African Political Thought of the Twentieth Century

A Re-engagement

Shiera el-Malik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317230281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

This book focuses on African political thought, as it emerged in the context of and contributed to fundamental changes in world order during the twentieth century, and as it continues to speak to the present global condition. The six chapters form a set of close readings of 20th century African political theorists insofar as their work forms part of a conversation that Africa had with itself and with the rest of the world regarding freedom, independence, emancipation and statehood, as well as forming part of the larger global conversations within which these theorists can be situated. The essays analyse the ideas and practices of a number of prominent figures including Frantz Fanon, Leopold Senghor, Amílcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto, Julius Nyerere, Gabriel d'Arboussier, Sembene Ousmane.

This collection is unusual in its breadth, bringing together analyses of radical thinkers and activists from the Portuguese-, French- and English-speaking regions of Africa. It includes chapters from prominent senior figures in the field, as well as contributions from younger scholars. The editor includes a short introduction which frames the collection and situates its contribution to broader debates and fields of enquiry. This book was originally published as a special issue of African Identities.

INTRODUCTION
African political thought of the twentieth century: a reengagement

Shiera S. el-Malik^a and Branwen Gruffydd Jones^b

^aDepartment of International Studies, DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA; ^bDepartment of Politics, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK

This special issue focuses on African political thought, as it emerged in the context of and contributed to fundamental changes in world order during the twentieth century, and as it continues to speak to the present global condition. The six essays in this issue form a set of close readings of twentieth-century African political theorists insofar as their work represents part of a conversation that Africa had with itself and with the rest of the world regarding freedom, independence, emancipation and statehood. Their work also represents part of the larger global conversations within which these theorists can be situated. The essays collected here analyse the ideas and practices of a number of prominent figures including Léopold Sédar Senghor, Steve Biko, Amílcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto, Julius Nyerere, Gabriel d’Arboussier and Sembène Ousmane.

Placing engagements with these thinkers in a single journal issue allows contemporary authors to address the ways in which ideas such as Negritude, Pan-Africanism, Humanism and African Socialism underpinned both Africa’s engagement with itself in the period of decolonisation alongside global ideological engagements regarding nation, state, responsibility to their citizens, their regional community and the international arena. Gathering together essays examining this range of African political theorists and activists serves to foreground the significance of Africa’s contribution to the political thought of modernity, a significance which is routinely and fairly systematically overlooked in most treatments of political thought. The papers provide a critical and historically contextualised exploration of the themes and innovations of these various figures, in a manner which both roots important theoretical, intellectual and cultural contributions in their concrete context of historical struggle, and reflects on the enduring significance of these ideas beyond their moment of enunciation.

This issue opens with an essay that examines anti-colonial struggles in relation to notions of race and culture. Gruffydd Jones’ essay explores how race and culture in the struggles against colonialism came to be addressed and formulated in specific ways particularly in the context of the Lusophone African anti-colonial struggles. She suggests that the necessity of war and challenges of prolonged popular armed struggle against the brutality of Portuguese colonial fascism required a reformulation of the questions of race and culture more revolutionary than that offered by Negritude.

Otunnu presents a historical analysis of Nyerere’s African socialism (ujamaa), philosophy of education for total liberation of society and philosophy of Pan-Africanism. For him, the philosophy and the practice of African Socialism presented the possibility of constructing socialism in non-European peripheral capitalist societies. However, specific conditions and both historical and contemporaneous contradictions limited its success.

Turning to the political, aesthetic and ethical significance of Ousmane Sembène’s art, Opondo examines how Sembène interrupts claims regarding African practices and conceptions of self that are streamlined into narrow colonial, ‘Afro-radicalist’ and ‘nativist’ narratives of African identity. For him, Sembène’s cinematic and literary practice presents a different way of thinking about Africanness, modernity in Africa, as well as notions of the political.

In thinking about international politics and the legacy of colonialism, el-Malik suggests that Senghor was successful in interrupting discursive closures such that his work illustrates how one might prioritise the critical analysis necessary for the development of critical questions. She characterises Senghor’s thinking as focused on epistemological questions, a recognition of the embeddedness of these questions in everyday political decision-making, and an awareness of the way his own thinking develops over time.

Kamola presents this idea of contemporary relevance of African political thought in another way. He examines the use African anti-colonial theory – and Steve Biko’s critique of white liberalism in particular – to examine contemporary debates about global governance and sets Biko’s arguments against arguments regarding KONY 2012 and the Millennium Development Goals. He argues that liberals who advance global governance both ignore their own complicity within the existing ‘global’ order and are actually not well positioned to offer meaningful solutions to the problems of violence, poverty and weak states.

The issue concludes with an essay that exactly illustrates the permeability of boundaries to the migratory patterns of ideas such that (in this case) the idea of democracy cannot be thought of as distinct from normative patterns of imperialism and imperial governance. Grovogui examines the vision and imaginaries of democracy enunciated in Gabriel d’Arboussier’s work. He argues that the anti-colonial democratic project understood the post-war liberal democratic project to be predicated on an imperial reason.

A number of themes and motivations cut across this collection of essays, and it is these interactions across the essays, which give rise to a collective contribution and warrant publication together in a special issue. First, the purpose of the collection and the approach of the authors is not to evaluate African political thought against the contents, standards and achievements of Western political thought. The essays recognise and affirm the irreducible autonomy and significance of African political thought as an integral component of the global political thought of modernity.

Second, the essays grasp the specificity of differentiated colonial contexts, conditions and struggles across Lusophone, Anglophone and Francophone Africa, and at different moments of the twentieth century. At the same time, the close analyses of the work of a number of African intellectuals from different contexts brings into view elements of the shared experience of colonialism and the broader aspirations of Africans beyond the specific framework of nationalism and decolonisation.

Third, this collection highlights and develops the deep relevance and resonance of the strands of African political thought for the present. To this end, the analyses in this collection reflect on the deeper ethical and philosophical commitments and implications of the work of these African intellectuals, and demonstrate explicitly various ways in which their contributions continue to shed light on concrete and pressing conditions and dilemmas of the present.

Finally, in refusing to take the given traditions of Western political thought as a starting point, the essays also refuse or go beyond some of the underlying boundaries and structures which frame conventional analytical distinctions, concepts and division of labour in political thought. In exploring the realm of African political thought and practice, the collection examines not only published books of political theory but also a broader range of sources which encompasses speeches and speaking, literature and film. Thus, this approach expands the terrain of the political and of critique, to include questions of culture, everyday life and the city.

From rupture to revolution: race, culture and the practice of anticolonial thought

Branwen Gruffydd Jones

Department of Politics, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK

This article considers the development of the political thought of the lusophone African anti-colonial movements, and their engagement with negritude. Some of the leading figures of the lusophone African anti-colonial movements of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe were deeply engaged in poetry and literature, and during the 1950s and the 1960s some of them participated directly in some of the contexts of and debates over negritude. The article explores how the problems of race and culture in the struggles against colonialism came to be addressed and formulated in specific ways by and in the context of the lusophone African anti-colonial struggles which went beyond the limitations of negritude. It was the necessity of actual war and challenges of prolonged, popular armed struggle against the intransigent brutality of Portuguese colonial fascism which required a more revolutionary reformulation of the questions of race and culture in the struggle for independence.

In ‘The Fact of Blackness’, chapter five of Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon describes his reaction to reading Senghor’s analysis of ‘rhythm in the masterpieces of Negro art’: ‘Had I read that right? I read it again with redoubled attention. From the opposite end of the white world a magical Negro culture was hailing me. Negro sculpture! I began to flush with pride. Was this our salvation?’ (1986, p. 123). Amílcar Cabral had a similar response when, having like Fanon moved to the colonial metropole to continue his studies, he first read the poetry collected in Senghor’s Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poèsie Nègre et Malgache de Langue Française (1948). Cabral, who was born in Guinea-Bissau and had lived since 1931 in Cape Verde, went to Lisbon in 1945 to study agronomy. One of the books which circulated among the African students in Lisbon was Senghor’s anthology, and Cabral recalled his response:

Things I had not even dreamed of, marvellous poetry written by blacks from all parts of the French world, poetry that speaks of Africa, slaves, men, life and human hopes … Sublime … infinitely human … The book brings me much and, among the many things, the certainty that the black man is in the process of awakening throughout the world. (Cited in Andrade, 1980, p. xxii)

Yet, in their political thought and practice, both Fanon and Cabral would reject and move beyond the limitations of Senghor’s negritude as a valid basis for confronting colonial oppression. This article begins to explore the trajectory of the political thought of the liberation movements of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe (hereafter the lusophone African liberation movements), with a particular focus on their distinct formulation of the question of race and culture in relation to anti-colonial struggle and national liberation. The article probes the relationship between the literary and philosophical movement of negritude and the ideas about race and culture in the political thought of these liberation movements. In his study of the rise of black internationalism in the inter-war period, Edwards highlights the contradictions and tensions which necessarily arose in the exchanges between black intellectuals and activists from different contexts, notwithstanding prevailing ideals of worldwide black unity: ‘black modern expression takes form not as a single thread, but through the often uneasy encounters of peoples of African descent with each other’ (2003, p. 5). Edwards’ foregrounding of differentiations and disagreements within black political thought, expression and struggle, rooted in the highly varied contexts of black and colonial oppression and resistance, resonates with this inquiry into African anti-colonial thought. It points to the active dynamism of black and African political thought and practice in grappling with myriad specific and rooted problems of colonial and racial oppression while simultaneously sustaining a consciousness of the broader, global horizons of African and human unity.

The first section considers briefly the relationship between the francophone and lusophone negritude literatures of the early twentieth century, and examines the debates over negritude specifically in relation to African decolonisation. The second section explores some of the actual points of contact and engagement between the figures of the lusophone African anti-colonial movements and the ideas, debates about and contexts of negritude. The third section discusses how the problems of race and culture were formulated in distinct ways in the thought and practice of the lusophone African anti-colonial movements. The figures of these anti-colonial movements had, necessarily, to confront the questions of race and culture addressed earlier by Césaire and Senghor, and in the imperatives of revolutionary armed struggle, reached different resolutions.

Tensions of Negritude and African decolonisation: race, culture and politics

The philosophical and literary movement named Negritude by Césaire and Senghor emerged initially in Paris in the 1930s in the writings of black francophone intellectuals who sought to reclaim their identity and history from the suffocating and violent experience of French colonial racism and denial. Negritude was a complex movement which cannot be reduced to the ideas and works of Césaire and Senghor. Nevertheless, it is perhaps around these two leading figures that some of the tensions and divergences within negritude are most apparent and significant. These tensions are found within both distinct notions of race, culture and identity and the question of the relationship between culture and politics. What Césaire, Senghor and many other writers of negritude and other movements shared was the determination to proclaim and articulate the worth of black African culture and identity in the face of colonial oppression based fundamentally on the denial of black African worth. While inhabiting shared ground in the early years, the conception of negritude in the poetry of Césaire and Damas diverged from that of Senghor, articulating a historically and experientially rooted notion of culture and black identity, shaped by the long historical experiences of colonial racial and economic oppression and uprooting specific to the islands of the Caribbean. In contrast, Senghor, in both his poetry and his philosophical texts, upheld a more essentialist notion of racial identity and culture, a notion of an inherent black African mode of thought and experience, a way of being. He developed the idea of an African soul, an African style and an African aesthetic, which was characterised by a philosophy of vital life forces and, above all, by the centrality of rhythm. For Senghor, African culture was ‘born of the reciprocal action of race, tradition and milieu’ (1964, p. 287); the Negro soul was practical and sensual, ‘permeable to apparently imperceptible rhythms, to all the solicitations of the world’ with ‘an emotive sensibility’ (p. 288). ‘Emotion’, Senghor wrote, ‘is Negro, as reason is Hellenic’ (p. 288). The emotive sensibility of the Negro, or black African, underpins an open approach to the world, understanding the self to be part of and continuous with the world, in contrast to the subject–object dichotomies of European thought:

All of nature is animated by a human presence. Nature is humanized … Not only animals and the phenomena of nature – rain, wind, thunder, mountain, river – but also trees and stones are made men – men who retain some original physical features, as instruments and signs of their personal soul. This is the most profound trait, the eternal trait, of the Negro soul. (p. 289)

Echoing European theories of race, Senghor posited this essential Negro soul to be ‘the daughter of the milieu’ – Africa – ‘for here the effect of the milieu is particularly perceptible. Due to the light, so primitively pure, on the savannah and at the edges of the forest, where civilizations were born: bare light that lays bare, that reveals the essential, the essence of things, as it were. Due to this climate, whose violence both exalts and crushes’ (1964, p. 289). Senghor contrasted this African epistemology with the rational and static objectivism and dualism of European Enlightenment thought: ‘the values of European civilization had rested essentially on discursive reason and facts, on logic and matter’ (1970, p. 181). He argued:

Far back as one may go into his past, from the northern Sudanese to the southern Bantu, the African has always and everywhere presented a concept of the world which is diametrically opposed to the traditional philosophy of Europe. The latter is essentially static, objective, dichotomic; it is, in fact, dualistic, in that it makes an absolute distinction between body and soul, matter and spirit. It is founded on separation and opposition; on analysis and conflict. (1970, p. 184, emphasis in original)

The imperative to reclaim a sense of African pride and identity autonomous from the dominant and imposed Portuguese tradition, and to express and denounce the suffering of the colonised, was also articulated in lusophone African literature from the early twentieth century (see especially Hamilton, 1975; Laranjeira, 1995). More or less contemporaneously with the initial steps leading to the emergence of negritude in France, literary movements articulating the specificity of their culture and identity emerged in the islands of Cape Verde, and of São Tomé and Príncipe. In Cape Verde this was rooted from 1936 in a group of writers centred around the journal Claridade – which was, as Andrade later observed, ‘a veritable cultural movement which marked the moment of caboverdianidade – the first prise de conscience of the dramatic realities of the archipelago of Cape Verde’ (1959, p. 6). In Angola, the Movimento dos novos intelectuais de Angola and their project Vamos Descobrir Angola (Let’s Discover Angola) emerged in the post-war moment of the late 1940s, followed by the establishment of the literary journal Mensagem in Luanda in 1951 (Andrade 1959; Hamilton, 1975, p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: African political thought of the twentieth century: a reengagement
• 2. From rupture to revolution: race, culture and the practice of anti-colonial thought
• 3. Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere’s philosophy, contribution, and legacies
• 4. Cinema is our ‘night school’: appropriation, falsification, and dissensus in the art of Ousmane Sembène
• 5. Interruptive discourses: Léopold Senghor, African Emotion and the poetry of politics
• 6. Steve Biko and a critique of global governance as white liberalism
• 7. Remembering democracy: anticolonial evocations and invocations of a disappearing norm
• Index