.” If indeed, as the discourses of the 1990s had stressed, the causes of the continent’s problems partially owed to its lack and exclusion from the global economy, then one way of regenerating it would be to deal with the lack through its reinsertion into the global economy. This was, for example, the assumption of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had encouraged his Western counterparts to turn their attention to Africa, the continent he had on another occasion described as “a scar on the conscience of the world” that would get angrier if not rehabilitated through Western modernist interventions and imperialist benevolence. It is the purported result of these engagements that Johnson is partially celebrating: “the free institutions,” as well as “our economic ideas, our beliefs, our values,” are what he credits for the “strong” economic performance of African countries. It is these engagements, Johnson believes, that have helped to institute neoliberal governance and market mechanisms, which in turn have led to “improved governance” in African states as they are increasingly reintegrated in the global economy.
Johnson’s assumptions are symptomatic of the dominant ways discourses are framed about Africa, a continent toward which exists, Christopher Miller (1985) once reminded us, “a striking tendency towards dual, polarized evaluations,” so that it is constantly “made to bear a double burden, of monstrousness and nobility, all imposed by a deeper condition of difference and instability” (5). Made possible by the same discursive order, this polarized and conflicting evaluation has always been at odds with itself. The contradictions it represents are, paradoxically, the source and condition of the complementarity of the seemingly opposing narratives it fashions, so that, as V.Y. Mudimbe (1988; see also Hammond & Jablow 1970) once reminded us, ideas about “beastly savages,” “barbaric splendor,” “the white man’s grave,” for example, can go hand in hand with theories about “tropical treasure house,” “the promises of the Golden Land or New Orphir, and with the humanitarian principles for suppressing the slave trade, and for Christianizing and civilizing the Africans” without necessarily changing the image of the continent as an area of savagery and barbarism (20).
What this means, in essence, is that discourses of Africa’s lack and failure on the one hand, and those of the “Africa Rising” narratives on the other, are in fact different sides of the same coin: both are the products of a Eurocentric conception of Africa, a continent that is never allowed to be a contingency, or value in itself, but as a product of a narcissistic obsession with its difference and alterity. These discourses deal with an invented notion of Africa, the continent in relation to which the notion of “absolute otherness” is taken to its farthest possible extreme (Mudimbe 1988, 1994; Mbembe 2001). Making simplistic stereotypical generalizations that are never really about the continent, but about an egotistic obsession with its difference and alterity, these narratives never allow Africa to be complex, layered, nuanced, or differentiated. Rather, it is always presented as a homogenous space submitting to the fidelity of a monolithic reality, so that developments in one or some states become those of the entire continent. This Africa, seen as static and undifferentiated, can only really inhabit a single reality at a time: it is all at once, either barbarous or noble, failing or succeeding, “rising” or “reeling” as Jeffrey Gettleman (2016) recently asserted in a New York Times article. Lacking independent conceptual existence outside of the memory of the Eurocentric evolutionist gaze through which it is viewed, this Africa is a transparent and uncomplicated space, whose history is modeled on the trajectories of the evolution of European societies. Its relevance is derived not from its existence as a world-historical region but mainly from its peripherality and objecthood, which provides a metaphor for the West to construct and project its cogito; assert the superiority of its historicity, values, norms, and ideals; and celebrate the power of its benevolence and altruism as seen in Johnson’s speech.
A Preoccupation: An Intervention
It is these problematic discourses that this volume attempts to contest. Bringing together a number of scholars to stage a critical intervention into the problematic ways the continent is accounted for in international relations and global politics, it asks why is it that after decades of critical work calling into question these problematic discourses on and about Africa, the dominant narratives about the continent continue, almost entirely, as if these interventions never happened. Our focus is the discipline of international relations (IR), which remains a major site for the production of these problematic ideas about Africa. Consistently proving to be incapable of coming to terms with African realities, the discipline constantly resorts to frames that depict Africa in terms of lack, failure, and peripherality, a region that has very little to contribute to world politics other than constituting a headache for Western policy makers, international strategic actors, aid agencies, and global do-gooders. The contributors to this volume ask whether this persistent peripheralization of Africa owes to the fact that it has very little to contribute to global politics or whether it is because the dominant trends, and modalities of the discipline of IR, as well as the ideological concerns of its major practitioners, are such that they consistently obfuscate and write over the very important ways the continent constitutes, and is constitutive, of world politics and global power (Kniwane 2001).
Our aim thus is to examine, within a number of interrelated domains, the complicated relationship between Africa and the power-knowledge regimes of international relations, and ask how the dominant modalities of the discipline, and the discourses they fashion, construct Africa as an object of knowledge and what the implications of these constructions mean for the continent and its people. By way of epistemological critique, we seek to rethink the discipline of international relations by foregrounding the experiences of Africa to historical and ongoing processes of world order and global power, ...