Postethnophilosophy. (Value Inquiry Book Series)

POSTETHNOPHILOSOPHY

VIBS Volume 227 Robert Ginsberg Founding Editor Leonidas Donskis Executive Editor Associate Editors G. John M. Abbarno George Allan Gerhold K. Becker Raymond Angelo Belliotti Kenneth A. Bryson C. Stephen Byrum Robert A. Delfino Rem B. Edwards Malcolm D. Evans Roland Faber Andrew Fitz-Gibbon Francesc Forn i Argimon Daniel B. Gallagher William C. Gay Dane R. Gordon J. Everet Green Heta Aleksandra Gylling Matti Häyry Brian G. Henning

Steven V. Hicks Richard T. Hull Michael Krausz Olli Loukola Mark Letteri Vincent L. Luizzi Adrianne McEvoy J.D. Mininger Peter A. Redpath Arleen L. F. Salles John R. Shook Eddy Souffrant Tuija Takala Emil Višňovský Anne Waters James R. Watson John R. Welch Thomas Woods

a volume in Social Philosophy SP Andrew Fitz-Gibbon , Editor

POSTETHNOPHILOSOPHY

Sanya Osha With a Guest Foreword by

Seth N. Asumah

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011

Cover Photo: www.dreamstime.com Cover Design: Studio Pollmann The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3317-7 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3318-4 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011 Printed in the Netherlands

Social Philosophy (SP) Andrew Fitz-Gibbon Editor

Other Titles in SP Evgenia Cherkasova. Dostoevsy and Kant. 2009. VIBS 206 Craig Hanson. Thinking About Addiction. 2009. VIBS 209

CONTENTS EDITORIAL FOREWORD Andrew Fitz-Gibbon

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GUEST FOREWORD Seth N. Asumah

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PREFACE

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INTRODUCTION

1

ONE

Discourses of Decolonization

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TWO

The Lure of Ethnophilosophy

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THREE

An Anthropology of Colonialism and Contemporary Globalization

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FOUR

The Frontier of Interculturality

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FIVE

An Ethic of Culture and Memory

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SIX

Agency and a Deterritorialized Literature

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SEVEN

Figures of the African Female

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EIGHT

The Poetics of Corruption in a Global Age

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NINE

A Postcolonial Text and the Agency of Theory

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TEN

The (Re)Colonization of Globality

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ELEVEN

Race and a Postmodern World

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POSTETHNOPHILOSOPHY

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Sarah Baartman, Sexuality, and the Theater of Race

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CONCLUSION

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WORKS CITED

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

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SUBJECT INDEX

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NAME AND TITLE INDEX

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EDITORIAL FOREWORD In 1998, the philosophy department at State University of New York at Cortland took the innovative step to create a program focused on social philosophy. The key components of the program are social and political philosophy, ethics, and applied philosophy. In 2007, following the successful implementation of the program, the department formed the Center for Ethics Peace and Social Justice to extend the outreach of philosophy through publications, conferences, and a summer ethics institute for faculty, and philosophical practice and activism. As part of that outreach, we are delighted to co-sponsor the VIBS special series in Social Philosophy. Sanya Osha’s innovative work, Postethnophilosophy, is the third volume in our series. In this book, Osha reconsiders the question: “What is African philosophy,” and introduces a strategy for setting a broad and productive agenda for contemporary African philosophical thought. The scope of this work is broad. It explores the links between contemporary anthropology and African thought by critiquing the contributions of primary scholars such as Kwasi Wiredu, Wim van Binsbergen, and John and Jean Comaroff. He argues that African philosophy had been impeded by an engrossing search for identity. This book advances beyond the problem of identity and selfconstitution, and focuses instead on the dynamics of decolonization, race in a post apartheid context, the problematic interactions between race and sexuality, and a range of other discursive deliberations. On a broader scale, the book addresses the question of producing knowledge in Africa. In particular, it examines the role of the public intellectual in relation to politics and cultural memory. These various preoccupations bypass the central assumptions of classical ethnophilosophy. Osha makes a bold announcement for the beginning of a postethnophilosophical phase in contemporary African thought. Andrew Fitz-Gibbon Associate Professor of Philosophy Director, Center for Ethics, Peace and Social Justice State University of New York College at Cortland and VIBS Social Philosophy Special Series Editor

GUEST FOREWORD RETHINKING AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY In this era of globalization and Sino-Africanization, there is an urgency to reexamine the decolonization discourse and its concomitant questions, issues, and prospects for the African continent in relation to the processes of development and modernization. There is always a point in time where the evolution of the corpus of the field of study tends to eclipse with the field itself, and we have reached that juncture for African philosophy and the continent. The deadline for the realization of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) propounded by all the member states of the United Nations and twenty-three transnational organizations is a few years away. Yet we are nowhere near the eradication of extreme poverty, achievement of universal primary education, promotion of gender equity, combating the HIV/AIDS pandemic, reduction of child mortality and developing global partnership for development, to name some of the goals for the Millennium Project. In the post-colonial era, scholars and policymakers have been engaged in scholarship, discursive consciousness, and practical perceptions of reconciling the differences between African cultures and European ones. Most often, Africanists and Africologists are submerged in laborious projects of vindicating the African personality and the African collective self. In these troubling times of socio-economic and political uncertainties across the continent, there is a dire need for a new ubuntu that emphasizes relational democracy, where Africans will command respect in the global village, reconstitute their shared values, and utilize participatory avenues through sustained institutional arrangements to shape the life and direction of their societies. In this perspective, if postethnophilosophy interrogates the African body politic by bringing the questions and issues of race, power, hegemony, development, modernization, multiculturalism, interculturality, globalization, and intersectionality to the forefront, then, from not engaging readers on topics above to what postethnophilosophy attempts to achieve, we have come a full circle in our Africaness regardless of identity politics, location, and culture. Without rehashing the debate over whether there even exists a corpus of African philosophy and its origin, one can firmly make the claim that African philosophical tradition has been long situated to confront the questions and issues that have gained currency in terms of the Millennium Development Goals. The intellectual works and practices of African philosophers and the discourses about the continent and its interaction with, especially, Europe and the Americas constitute this philosophical tradition that attempts to mediate the forces of structural variables in Africa and systemic dynamics of global capitalism. African philosophical thinkers, in this perception, continue to de-

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fine and redefine their roles as mediators of the African personality and the African polity. With the emergence of ethnophilosophy, the intensity and scope of the decolonization discourse, the effects of globalization, and Chinanization, the task of interrogating the African self and the European other has become more complex because of the politics of discursive omission and commission. Some scholars may argue that in the process of globalization, local culture becomes synonymous with Western culture, and that consequently, there is a need for subordinate cultures to go back to their source of the essence of being (Sankofa) to search for productive elements that will bring new meanings to their lives. Indubitably, this occasion is not the time for pessimism. Nevertheless, the European nostalgia for slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism, and now, globalization, always remind Africans of the trauma and the nature of decolonization. In a similar vein, Salih Booker and William Minter document the inequalities in today’s global village as the: foundation of the old inequalities of slavery and colonialism. . . . Like apartheid in South Africa, global apartheid entrenches great disparities in wealth, living conditions, life expectancy and access to government institutions with effective power. (2001, p. 15) Globalization is not a panacea for most of Africa’s problems, as the winners of the global movement would make the world believe. Africans should be careful in participating in a movement that champions the style of globalization that is blind to the needs of the majority of the members of the global village. If this present process of globalization continues into the next twenty-five years, African nation states are likely to permanently reinscribe in a position of subjugation, exploitation, marginalization, and life-threatening status that is mystified by Western rationalization of a free market and equal benefits for all members of the global village. Furthermore, the emergence and increasing activity of parastatal agencies, transnational corporations, and nongovernmental organizations in the postcolonial era have impacted the nature and function of the African nation state. The role of the African nation state, in the process of development and modernization, continues to elude both scholars and policymakers in these times of liberalization and globalization. Depicting the role of the nation state as elusive is associated with the question of whether transnational actors’ activities on the continent have rendered the nation states’ role to become anachronistic or epiphenomenal. In decolonial discourse, as the modern nation state continues to evolve in Africa, it retires into a different type of entity in order to respond to the demands and needs of the society at large. Yet the authoritative action of the nation state to shape and constrain the expectations, demands, and pressures from the general populace, international actors, and other institutions are modified according to paradigmatic reorientation of the

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state itself. If the security and power of the nation state are eroding, is it perhaps because of free trade zones, international financial institutions, nongovernmental institutions, global capitalism, terrorism, environmental challenges, patriarchal hegemonic African societies, or a combination of structural paralysis and systemic dynamics? The postcolonial African nation state, in addition to being anthropomorphic, has to constantly deal with the development crises of identity by unifying the general populace, promoting autonomous political participation by improving the democratic process, facilitating penetration of the law into the society by maintaining law-governing structures, and distributing resources and power by decentralization in governance. These crises, inter alia, have prevented the postcolonial African nation from reaching a takeoff stage—a point of prematurity, where the necessities for development are secured. Since we must not perform a premature autopsy on the body politic of the African nation state, African philosophers must lead the way to challenge scholars, educators, and policymakers to confront the issues and conditions above and find solutions to them by taking the conversation beyond the postcolonial discourse and traditional ethnophilosophy. A courageous act is required to address the totality of issues and questions pertaining to the African human condition and globalization through the lenses of ethnophilosophy. Yet, Sanya Osha’s volume is the first I have read that is Janus-headed in its discursive approaches. Osha’s corpus is, on the one hand, ipsissima verba of the African philosophers whose work precede him. On the other, it transcends the limits and substantially raises the bar of the works of Kwesi Wiredu, Paulin Hountondji, Kwame Anthony Appiah, John L. Comaroff, Jean Comaroff, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Van Binsbergen, and the like. For instance, if Hountondji finds a philosophical problem with African ethnophilosophy because it plays into the hands of Western ethnophilosophy, but falls short of finding a clear solution to the theoretical lacuna, Sanya Osha effectively captures the domain of discursive consciousness through his work on postethnophilosophy. As it is noted in the Akan, “one does not tell Kweku Ananse stories to Ananse’s own children.” However, in this case, the new stories of Ananse must generate better meaning through effective use of language that makes sense of the ancient narratives. Osha does not spare his readers and ethnophilosophers from a critical analysis of Wiredu’s corpus. This begs the question: in the postcolonial era, is the African collective self still subordinate to the superordination of the European other in order to authenticate African philosophy, as Wiredu does in his Anglo-Saxon analytical framework, and Osha carefully reveals? The African sage must have insights and the griot must be charged with the preservation and critique of tradition and culture. If the sage and griot surrender their vision and wisdom to outside agencies, then they have to reexamine their own ideals and approaches to mediation in the society. Axiomatically, Van Binsbergen is well captured in his dilemma of maintaining both the qualities of a

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North Atlantic academician and a sangoma high priest of East Africa. Van Binsbergen has to reconcile these differences in his theoretical approaches, but he still suffers a dosage of double consciousness in his philosophical narratives. Osha immaculately brings the narratives and discursive consciousness of the interlocutors of ethnophilosophy to life in his assessment of their works, yet he compels the student of African philosophy or anyone who appreciates knowledge of the African postcolonial experience to resign in the existential anxiety of wanting to be further engaged by the text. Where other philosophers have failed to clearly conceptualize and problematize decolonization to encapsulate the African experience in toto by addressing the issues of globalization, interculturality, sexuality, and intersectionality, Osha masterfully succeeds. Osha’s volume will have a profound influence on African postcoloniality, ethnophilosophical discourse, cultural studies, and the new corpus of postethnophilosophy. As if writing about African postcolonial experience and African philosophical traditions are not laborious enough challenges, Osha raises the bar in demanding that African philosophers move the conversation beyond traditional ethnophilosophy. He is effective in utilizing the prism of culture, race, class, gender, sexuality, globalization, and the intersectionality of these categories to engage his readers—an approach unique to Osha’s work. This work should not be regarded as just another contribution to African philosophy. It must be appraised as a much needed and timely extension of African philosophy beyond the realms of enthnophilosophy. Taking the decolonization discourse beyond its traditional boundaries means that Africans must revisit the role of women in the process of development, modernization and globalization. Even though the process of Chinanization or Sino-Africanization have been around for over fifty years, neither Africans nor the Chinese have paid any particular attention to the Chinese adage, “women hold up half of the sky.” Euro-American and Chinese development agencies in Africa conducting business with or for Africa tend to be somewhat oblivious to women’s roles in the process of development and modernization. African hegemonic, masculinist societies have also, until recently, neglected women’s role in development and modernization. Gender inequality is a fact of life in many places around the world. Yet, the exploitation, marginalization, and injustices against women are more pervasive in Africa than in most other parts of the world. In addition, the processes of development, modernization and globalization have reduced African women’s roles to negligible limits. Forces such as colonialism before the above-mentioned processes neglected African women’s issues such as female genital mutilation, wife beatings, sale of child brides, honor killings, murders due to dowry, and prostitution. These issues remain unfinished business, and can arguably be tantamount to a “silent genocide” of African women. This is not to sensationalize the levels of women’s suffering in different parts of the world or engage in another kind of an Oppression Olympics for women. Nor should Africologists define gender roles through essentialism, em-

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phasizing the categorical differences between the African man and woman and, consequently, differentiating how oppression relates to women in Africa. Nevertheless, the African woman’s oppression is prejudiced by the phallocentric patriarchal African society, cultural values, colonialism, neocolonialism, global capitalism, development, modernization and globalization. The argument above is clarified by the fact that the African woman is not victimized by her womanhood alone, but by many prevailing systemic forces. Thus, the project for gender liberation and equality cannot be limited to a duality of discursive consciousness emphasizing male superordination vis-á-vis female subordination. Indubitably, African hegemonic masculinity is a socio-cultural construction that can experience paradigm shifts in different cultures. Therefore, our analyses must not be accepted as “universal.” A kaleidoscopic approach to tackling African women’s oppression and repairing the gender gap is a mindful and deliberate approach to interrogating power, space, hierarchy, culture, class, and intersectionality in reaching gender parity. I am not yet optimistic about gender equality and liberation in this decade, but I am hopeful. To capture the essence of the dynamics of decoloniality adequately, and the application of appropriate discursive consciousness, an avoidance of a duality or binary approach is necessary for interlocutors of the decolonization discourse. In this respect, readers of this volume are primed to transcend the parameters of Africa/Europe, core/periphery, good/bad, Black/White, or male/female quagmires. Yet these approaches are sometimes unavoidable if one has to deduct such experiences from universal historical contradictions of slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism, and globalism to discover future possibilities. This author carefully brings the matrices of domination into his analytical framework, but they do not stand apart from the decolonization discourse. Consequently, an inclusive perspective is attained by recognizing the African experience in both local and global spheres. A transdisciplinary and multidimensional approach to appraising African philosophy enriches Osha’s work. Today, Anglo-American values have indeed swept the African continent. Most cities and villages in Africa are submerged in this neoconvergence era, adorned by “McCulturization,” “Coca-colization,” “Americanization,” computer technology, Internet cafés, hip-hop music, rock music, Hollywood films, Eurostar, MTV, soap–operas, blue jeans, and other symbols of democratic capitalism. If the prophesy of the convergence theory appears to be accurate, then what would be the essence of African philosophy? From Algeria to Angola, and from Zambia to Zimbabwe, people of the African world are adopting similar tastes in food, dress, art, popular music, entertainment, and intellectual property. These tastes are predominantly Western ones. Paradoxically, there seems to be a trend toward “cultural sameness” in our multicultural world. The African world is experiencing a cultural disintegration to adopt Western forms of life-style and protocol, and most African nation states are losing their raison d’être as sovereign states. I am not an Afro-pessimist, but the

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movement to modernization without development is disturbing. African nation states’ susceptibility to global forces has facilitated the “dollarization,” Coca-colization and McCulturalization of the African world––making them even more vulnerable to the process of globalization. African countries are converging at a very fast rate with the West; however, they remain underdeveloped according to commonly accepted measures of development. African nation states must be true partners in setting development goals that will take their cultures into consideration. African cultures must be realistically integrated into the Millennium Development Goals and the process of globalization through renewed emphasis on African development, and the promotion of arts, indigenous dressing, and cultural festival must not be set apart from economic and socio-political development. Africans must also take into the account the forces of their deep culture, how that affects the process of modernization, and how the process of development is stifled because of certain cultural settings that are not conducive to the process of modernization and development. There is a plethora of evidence that African nation states are vehemently endeavoring to develop, become modern, and transcend the decolonization discourse. Hitherto, the issues and problems of the cultural divide between Africa and the West are being neglected because of global hegemonic cultures and the complacency of African nation states to start a new conversation over cultural imperialism, sexuality and intersectionality. To be true partners in the global village, a new conversation about cultural partnerships and development must begin now. Africa, in this volume, has reached new heights and African philosophers are meeting the challenges of problematizing issues and finding solutions for the questions of the development of underdevelopment of the continent. Thus far, regardless how developed and modernized Africa becomes, Africans must still combat the traditional ills, stereotypes, activities of predatory regimes and vampire parastatal agencies in addition to the forces of the international system. Solutions to the African problem and condition are complex and difficult, but discussions in this volume and postethnophilosophy should contribute to a new avenue of finding solutions to Africa’s problems. To enable the impacts of globalization to be meaningful to Africans in the global village, local cultures should be juxtaposed with global cultures through deliberate discourses and policy goals. Moreover, the values of Western cultures impact on African ones should be studied and analyzed constantly through institutional frameworks to determine the lethal impact of globalization on African cultures, so that prudent decisions could be made about mitigating the differences. Finally, to remain authentic players in the global village, African nation states must utilize the African Union in cooperation with the private sector and governments from the West and create their own strategic plans that address their special needs and cultural preservations.

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Sanya Osha’s work sets a strong analytical stage for African philosophers to sharpen their discursive approaches to provide agency for the rapid changes in what is cerebral and practical due to international interaction. African philosophers must continue to reexamine current global forces in addition to returning to the African essence of community sustenance, dependability, and African worldview. Ethnophilosophers must move beyond the status quo ante. As with all things, Osha’s work may contain risky propositions for African philosophers and the continent. Nonetheless, I invite you to engage in this penetrating adventure of reading Osha’s captivating work on postethnophilosophy. Seth N. Asumah SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Professor of Political Science Chair, Africana Studies Department State University of New York at Cortland Cortland, New York, 13045 USA

PREFACE On the whole, this work is concerned with some of the major currents of contemporary African thought; the dynamics and configurations of decolonization, paradigmatic shifts in Africanist anthropology, the politics of culture and social memory, and questions of race, multiculturalism, and globalization which are all preoccupations that transform the contours of classical ethnophilosophy. As mentioned earlier, the relationship between Africanist anthropology and African philosophy has a long and deep history. The discourse known as ethnophilosophy is in many respects a product of that history and relationship. Postethnophilophy refers to the discursive rupture in this foundational relationship. It also refers to the complexities of contemporary Africanity in which questions of race, place, and belonging have moved beyond the primary concerns of ethnophilosophy. Postethnophilosophy is also a product of the crisis of identity that bedeviled conventional African philosophy in its search for different discursive orientations. It is both a condition that forms African theoretical discourse and also an attempt to institute a different set of problems. In some ways, this work addresses a significant part of the African forms of discourse that deal with themes relating to the traumas and realities of colonization, the dynamics of postcolonial subjectification, processes of decolonization, questions of agency, and modes of knowledge construction in Africa. However, by addressing the subjects of gender and sexuality, and their intersections with the problem of raciology, it departs from the classical ethnophilosophical turn and the overriding problem of origins in contemporary African thought. Parts of Chapter Two have been revised and expanded from the ideas previously published in my, “Legacies of a Critique of Ethnophilosophy: Hountondji’s African Philosophy: Myth & Reality Revisited,” QUEST: An African Journal of Philosophy, Revue Africaine de Philosophie, 17:1-2 (2005). Ideas in Chapter Three have been developed from work previously published in my “Anthropology at the Limits: A Genealogical Re-Appraisal of Colonialism in the Time of Contemporary Globalization,” Research in African Literatures, 34:1 (Spring 2003), pp. 173–186. Other works to which I refer are cited in the text. I am grateful to Wim van Binsbergen for insisting on the viability of this project and making available the moral, institutional, and intellectual resources needed for its realization. Mirjam de Bruijn, coordinator of the Agency in Africa theme group of the African Studies Centre in Leiden was equally supportive of the project by encouraging its publication. I thank the faculty and staff of the African Studies Centre for the tremendous support and hospitality that I received while I was a visiting fellow at the Center between October and December 2005. The conception and efforts needed to realize this

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project took place within those crucial months. The beginning of the research process dates much further back. Over the years, I have incurred many intellectual debts. I thank Georges Herault, Dipo Irele, Abiola Irele, Pieter Boele van Hensbroek, Eghosa Osaghae, Pius Adesanmi, Francis Nyamnjoh, Rasigan Maharajh, Mario Scerri, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Nal Abdelrasq, Graeme Reid, and Philippe-Joseph Salazar, who in different ways have contributed in making the long journey it took for this book to find its shape possible. My VIBS Special Series Editor, Andrew Fitz-Gibbon, went beyond the call of duty in guiding the manuscript through many drafts. I am grateful to him and his excellent team for making the entire exercise a worthwhile effort. Finally, I thank Elizabeth D. Boepple for the superlative copy-editing.

INTRODUCTION Since the ground breaking texts of contemporary African philosophy, such as Kwasi Wiredu’s Philosophy and an African Culture (1980), Paulin J. Hountondji’s African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1983), Valentin Yves Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (1988), Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992), and Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony (2001) were published, much has been accomplished within the discipline. This is not to suggest that the authors mentioned belong to a particular school of thought, or that they adopt similar conceptual methodologies. Neither is it to suggest there are not other equally significant African philosophers. The philosophers mentioned here are quite dissimilar in many respects. Wiredu draws much of his inspiration from the Anglo-Saxon analytic tradition while Hountondji, Mudimbe, and Mbembe belong to what may be termed the continental school of philosophy which draws a considerable part of its discursive impetus from European philosophical figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Louis Althusser. Appiah, on the other hand, is indebted to what he calls the philosophy of culture. Indeed, a school of philosophy emerged from the University of Ibadan in the 1970s that eventually produced a distinct orientation in the discourse that is known as African philosophy. True, Universities of Ghana, Legon, and other academic institutions in East Africa (Kenya in particular) have been crucial in fashioning the discursive grids on which modern African philosophical practices are based. However, the Ibadan school of African philosophy has sought to uphold the tenets of these foundational grids in ways that have made it almost impossible to operate outside these disciplinary frameworks. Both students and teachers are more or less obliged to observe the injunctions of the elementary grids. Most West African and East African schools of philosophy constantly stress the distinct discursive formations that make up contemporary African philosophy; ethnophilosophy, philosophic sagacity, nationalist-ideological philosophy and professional philosophy. Placide Tempels’ La philosophie bantoue (Bantu Philosophy, 1949) initiated the ethnophilosophical trend in modern African philosophical thought. Tempels sought to address racist views of colonialist anthropology in initiating this trend. Although African philosophers such as Paulin Hountoondji have denigrated the philosophic validity of his efforts, they are significant in two crucial respects. Tempels reversed the racist tempo of colonialist anthropology thereby opening up the space for more balanced interventions on African identities and subjectivities. Secondly, his work complicates the status on race in African forms of discourse in ways that an either/or approach regarding the racial character of modern African philosophical traditions is simply not quite tenable.

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In the bid to construct a humanizing notion of African collective identities, it became attractive to pursue vistas of racial exclusivity, hence the Anglophonic concept of African personality and the Senghorian ideology of Négritude. These attempts of collective racial assertion were meant to proclaim African racial self-worth in the face of centuries of abuse, brutalization and erasure. However, the project of assembling more appropriate discursive and ideological identities for Africans has not been as insular as it appears to have been. Some Western subjects have striven to redress the shortcomings of their compatriots in the task of building postcolonial identities. Most traditions of modern African philosophy do not adequately confront this reality and instead continue to strive for a racial essence that is usually an obverse dimension of Western ethnocentrism. This conclusion does have its benefits. Instead of pursuing an ethnocentric essence in which African philosophical discourse remains locked in a perennial quest for the kernel of identity, definition and status, it acquires a universalism that rids it of a great deal of unnecessary ethnocentric baggage. African philosophy, even if born within a distorting and traumatic matrix of racial bigotry, has carried seeds that transcend the barriers of race. Beginning with the exploratory efforts of Tempels, other non-Africans have assisted in shaping the different contours of the discipline. This feature, which many ethnocentrists might find discomforting, holds out a promise of genuine cosmopolitanism. Thus, African philosophy then transcends the strictures that prevent it from participating in broader conversations of humankind. African philosophy cannot only be regarded as comprising of texts written by Africans alone. Such a conception of the discipline would not embrace the transcontinental reach and antecedents involved. In part, African philosophy is an offshoot of colonialist anthropology, which initiated an earnest search for the kernel of African consciousness. What is the identity of the African? This has been a central question. A set of discourses emerged around the question and both Westerners and Africans were engaged in the quest to find answers. The discourse of ethnophilosophy is a product of this fervent quest. Barry Hallen, a non-African, has been central in addressing the grids that continue to shape the evolution of modern African philosophical discourse. His work, African Philosophy: The Analytic Approach (2006), can be read at many levels. First, it could be read as being part of the tradition of metaphilosophical texts that attempt to define the nature of African philosophy in the manner that some of the works of Wiredu, Hountondji, and Peter O. Bodunrin have done. It is also part of a body of work that interrogates the correlation between pre-Tempelsian anthropology and African philosophy. In addition, it can be read as a work that moves beyond the metaphilosophical plane to engage in the effort of actual theoretical reconstruction. Finally, it belongs to a tradition of African philosophical discourse that restores the dignity of indigenous African epistemological constructs that are often denigrated by colonialist anthropology. Hallen’s ambitious work can be read in other ways, but

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more importantly, his interventions in the domain of African philosophy are an indication that discursive or identitarian insularity within the field is pointless. Some of the founding texts that define the tendency known as philosophic sagacity in African philosophy are Henry Odera Oruka’s edited volume, Sage Philosophy: Indigenous Thinkers and Modern Debate on African Philosophy (1991) and Marcel Griaule’s Conversations with Ogotemmêli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas (1965). Kwame Nkrumah and Juilius Nyerere, who were leaders of liberation movements and become respective rulers of Ghana and Tanzania, are known to have initiated the nationalistideological tendency in African philosophy. Also, the school of professional philosophy has key proponents, which include Wiredu, Bodunrin, and Hountondji. As an extension of this broad classificatory grid, a protracted opposition exists between the so-called universalists and traditionalists. The universalists hold the view that African philosophy must strive to attain the objectivity of a science. Hountondji is noted to have advocated this view, in which he argues that the emergence of an African philosophical practice can only occur when the appropriate scientific infrastructure, culture, and practices have been instituted in Africa. The traditionalists on the other hand, claim that African indigenous beliefs and epistemic resources are crucial for the development of African philosophy. We have also seen what has been termed the hermeneutic-narrative approach as a way of establishing an African philosophical practice. Advocates of this tendency assert we ought to reinterpret African indigenous resources just as biblical texts are to extract worthy philosophical materials. However, if we examine these different tendencies and grids in African philosophy we would observe that there are many areas of overlap and similarities of approach. Furthermore, many of the proponents of these grids hardly move beyond entrenched metaphilosophical preoccupations. Hountondji’s main achievements as a philosopher lie in his unremitting critique of ethnophilosophy, but he is usually demobilized in a metaphilosophical mire. The same can be said of Bodunrin and those who adhere to his views. On the other hand, Wiredu who has been termed a universalist, a proponent of the professional school and a traditionalist has managed to transcend the limitations of the disciplinary grids. Accordingly, he succeeded in becoming one of the most productive philosophers from Africa. Part of his success obviously comes from working beyond the strictures of the grids. Mudimbe, for his part, works completely independent of the grids. Instead, he conducts his interrogations at the point at which colonialist anthropology constitutes the silenced figure of the Black subject as a cipher. Appiah, too, has attempted to work outside the grids. Lately, he has been exploring the possibilities available to the citizen of the world through an increasingly assertive cosmopolitanism (2006). For my part, I have an oblique attitude to the grids. I address philosophers such as Wiredu and Hountondji who are central to them. However, I do not

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take them as my starting-point, or employ them as a point of departure. My concerns revolve around the conditions and possibilities for knowledgegeneration in Africa. For instance, I am interested how intellectuals engage in public debates regarding the march of modernity in Africa. In this respect, Wole Soyinka’s interventions have been quite interesting. I am also concerned with African scholars who have been preoccupied with philosophical themes but are usually ignored by the academy. This study engages with these different tendencies and traditions of African philosophy by: (1) identifying what precisely makes them distinctive and significant; (2) seeking to evaluate their different impacts on the constitution of contemporary African thought; and (3) proffering some theoretical conclusions as to their status as structures of thought and also their possible futures. In addition, it explores the opening up of Africanist discourse through the interventions of John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff and also Wim van Binsbergen, who, as scholars of African studies, have succeeded—in different ways and with varying degrees of success—in moving anthropological preoccupations beyond the concerns of figures such as Bronislaw Malinowski, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Leo Frobenius, and Tempels. The focus of contemporary Africanist anthropology returns us to the origins of African philosophy without the burden of what I term the problem of origins in chapter two. In this way, I explore avenues to steer the discourse away from its foundational impasse. Part of the central problem of contemporary African philosophy has been the struggle to define its disciplinary character without a systematic body of theoretical texts. Mudimbe, Appiah, and to a lesser extent Hountondji bypass this limitation by adopting a more adventurous attitude toward the notion and instrumentality of the archive. The threat, fear, and silence engendered in the presence of the archive can be regarded as one of the defining problems of the question of African philosophy. I attempt to bypass this problem by addressing texts that: (1) complicate the notion of Africanity; (2) subvert the myths about African ghettoization with an unusual understanding of the universal; and (3) centralize the theme of agency as a way of reconfiguring the notion of Africanity. The theme of agency is a recurrent trope in this study which is addressed from different perspectives. First, the question of theoretical agency in African philosophy is raised. It is suggested that different African philosophers address the issue differently. In particular, the matter of creative agency within a postcolonial context is tackled. In this event, the sociopolitical and institutional milieu in which intellectual labor is conducted is depicted to portray how it relates to the theme of creative agency. This study begins with critiques of some of the major discourses of decolonization. In particular, it assesses Wiredu’s theory of conceptual decolonization and its relations to other associated discourses such as Pan-Africanism. Also, this study examines the different meanings of decolonization in differ-

Introduction

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ent parts of Africa. As such, the implications of decolonization as a political and ideological project are analyzed. I examine the shifts within the discourse of Africanist anthropology as it relates to the question of colonialism and the making of the modern African subject. In particular, it examines the work of the Comaroffs as a model for these discursive preoccupations. This trajectory is adopted because their work reveals the ways in which diverse structures of power affect the questions and particulars of everyday life. The fourth chapter is related to the critique of the work of the Comaroffs. It examines the work of van Binsbergen to demonstrate the possibilities to which it alludes in advancing both Africanist anthropology and African philosophy. These two approaches in Africanist anthropology mark a significant shift away from the classical ethnophilosophical consciousness. The Comaroffs demonstrate that colonialism as a process does not operate along rigid polarities but functions at much deeper levels which mark and transform both the colonized and colonizer. This thesis is supported by a skillful deployment of poststructuralist tropes. Van Binsbergen, on the other hand, transgresses the trichotomies of race, place, and belonging in order to reconfigure the infrastructure of his subjectivity in a manner that complicates the unities and presumptions of race— Eurocentricism and Africanity—and also in ways that classical ethnophilosophy or even other forms of nativist discourses did not quite accommodate. In addition, van Binsbergen’s work accomplishes an internal decolonization of Africanist anthropology in which the colonialist gaze is turned upon the architect of anthropological knowledge. In this way, the subject and object relation is subverted just as the conventional politics and positionalities of otherness are transformed. In my opinion, this feature of van Binsbergen’s work is its most radical characteristic. This preoccupation with Africanist anthropology leads to a broader engagement with the complex disciplinary relationship between philosophy and anthropology. The birth of contemporary African philosophy can be linked to this long history of mutual disciplinary reinforcements and antagonisms. One of the main suggestions of this study is that the birth of contemporary African philosophy is attributable to the complicities of Africanist anthropology with the project and discourses of imperialism. African philosophy is a reaction to Africanist anthropology’s earlier status as a discourse of the oppressor and also its site as a locus of the exclusion of the colonized subject. Van Binsbergen grapples with this problematic history in a quite direct manner. The question of race continues to generate much debate and interest. It also continues to provoke heated passions which sometimes lead to dangerous situations of conflict and even genocide, as history has repeatedly demonstrated. The connections between genocide and race are not only long standing, but are constitutive of the entire experience of modernity, and even the

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condition which we refer to as the “postmodern,” following the example of Jean-François Lyotard, the poststructuralist philosopher. In the same vein, the phenomenon of race continues to be quite topical within the post-apartheid dispensation in South Africa. Consequently, academic studies of all kinds are still being published on the issue. PhilippeJoseph Salazar, a French scholar based in South Africa, tackles the matter of race in present day South Africa from a quite interesting angle. He explores the phenomenon of race by employing an uncommon assemblage of discursive approaches. These draw from rhetoric studies, Greek antiquity, and postmodern forms of discourse to explain how it intersects with postapartheid constitutionality, public deliberation, and space. In this way, Salazar suggests that the matter of race need not always be violent. Instead, the question of race can offer ways of exploring the multiple possibilities of postmodern democracy and cosmopolitan life. The concluding part of this study examines the different rhetorical constructions of race within the contemporary South African context and their implications for the establishment of a so-called “rainbow nation.” Finally, it links the conceptual understandings of race in the present age of molecular biology with the possibilities for postmodern democracy or what the sociologist, Paul Gilroy has termed “cosmopolitan democracy.” There are also discussions of the making of the postcolonial African subject as a citizen of the world in both conceptual and concrete terms. To broaden its global and methodological reach, examples are taken not only from Africa but also India. In this regard, it becomes possible to conceive of the previously colonized subject as a fully cosmopolitan denizen who makes the old distinctions between premodern coloniality and postmodernity increasingly meaningless when not overtly confusing. This conjuncture also invites fresh theorizations of categories pertaining to the particular and the universal. One of the chapters tracks the different understandings of corruption in the age of contemporary globalization. In this regard, I critique the work of Olivier de Sardan and Kwame Gyekye to bring to the fore the different moral universes that underpin different conceptions of corruption. Appiah’s critique of Wole Soyinka as a theorist of culture is well known. Appiah concentrates on Soyinka’s authorial position and his philosophy of authorship. A part of this study, on the other hand, addresses the questions of culture, politics, and memory in Soyinka’s work. In so doing, it highlights his strengths and limitations as a theorist of culture. In the same vein, another chapter focuses on the question of creative agency in contemporary Nigerian letters. In addition to focusing on the question of agency, it addresses the issues of place, belonging, and citizenship within the contemporary moment. African forms of feminist discourse have become quite confident. As such, chapter seven traces the figures of the female African subject within the context of contemporary African philosophy in order to unearth the agential dynamics at work. In this regard, Mudimbe’s work is extensively explored in

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addition to other prominent African feminists such as Nkiru Nzeogwu, Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, and some Western theorists of feminism. In addition, the work of Mbembe is addressed to highlight how some particular economies of sexuality operate in Africa. The preoccupations of classical ethnophilosophy and postcolonial African thought in general have avoided the subject of sexuality, the semiotics of the body, and the politics of the private. Part of this work examines the contours of this neglect with a view to offering some kind of amendment. To my mind, this particular gesture constitutes a definite advancement with innumerable discursive possibilities.

One DISCOURSES OF DECOLONIZATION 1. On the Agency of Theory Kwasi Wiredu, distinguished Ghanaian philosopher for many decades, is one of Africa’s foremost philosophers and he has done much to establish the discipline as a solid domain of inquiry in its contemporary form, especially within the Anglophonic divide in Africa (Osha, 2005b). To appreciate the scope and importance of his work, it is necessary to possess some familiarity with relevant areas of African studies such as history, anthropology, literature, postcolonial theory, and an awareness of the contributions of figures such as Cheikh Anta Diop, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Kenyan cultural theorist and novelist, Valentin Yves Mudimbe, and Paulin J. Hountondji, the Beninoise philosopher, to different forms of African discourse. Wiredu’s contribution to the making of modern African thought provides an interesting and an essential site for an inquiry into agency-in-action, since it can be read as a counterarticulation to the hegemonic discourses of colonialism. This chapter examines the limitations and immense possibilities of Wiredu’s theory of conceptual decolonization. First, a close reading of the theory itself exists, and then an identification of its location within the general movement of modern African thought. A major point I make is that, even though Wiredu’s theory has some quite interesting moments of conceptual brilliance, the need to connect with a wider ideological terrain that affirms the viability of Black subjectivity also exists. It is also necessary to be aware of current imperatives of globalization, nationality, and territoriality and how they affect the agency of theory as ideological and conceptual decolonization. Another major aim of this discussion is to explore the interconnections between processes of contemporary globalization, nationality, and postcolonial territoriality, with a brief analysis of the political situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and their links with the agency of theory as part of the general project of decolonization. It also suggests that the emergent transnationalization of the politics of recolonization and the new forms of the mobilization of conflict affect the meaning and scope of decolonization as a political and theoretical project. In addition, a central point I make is that decolonization as a unitary and unchanging concept needs to be debunked. It is not framed as a project and waged as an existential struggle in the same way under all conditions and contexts. In tracing the different gradations of decolonization as an ideological project, three other African intellectual figures are evoked as a counterweight to Wiredu’s theory of conceptual decolonization. Diop articulates a politics of

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decolonization through the affirmation of a philosophy of Black subjectivity that centralizes ancient Egypt as its main source of inspiration. Wa Thiong’o’s project of cultural and linguistic decolonization is conceived as part of a broader critique of global imperialism. Finally, Ernest Wamba dia Wamba’s interventions in the political terrain of the (DRC) display a marked transformation and an intensification of the logic of the transnationalization of recolonization which in turn necessitate a more complex understanding and critique of the general notion of decolonization. This methodological trajectory seeks to demonstrate the different turns and meanings the question of decolonization can assume. The notion of decolonization is far more complex than is often assumed. Consequently, the epistemological resources by which it can be comprehended as a concept, ideology, or process are multiple and diverse. This chapter, as a whole, is also a reflection on the diversity of the dimensions of decolonization. Wiredu’s deconstruction of some Western epistemological concepts and categories, brilliant as it is, can be given a broader ideological significance by situating his project within a general critique of imperialism and within the framework of global and Pan-African discourses of Black subjectivity. The question of Black subjectivity within a context of postmodernity and contemporary globalization is still relevant as is, for instance, the case in the volatile processes of de-racialization in South Africa. Also, Mammo Muchie’s The Making of the Africa-Nation: Pan-Africanism and the African Renaissance (2003), reiterates the continuing relevance of the question. Wiredu’s Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective (1996), is also, in a way, a reframing of and a response to the question. Muchie’s project re-inscribes the ideal of Pan-Africanism within a multiplicity of contexts: the project of African Renaissance, the age of advanced digitalization, processes of contemporary globalization, and the epoch of resurgent fundamentalisms. It is likely that this new conception of the Pan-Africanist ideology has changed from how it was formulated in the early twentieth century as a result of the transformation of cultural and political configurations. A few words about the ideological project contained in the Muchie edited volume might be appropriate here. Thabo Mbeki and Muchie are conjoined by similar concerns. Mbeki was once perhaps the most central political figure on the African continent while Muchie is an undoubtedly resourceful theorist of contemporary PanAfricanism. They are aligned by their strong preoccupations with notions of the African, the African-Nation, Pan-Africanism, African renaissance, and African transformation. Perhaps not since Kwame Nkrumah have we had the level of systematicity with which Muchie focuses on Pan-Africanism and its possibilities for articulating a broad range of African identities, including diasporic ones, under a unified force. Both Mbeki and Muchie are quite serious about their common project. Pan-Africanism as an ideology of transcontinental liberation was formally established in 1900 when Henry Sylvester Williams, a Trinidadian law

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student, hosted the Pan-African Congress. In those days of triumphant colonialism, Pan-Africanism was a quite revolutionary gesture as it projected a powerful ideological anti-colonialist stance and because it undermined established colonialist stereotypes of the African subject as being incapable of meaningful thought and action. Pan-Africanism was a crucial ideological response to centuries of racism and cultural and sociopolitical disempowerment. Muchie’s project attempts a resurrection of Pan-Africanism as an ideology of liberation and agency in the era of contemporary globalization. His work in this regard connects with Mbeki’s political role as perhaps the most vital advocate of Pan-Africanism in the era of late post-coloniality. Muchie’s introductory chapter is entitled, “Has the Pan-African Hour Come.” At a moment in recent history, Pan-Africanism was definitely high on the African political agenda. For instance, in October 2004, the first meeting of Intellectuals of Africa and the diaspora took place in Dakar, Senegal. Present at the event were the heads of state of countries such as Nigeria, Cape Verde, Mali, Uganda, South Africa, and the host nation, Senegal. The general conference themes included: Pan-Africanism in the twenty-first century; the contribution of intellectuals of Africa and the diaspora to the deepening and strengthening of African integration in the context of the twenty-first century; African identity in a multicultural context; Africa’s place in the world; Africa’s relations with its diaspora and science and technology. These are all themes that are given prominent attention in the volume Muchie edited. Muchie agrees that the question of a single African idea or identity for the entire African continent is usually problematic. Mudimbe’s major work, The Invention of Africa (1988) is one of the most famous interrogations of the problematic status of Africanity. Hountondji has also debunked what he termed “the myth of unanimism” in relation to the question of African identities. By extension, there are quite significant moments in contemporary African philosophy that attest to the continent’s heterogeneity. Muchie concurs that there are many African identities, but he argues that this should not prevent Africans from forging a collective vision for the continent just as Indians have been able to do. Contemporary Pan-Africanism should not be a platform for ethnocentricism and all kinds of identitarian fundamentalisms. Instead, Muchie argues that it can be reconfigured as an ideology of agency in the face of the multiple disjunctures of the global moment as they affect the generality of Africans. Interestingly, when in power, Mbeki often stressed the point that he worked for a nonracialized South Africa which in a significant way undermined charges that Pan-Africanism and African Renaissance were masks for identitarian inflexibility. Muchie asserts: the right to the universal or the African does not have to challenge the right to remain different, speak different languages, and worship different deities. It can complement it and in fact it can enrich it, provided that the dialect between specificity and universality is resolved in favor of

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POSTETHNOPHILOSOPHY producing the national nucleus for creating a sustainable unification of Africa. (2003)

This is one of the ways the Pan-Africanist ideology retains its relevance within the present age. (For further understanding of some of the ideological contours of Pan-Africanism, see S. K. B. Asante, 1977; James Cameron, 1961; D. E. Cronon, 1955; Robert Cummings, 1986; Saul Dubow, 2000; Thomas Hodgkin, 1956; Hollis Lynch, 1966; Muchie, 2003; K. K. Prah, 2001.) 2. Coloniality and Early Modernity Discovering snapshots of Victorian culture playing themselves out in peculiar ways in African history and lives is always interesting. Charles Francis Hutchison’s book, The Pen-Pictures of Modern Africans and African Celebrities (2004), which was first published around 1930, boldly tackles various experiences of unfolding modernity within a dominant ambience of colonialism. The predominant dialectic is familiar enough: colonizer/colonized and tradition/modernity. But within the context of the dominant binary logic, the surprises and the diverse exigencies of existence are truly arresting, that is, the ways in which colonized/“native” subjects navigate the strange byways of Euro-modernity and in the process, re-make themselves, their life-worlds, their cultures and other subjects around them. Not only are they re-invented as subjects but also, the entire fabrics of their societies are reconstructed. Hutchison was a successful Gold Coast businessman born in Cape Coast in 1879. He trained as a surveyor in England in the 1890s and then returned to the Gold Coast where he became the preeminent land surveyor. He had also been sired by “one of the most prominent Euro-African families of the nineteenth-century Gold Coast, namely the Hutchison-Bartels clan of Cape Coast and Elima” (Doortmont, 2005, p. 16). His great-grandfather was William Hutchison, a Scot who had served the colonial administration in the Gold Coast. Within the Gold Coast of that era, it was not surprising to find families with European ancestry or members. Some Europeans—Dutch, Danish or British—married local women and raised families thereby creating what in various ways might be termed “subjectivities of Whiteness” (Nutall, 2001) within the populace. The political context in which Hutchison’s book was conceived and written is equally interesting. Great social and political changes were occurring. An African elite had emerged in the sphere of international trade and commerce. The Atlantic slave trade had provided the grounds for the creation of the local elite. Then, as the slave trade ended to make way for legitimate trade in agricultural produce and minerals, the social scene was reconfigured by new processes of social stratification and re-alignment. Fortunes were made and lost. The agglomeration of interests that emerged from this socioeconomic flux was crucial to the making of modern Ghana. As processes of

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social stratification set in, the nature and configurations of political power also changed. At the time, the local elite were fairly cordial partners with the agents of Empire. They aided the machinery of the colonial administration either as minor bureaucrats or as trading partners. Afterwards, the colonial machine preferred to deal with traditional chieftains thereby incurring the displeasure of the local trading, educated elite. It was the displeasure of the elite that eventually provided fuel for the sentiments that congealed to make modern Ghanaian nationalism leading to the moment of political liberation. Obviously, this change in the general political climate led to a transformation of the perception and subjectivity of Whiteness. Pen-Pictures captures the crucial moments of incipient anti-colonialism that emerged in the 1890s. Hutchison’s book incorporates a number of registers. It is first and foremost a celebration of the lives of prominent Gold Coast indigenes. It is also a portrait of subtle and overt colonial social relations. It is a commentary on the different subjectivities of Whiteness. In addition, it is a somewhat understated translocal engagement with the dialectics of freedom as espoused by the antislavery movement of the United States. Finally, it is a depiction of the multiple social tensions involved in the making of a modern postcolonial culture. These are the broad discursive registers that inform the book. However, we must bear in mind that the book comprises biographical sketches in blank verse and prose. Part of its strength lies in being able to reveal a great deal of historical truth within those sketches of biography. In all, there are sketches of 162 individuals from diverse professional backgrounds—mercantile/business, civil service, law, traditional rulership, the clergy, medicine, and engineering. Michel Doortmont, who has done an impressive job of preparing a recent edition of Hutchison’s book, mentions some of its values: it is an important source book on vital segments of Ghanaian history. As a text filled with photographs, it is a piece of cultural commentary as well as a significant product of art. In the same vein, it is a work of West African literary art and historiography. Finally, it is an important launch pad for other historical and theoretical projects. In Doortmont’s words: Hutchison often provides numerous snippets of information that are the product of intimate personal knowledge of the individuals described, and give the reader a detailed and very private insight into the life and times of the Gold Coast educated elite of Hutchison’s generation, and that of his father, making the book both a historical biographical dictionary and an intimate sketch of upper class Gold Coast society in the twentieth century. (2005, p. 1) Doortmont’s introduction to the new edition of Pen-Portraits puts it in its proper perspective. He undertakes a major role in restoring the cultural

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significance of Hutchison’s text and in amplifying it through further research and elaboration. In this sense, he accomplishes two objectives. First, through academic research, he brings to the fore an important cultural text and second, he evaluates the achievements of its author by putting them in their proper perspective. Accordingly, we discover that Hutchison wrote other works (mentioned but publication details not cited)—A Eulogy of White Celebrities of British West Africa; African Cameos: A Book of Entertaining Stories; Shades of Africa Reflects Life, Scenery, and Psychology. Other titles by Hutchison include, Man of Genius: A Book on the Miracles of the Subconscious Mind and The Problem of Progressive Africa: Corrective Monologues of African Psychology. Those were culturally rich times for an inspiring mind in the era of colonialism. Also, the discursive context reiterates the preoccupations that would continue to dominate the deliberations of African thinkers: the Same/Other, tradition/modernity, tyranny/agency and the various dimensions of the politics of identity. In addition, the text locates a context of colonized self-making in the encounter with the modern. In philosophical terms, this apparently uncomplicated context is still evident in many parts of African continent, that is, the locus at which an African self begins to reconstitute itself through the lens of modernity. 3. Rationality and the Project of Otherness Wiredu has been formally involved with a project he terms conceptual decolonization in contemporary African systems of thought, which can be read as an affirmation of African agency (Osha, 2005a). By conceptual decolonization, Wiredu advocates a reevaluation of African structures of knowledge and thought to accomplish two theoretical objectives. First, he intends to subvert unnecessary epistemic components of indigenous cultures lodged in modern African thought so as to make it more feasible. Second, he intends to deconstruct some of the Western epistemologies to be found in the African philosophical tradition. This chapter is also a reflection on some of his more significant contributions to the invention of modern African philosophical practice in relation to the trends created by his Francophone contemporaries such as Hontondji and Mudimbe. In addressing this diverse conceptual scenario, we ought to appreciate not only the singularity of Wiredu’s work, but also the different theoretical tendencies that have informed the constitution of contemporary African thought. In spite of Wiredu’s invaluable contributions to modern African thought, it can be argued that he has a quite reductive way of reading the colonial encounter and its multiple effects within the context of post-coloniality. His conceptual stance for the project of postcolonial (re)construction marks out a schema that operates at the level of mediating divisions between tradition and modernity, coloniality and post-coloniality, and finally orality and textuality in ways that suggests that more complex models of analysis are not required.

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In many ways, Wiredu’s near romanticization of the idea and possibilities of pre-coloniality closes off the potentials for other conceptual engagements with the diverse challenges of post-coloniality. It would be a mistake for Wiredu, or advocates of his project of conceptual decolonization, to attempt to universalize his theory since, as wa Thiong’o argues, decolonization is a vast, global enterprise. Instead, I read Wiredu’s project as a way of articulating theoretical presence for the de-agentialized and deterritorialized contemporary African subject. In many ways, his project resembles those of wa Thiong’o and Diop. Wa Thiong’o advocates cultural and linguistic decolonization on a global scale and his theory has undergone very little transformation since its initial formulations during the 1960s. Diop posits a quite similar theory to Wiredu and did so before him. Wiredu’s project is linked in conceptual terms to the broader project of political decolonization as advanced by liberationist African leaders such as Julius Nyerere, Jomo Kenyatta, Nkrumah, and Nnamdi Azikiwe. But what distinguishes the tenor of his theory is its immersion in the Anglo-Saxon analytic tradition. This dimension is significant in differentiating his project from those of his contemporaries such as Mudimbe and Hountondji whose discursive orientations are indelibly marked by their Francophone backgrounds and academic training. It can be argued that Wiredu’s project of conceptual decolonization has more in common with wa Thiong’o’s project of cultural and linguistic decolonization than with Mudimbe’s deconstruction of figures of the African subject in the Western anthropological archive or Hountondji’s famous critiques of what in African philosophy is called ethnophilosophy (Mudimbe, 1988 and Hountondji, 2002). In particular: for Hountondji, La philosophie bantoue [Tempels, 1945] did not represent the philosophy of Africans but that of the Belgian priest, Placide Tempels, in his veiled project of presenting the people of Central Africa as subscribing to a metaphysical system that would not be incompatible with Christian conversion. Tempels’ template served as the basis for African ethnophilosophy (the term was not invented by Hountondji and Towa but is found earlier with reference to Nkrumah’s studies, as Hountondji himself avers). (Keita, 2004) A marked difference exists between how an African philosophical figure such as Hountondji identifies and establishes a foundational problem in African philosophy and Wiredu’s approach to the same issue. In all previously colonized regions of the world, decolonization remains a quite topical issue at the highest of theoretical levels and at the basic level of everyday existence. After the attainment of political liberation by African countries, decolonization became an immediate and overwhelming preoccupation. The debates that animated and structured the trajectories of decoloni-

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zation came to be based on a series of conceptual dichotomies: modernity and tradition, West and the rest, Black and White, socialism and capitalism, and others. These broad binarisms were further mediated by conceptual categories that relate to class, gender, ethnicity, and nationality, among others. A broad spectrum of academic disciplines took up the conceptual challenges of decolonization in a variety of ways. In particular, the disciplines of anthropology, history, political science, literature, and philosophy all grappled with the practical and academic conundrums of decolonization. It is usually profitable to examine the contributions and limitations of African philosophers comparatively, along with other African thinkers who are not professional philosophers, in relation to the history of the debate on decolonization in which valuable contributions have been made by intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Diop, and wa Thiong’o. In this light, it would appear that African philosophy has been quite limited in defining the horizons of the debate when compared with the achievements of academic specialties such as literature, postcolonial theory, and cultural studies. Decolonization, as mentioned earlier, as wa Thiong’o notes, must be conceived as a vast, global, and multidisciplinary enterprise. He sees the need to connect his project of cultural and linguistic decolonization with a much broader critique of global capitalism and imperialism. He conceives it as a wide-ranging ideological initiative. At the moment when wa Thiong’o was articulating this project, the foundational nexus of discursive problems that preoccupied African philosophers—especially within the Anglophonic divide—was largely concerned with questions of identity (Masolo, 1994). These discursive preoccupations did a great deal to undermine the theoretical momentum of the nexus of discourses that constituted African philosophy. As mentioned earlier, Wiredu’s conceptual apparatus for his approach to African philosophical discourse owes much to the analytic tradition. Western philosophical figures such as David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and John Dewey provided the major source of inspiration for exposing the shortcomings of the Western philosophical tradition and practice just as they also yielded the basis for Wiredu’s strengthening of the analytic tradition. Wiredu does not carry out a sustained critique of the inherent racism of the Western philosophical corpus. Instead, he uses the conceptual resources of the archive of Western analytic tradition as a basis for constructing a discourse of otherness based on Black subjectivity. The constraints within Western discursive formations that consign the African subject to a fate of extreme otherness become the instrumentalities through which an otherness of agency and the project of emancipation-in-discourse are constituted. How this conceptual reversal is accomplished is quite remarkable; the discursive tradition that owes much to Hume in an era of livid racism is transformed into the discursive fund by which the project of conceptual decoloni-

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zation becomes possible. There is no analysis of this reversal by Wiredu. However, the effects of this discursive transformation are quite dramatic. Wiredu’s first major book, Philosophy and an African Culture (1980) demonstrates the remarkable range of his philosophical interests. Beginning with conventional epistemology and moving to philosophy of language and sustained critiques of classical Marxism, Wiredu displays the full scope of his intellectual ambitions. Marxism in those days of pre-Soviet Union collapse was an exceedingly fashionable ideology for much of the third world. African thinkers in that ideologically charged epoch had to formulate propositions that were deemed to be “socially committed and responsible.” For many years, Hountondji, Wiredu’s great contemporary, had to deal with charges that his philosophically impressive corpus lacked ideological content and therefore merit from critics such as Olabiyi Yai. In those times of extreme ideologizing, Hountondji never avoided the required measure of socialist posturing. Wiredu, on the other hand, not only avoided the lure of socialism but went on to denounce it as an unfit ideology even though he recognized some philosophically engaging aspects in Karl Marx’s corpus. Within the context of the sociopolitical moment of that era, the moment of political liberation, it seemed a quite reactionary posture to adopt. Nonetheless, he had not only laid the foundations of his project of conceptual decolonization at the theoretical level, but had also begun to explore its different empirical implications by his analyses of concepts such as “truth” and by his focused critique of some of the more destructive impacts of both colonialism and traditional culture. Arguably, Wiredu’s contribution to the debate on the origins, status, problem, and future of contemporary African philosophy resides in his formulations regarding his theory of conceptual decolonization. His approach in formulating this theory of discursive agency and philosophical practice involves the incorporation of a form of biculturalism. His approach entails analyses of the canon of Western philosophy and the manifestations of tribal cultures as a way of attaining a conceptual synthesis. This schema involves a powerful element of biculturalism as a matter of logical consequence and a high level of (multi) bilingual competence. As such, it is not only an exercise in conceptual synthesis but also a project involving comparative linguistics. This insight defines Wiredu’s attitude and gestures toward the constitution of contemporary African thought. It is an insight that is inflected by years of immersion into the discourse of logical positivism. He confesses gaining entry into the critical discourse that came to be known as African philosophy through his efforts. The universities at Legon and Oxford during his time there did not offer courses in African philosophy. However, he began his reflections of the nature, legitimate aims, and possible orientations in contemporary African thought not as a result of any particular awareness of the trauma or violence of colonialism or imperialism but through a confrontation with the dilemma of modernity by the reflective postcolonial African consciousness.

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This dialectic origin can be contrasted with those of Wiredu’s contemporaries such as Hountondji and Mudimbe. Hountondji pursues his direction in African philosophy as a result of confronting the dilemma and limitations of being an African scholar of Husserl, whom he wrote his doctoral dissertation about, under the imperatives of intellectual and ideological decolonization in Africa and within a climate of the general reaffirmation of African identities. Mudimbe, on the other hand, conducts an extensive Foucauldian critique of repressed and devalued figures of the African subject within the annals of the Western anthropological archive. He addresses the operations by which colonialism (re)invents both the African subject and African continent in largely discursive terms. In his attitude toward the notion of African philosophy, Wiredu stands closer to Peter O. Bodunrin, a major Nigerian philosopher who died in the late 1990s, than to Hountondji. Bodunrin adopted Wiredu’s philosophical stance without being able to match Wiredu’s versatile accomplishments. Hountondji, on the other hand, as compared with Wiredu’s achievement, discovered an entirely different philosophical path that has also had an equally dramatic influence on the evolution of contemporary African philosophy. His achievement lies mainly in his relentless critique of the school of African thought known as ethnophilosophy, which began as an offshoot of colonialist anthropology. Colonialist anthropology, as advanced by Western scholars such as Bronislaw Malinowski, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Leo Frobenius, and Tempels, led to the development of ethnophilosophy as a discursive formation. Hountondji’s philosophical ideas were, in large measure, a reaction to this episteme. He was reacting to: the European claim was that the only acceptable path for the African was to evolve [evolue] by imbibing the mental products of Europe from Plato to [Jean-Paul] Sartre by way of [René] Descartes and [Edmund] Husserl. In the field of mathematics, there was Pythagoras’s theorem to be appreciated. In the field of literature, there was [Jean] Racine, [JeanBaptiste] Moliere, and [Pierre] Corneille, along with a long list of French literary luminaries. (Keita, 2004, p. 30) The theoretical compounds that define postcolonial African thought are many. In addition to the different trajectories of Anglophonic and Francophonic African thought, the trend that developed as a result of the discourse of Afrocentricism exists as well. Diop facilitated a discursive trend that addressed itself to the cultural and philosophical achievements of ancient Egypt which had scribal traditions. Followers of Diop often argue: students of a written African philosophy would also have to include in their history of African philosophy the metaphysical writings of members of the Axum school of ancient Ethiopia, such as Zara Yakob, the seven-

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teenth century philosopher. And in the African Middle Ages, the influence of Ibn Khaldun was recognized for his study of history and other social sciences. We cannot overlook the ideas of Ahmed Baba of Timboktoo who wrote systematically on jurisprudence, ethics, logic, and social philosophy. Futhermore, the writings of Songhay and scholars Kadi and Sati are extant and have been translated into modern languages. (Ibid.) Undoubtedly, Wiredu also discovered a challenging path in modern African thought in which he sometimes takes the meaning of the existence of African philosophy for granted. Also lacking is an attempt to de-universalize and localize its status as a result of indebtedness to the universalism inherent in the analytic model. African philosophy appears and sits under the universal rubric provided by Western philosophy and the theoretical space made available for its articulation is derived from the same Western-donated fund of universalism. A crucial theoretical space donated by analytic philosophy provides the occasion for the appearance and consolidation of African philosophy. Terms such as “reflective integration” and “due reflection” offer the critical spaces for the theoretical articulation of a project whose existence has not yet been concretely conceived. In Wiredu’s corpus, we see the familiar problem on the origins of modern African thought involving the tradition and modernity dialectic being played out. This tension is not quite resolved but fortunately it is also a tension that never jeopardizes his philosophical inventiveness. Instead, it appears to fuel his reflections in unprecedented ways. However, this gesture, this stance of universalism, can also be read in a positive way. It can be construed as instances of the affirmation of identity, articulations of subjectivity in the face of colonialist denigration. No apologies are required for the Black presence, which is de-ghettoized and universalized at the same time. This is a gesture that is accomplished by the sheer rigor of his mode of philosophizing. Despite whatever criticisms one might have about some aspects of Wiredu’s work, in terms of founding a tradition for the practice of modern African philosophy, his contributions have been pivotal. He has also been consistent in his output and the quality of his reflections regardless of some of their more obvious limitations. The absence of anti-colonial rancor and judicious employment of philosophical distance distinguishes the complexion of his thought from many of his contemporaries and this particular quality extends the relevance of his thought beyond the African continent. At this juncture, a reading of one of Wiredu’s major texts, Cultural Universals and Particulars, will better situate the distinctive features of his contributions to modern African thought. In this text, Wiredu is more focused on his theory of conceptual decolonization than in Philosophy and an African Culture (1980). Instead of also offering critiques of classical canons of rationality in addition to Marxist ideology, here Wiredu addresses issues that border on the ambiguities of the universal and contingent dimensions of African phi-

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losophical discourse. A central thesis in the work is that Africans have become enmeshed in the conceptual difficulties created by the imposition of foreign epistemological categories and modes of rationality. Accordingly, he argues: it is a more striking fact that many contemporary African expositors of their own traditional systems of thought yield no ground to their Western colleagues in stressing the role of belief in the supernatural in African thinking. It is hard not to see this as evidence of the fact in some ways Christian proselytization and Western education have been oversuccessful in Africa. (1996, p. 51) In addition, he says that the notion of a Supreme Being created out of nothing does not occur in traditional Akan thought and perhaps also most traditional African systems of thought. This conceptual gesture, this advocacy of a form of Africanity, is certain to win the respect of staunch Afrocentrists. In his critique of Christianity, Wiredu, as usual, employs some of the discursive taxonomies of analytic philosophy. Arguably, this critique can also be extended to the analytic canon as a mode of philosophy. The analyticity of analytic philosophy is turned against itself to reveal forms of subjectivity it excludes. In different ways, Diop and wa Thiong’o attempt to extend the critique of alien conceptual categories into the being of language by which those categories are constituted. The critique of the structure of discourse is one thing. However, the critique of the language of discourse with a view to transcending and reinventing it is another. At several moments Wiredu addresses the structure of discourse and the effects of its epistemological dichotomization within the context of the embedding of analytic philosophy into modern African thought. He does not extend the critique to the ways in which language at the basic level (parole) invents ontology, being, and the world. To be sure, this conceptual doubling creates a series of overlappings, which notions of ambivalence in critical theory could do much to unravel. The promise of Wiredu’s theoretical approach can also be undermined by a threat of infinity. Its sustainability lies in its constant and endless invention of interlinking conceptual bridges which ultimately can only serve as odes to brilliance. However, conceptual brilliance is not always the overarching pursuit of an Africa-centered agenda. Instead, it aims to resolve a long standing racial and imperialist impasse created by the broad effects of the colonial encounter and by the prolonged denigration of the Black subject in Western culture. However, Wiredu lands on safe philosophical grounds when he debunks Cartesianism within the context of an African epistemological practice. On this level, he says: the category itself is conceptually inadmissible in this system of thought. Should the reader be curious at this stage as to whether mind too is qua-

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si-material in the Akan way of thinking, the short answer is that mind is not thought of as an entity at all but rather simply as the capacity, supervenient upon brain states and processes, to do various things. Hence, the question of whether mind is a spiritual or material or quasi-material entity does not arise. (Ibid., p. 53) In this move, Wiredu reveals the incongruity of a key mode of Western rationality. One wishes such incisive conceptual subversions were more common within the annals of African philosophy. At a more mundane level, Wiredu is equally incisive in exploring his theory of conceptual decolonization as it relates to the domain of morality. In his essay, “Custom and Morality: A Comparative Analysis of Some African and Western Conceptions of Morals,” he demonstrates in different ways how morality has come to be confused with custom and vice versa. Polygamy, for instance, was attacked by Christian moralists as being immoral for traditional African societies even when custom and necessity validated it on economic grounds. According to him: the Christian missionaries who came to Africa to “save” our souls, perceiving the practice to be incompatible with their own norms of good conduct, condemned it as immoral and worked assiduously to eradicate it. (Ibid., p. 69) This, in Wiedu’s view, has led to “a kind of ethical schizophrenia in the consciousness of many of our people” (ibid., p. 51). His point is that the exigencies of operating within the framework of a modern economy have rendered the practice of polygamy unsupportable. Similarly, the Christian missionaries preached that premarital sex was immoral conduct whereas custom in traditional Akan society held that carnal knowledge among intending marriage partners was not only desirable but also legitimate. Christianity, on its part, eroded this established custom and conflated it with morality. In this regard, Wiredu’s main argument is that, “this notion of the dependence of morality on religion . . . does not even make sense in the Akan context” (ibid., p. 74). Again, he demonstrates the limitations of, and injury caused by, a colonial imposition. In relation to the African philosophical practice, Wiredu’s thesis—which forms the core of his theory of conceptual decolonization—is that modern philosophical concepts such as “mind,” “person,” “soul,” “spirit,” “proposition,” “truth,” “fact,” “substance,” “existence,” and so on “ought to be reformulated in African languages to determine their relevance and validity with the African epistemic context” (ibid., p. 93). This proposition, in short, spells out some of the limits and the often arresting possibilities of his theory. In articulating this conceptual strategy, Wiredu moves beyond a delimiting yet

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foundational African philosophical problem which is, “does African philosophy exist?” The existence of African philosophy is affirmed and its ontology is willed into being by: (1) discountenancing the conventional foundational problem of African philosophy, and (2) by a startling series of (re)problematizations. Wiredu demonstrates that there is always much an aspiring African philosopher can do. The apparent tabula rasa that confronts the African philosopher is only due to a weakness of the imagination and the intellect and once this initial weakness is surmounted, the field becomes open to endless conceptual inventiveness. The African subject is always prone to the colonial archive’s mechanisms of invention which construct the African philosopher as other. The same colonial archive may also confine the African philosopher to silence. So it is left to the African philosopher to raid that archive, to ignore its fundamental violence and silence, and struggle instead for the endless project of auto-invention. Wiredu himself unveils the enormous scope for invention in African philosophy by his deconstruction of the concept of truth in the Akan language. Wiredu’s point is, “one can reason to one’s heart’s content in Akan without recourse to any word or phrase separately standing for fact, (that is, in addition to the term expressing the idea of being so)” (ibid., p. 110). The brilliance of this discovery is not in doubt. But the wider ideological meaning of this conceptual brilliance needs to be made clearer and linked to a broader project. At a point, Wiredu suggests the possibilities for articulating this project, “the agenda for contemporary African philosophy must include the critical and reconstructive treatment of the oral tradition and the exploitation of the literary and scientific resources of the modern world in pursuit of a synthesis” (ibid., p. 112). Here, he veers toward an appealing direction, but again the ideological imperatives of the mode of rationality are not clearly defined. Wiredu appeals to an ideal of rationality within a universe that has few ideals. The Kantian scope of his thinking does not fully confront the disturbing reality that modes of rationality are in essence constructs of brutal or impersonal power. The figure of Michel Foucault sheds a guiding light here. But if we wish to avoid the recontextualization of Foucault a la Mudimbe, then we could turn toward the direction of Diop, whose ideologies of Blackness affirm the raciologically-dependent nature of so-called universal knowledge. Wiredu makes an appeal for the virtues of synthesis in thought. However, collective thought and universal thought are not mere products of disinterested rationality. Instead, they tend to emerge from bloody battlefields and incendiary furnaces of the mind. Let us assume that the synthetized products of rationality emerge from the most serene contexts with a minimal amount of strife. How are these products inserted into a condition of post-coloniality? How does one address the multiple nuances of the in-betweenness such a condition invariably en-

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tails? This is a less fervent but no less seductive ideological route than the Diopian imperative. Under the classical postcolonial condition, the postcolonial meets the postmodern, discards the Kantian seriousness of Wiredu’s search for synthesis, and embraces instead the seductions of jouissance (enjoyment), the limitless inventiveness of play as the world gets consumed by its products and endless need for violence. So far, I have identified two ideological possibilities for Wiredu’s project: the Diopian recuperation of the ideologies of Blackness and the affirmation of their historical sanctity, and the postcolonial and postmodern dissolutions and resurrections within the light of play. We might as well mention a third ideological possibility. In a world of such extremes, the spirit of fundamentalism has become pervasive. Undoubtedly, Wiredu will not go in this direction, but the spirit and context of fundamentalism need to be critically engaged. In many respects, our age, in addition to being one of digital globalization, has also become the age of fundamentalisms. I will say more on these ideological possibilities later. Wiredu urges African philosophers to attempt to think out different philosophical concepts: in your own language and, on the basis of the results, review the intelligibility of the associated problems or the plausibility of the apparent solutions that have tempted you when you have pondered them in some metropolitan language. (ibid., p. 137) However, Wiredu himself is aware of the immense problems involved in this conceptual structure: “a program that is easier prescribed than implemented, but to which there is not alternative” (ibid., p. 153). Here, we are confronted by the necessity to evolve a broader ideological project, to move beyond the approach to African philosophy as an ode to conceptual brilliance. Once this theory moves beyond the realm of pure conceptuality into the field of thought-reframed-as-ideology or thought-must-becomeideology, its limits as part of the logistics of ideology become all too apparent. For instance, it is necessary to note that half of the world’s 6,500 languages are about to become extinct. We must also bear in mind, as wa Thiong’o has argued, that the struggle for linguistic and cultural decolonization must be linked to the larger project of global anti-colonial critique and struggle. Powerful institutions and mechanisms support powerful languages: educational establishments, global finance, the military and industrial complex, political institutions, and more. In addition, they are also invested in powerful infrastructures of consciousness that do the work of ideological legitimation. For Wiredu’s project to be ideologically viable, this kind of awareness and critique is necessary. Language is also inextricably linked to the politics of identity. The politics of identity, as in the case of the Hutu/Tutsi conflict in Rwanda, is in turn tied to the politics of death. An urgent need exists to re-

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conceptualize the ways in which the politics of language and identity leads to sociopolitical incohesion and, in many African situations, genocide. (For an analysis of the relationship between identity and genocide, see Mamdani, 2001.) If the politics of language and identity holds some powerful romantic allure, it also has its dangerous underside which has been replayed many times in Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan, Uganda, and several other African countries. Africa has almost two thousand languages, so we can imagine the sheer laboriousness involved in thinking through philosophical concepts in those languages. The logistical problems will be overwhelming. Language in Africa is also tied to the phenomenon of ethnicity and in this case, the ethnocentricism of ethnicity. Ethnicity is also a vital marker of identity linked to the ability for generating life and death situations. Although there are cosmopolitan forms of African ethnicities in existence, it is ethnicity as a bounded construct, as pristine materiality, as a form of blood and flesh and soil corporeality that governs the lives of the majority of African subjects. In a Hutu/Tutsi context of ethnic strife—and they are many in Africa—language becomes the bearer of both life and death, it becomes a property of extremities, and it also acquires the rigidities of an ideological and religious fundamentalism. To return to Wiredu’s core thesis in his project of conceptual decolonization, he states: It would be a major first step toward the formulation of modern thought in African languages if we in Africa were to cultivate the habit of thinking in our own indigenous languages as much as possible when talking in one metropolitan language or another about issues involving concepts such as “God,” “Mind,” “Person,” “Soul,” “Spirit,” “Sentence,” “Proposition,” “Truth,” “Fact,” “Substance,” “Existence,” and about categorical distinctions such as “the Physical and Spiritual,” “the Natural and the Supernatural,” “the Religious and the Secular,” and “the Mystical and the Nonmystical.” (ibid., p. 93) The conceptual novelty involved in this gesture entails bypassing a perplexing yet pervasive foundational problem of modern African philosophy. In doing African philosophy this way, a philosopher moves beyond the circularity of a particular kind of metaphilosophy into a terrain of ideological contestation. After several successes at conceptual inventiveness, another kind of gesture is required within the ideological field. This becomes necessary within the context of new forms of dispossession brought about by contemporary processes of globalization. If the sole aim of the African philosophical project is confined to an exercise in conceptual brilliance without a broader social engagement, the old crisis of relevance reoccurs. The current ideological situation both globally and within the African continent threatens to stifle not only the possibility for philosophical deliberation but also the existence of bare life.

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Wiredu’s project of conceptual decolonization is also an attempt to undermine the unfolding logic of colonization. The point, though, is that logic has become even more virulent and more subtle. Consequently, the conceptual mechanisms by which the unfolding ramifications of the logic of colonization are confronted must be stronger, more diverse, and more subtle. They require a rupturing of the borders of philosophy and a ceaseless contestation of their limits. 4. The State of the Discourse It is sometimes intriguing and at the same time tiresome that decolonization continues to generate interests and debates in African philosophical circles. This is not to say the motif of decolonization is not significant. It is a relevant preoccupation. However what is required is a continuous problematization of the discourse of decolonization to reflect (1) the changing sociopolitical conditions within the African continent; (2) to include in our analyses global configurations within the contemporary moment and how they impact on general conditions in the African continent; (3) to meditate on the historical transformations in the discourse of decolonization itself to keep track of its turns and changes; (4) to reconceptualize the project and discourse of decolonization where and when necessary with a view to doing away with old conceptual models if they fail to describe adequately present realities. Messay Kebede, in his book, Africa’s Quest for a Philosophy of Decolonization (2004), does not take the points just enumerated into account. He fails to define or clarify in a satisfactory manner what precisely he means by decolonization. Wa Thiong’o has done critical conceptual work on the discourse of decolonization, but he is hardly mentioned. Even Wiredu (1980, 1996), one of Africa’s foremost philosophers and major theorists of conceptual decolonization, is not treated on the basis of his work in this domain. Kebede’s text commits a great number of fallacies in relation to concepts and key African philosophical figures. Some of these include postmodernism, deconstruction, ethnophilosophy, Négritude, Senghor, Mudimbe, and Wiredu. It is essential to address some of these fallacies. Even the choice of theoretical periods and models is often obsolete when not incongruous. For instance, Levy-Bruhl is adopted as a primary figure on whom to heap the blame of Eurocentric racism. Within the context of outmoded anthropology, Levy-Bruhl is a notable figure, but we have become used to beginning the critique and condemnation of Eurocentricism around the figures of Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Hume (Gates Jr., 1992). None of these famous Western philosophical figures is discussed comprehensively in the more important and continuous task of denouncing Eurocentricism and other related virulent forms of racism. Kebede points out that had the scourge of racism been absent, global economic growth and development would have been much higher:

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POSTETHNOPHILOSOPHY some theories suggest that Europe could have obtained higher economic gains of it had avoided the cumbersome and inhuman practice of political and cultural subjugation and opted for the development of the continent through free economic exchanges. (Kebede, 2004, p. 9)

However, none of these theories is mentioned and neither are the implications of this proposition exhaustively explored. Messay’s conceptualization of ethnophilosophy is also quite problematic. He regards John Mbiti and Senghor as major proponents of ethnophilosophy. To put the discourse and counter discourses of ethnophilosophy into proper perspective, it is imperative to turn to the work of Hountondji. Tempels initiated the ethnophilosophical turn in philosophico-anthropological discourse in Africa with the publication of his pioneering text, La philosophi bantoue (Bantu Philosophy) in 1945. Hountondji mentions that this text was written primarily for a European audience, in which the Bantu subject is characterized as a mere anthropological cipher, a non-presence awaiting the attentions and ministrations of the European adventurist and influence in the figures of the missionary, administrator, and soldier. In his words: it aims on the one hand at facilitating what it calls Europe’s “mission to civilize” (by which we understand: practical mastery by the colonizer of the Black man’s psychological wellsprings) and, on the other hand, at warning Europe itself against the abuses of its own technocratic and ultra-materialistic civilization, by offering her, at the cost of a few rash generalizations, an image of the fine spirituality of the primitive Bantu. (1996, p. 49) An important injunction is made: colonizers can “civilize” the “native” on the condition that they possesses the appropriate spiritual qualities. Tempels’ corpus provoked a few intellectual reactions from a Rwandais priest, Alexis Kagame. Kagame attempts to construct a universal ontology drawing from an Aristotelian philosophy of consciousness. Similarly, in incorporating Greek syntactical structures in relation to his mother tongue, his entire theoretical project fails in Hountondji’s view: His critique, . . . is not a radical one. He should have renounced Tempels’ whole project instead of accepting its dogmatic naiveté and carrying it out slightly differently. Kagame should not have been content to refute Tempels, he should have asked himself what the reasons were for his error. Then he might have noticed that Tempels’ insistence on emphasizing the differences was part and parcel of the whole scheme, the reconstruction of the Bantu Weltanschauung, inasmuch as the scheme was not inscribed in the Weltanschauung itself but was external to it. (Ibid., p. 51)

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Hountondji grants that Kagame has a powerful theoretical temperament, but concludes all the same that his “work simply perpetuates an ideological myth which is itself of non-African origin” (ibid., p. 44). Other prominent ethnophilosophers Hountondji mentions include Archbishop André Makarakiza, François-Marie Lufuluabo, Vincent Mulago, Jean-Calvin Bahoken, Basile Fouda, and in some respects, William Abraham. This significant historical background is absent in Kebede’s discussion of this major African philosophical tendency. Other significant assessements of ethnophilosophy within the canon of contemporary African philosophy are Mudimbe’s (1988; 1991). Kebede mischaracterizes ethnophilosophy: “Ethnophilosphers come out strongly in favor of the existence of African philosophy because they find the colonial denial of African philosophy highly insulting and degrading” (Kebede, 2004, p. 83). It should be recognized that even the project of ethnophilosophy can be defined in racial terms and this classification is quite important. Western and African schools of ethnophilosophy both reinforce and antagonize one another. No mention is made of this crucial distinction. At a point, he terms Hountondji’s method as “critical ethnophilosophy.” This characterization is quite problematic. Does he mean to cast Hountondji as the ultimate anti-ethnophilosopher, which he is, or to state that Hountondji advances a more critical project of ethnophilosophy, which he does not? Hountondji’s entire metaphilosophical program has been dominated by a relentless attack on the project and status of ethnophilosophy in whatever guise. This point cannot be overemphasized. An apparent confusion arises between Senghor’s conception of Négritude and ethnophilosophy. For instance, this confusion, in not seizing the opportunity to differentiate the boundaries between the project of ethnophilosophy and Négritude, becomes apparent in the following statement, “Leopold Sedar Senghor’s specification of emotion as an African specialty promotes the same idea of African irrationality with even greater strength” (ibid., p. 85). Kebede never makes a consistent attempt to differentiate Négritude and ethnophilosophy. Instead, he evinces a recurring tendency to formulate both as the same enterprise. Kebede makes a sweeping and unduly damaging remark, “Unable to rescue Africa, the glorification of the Black essence by the Négritude philosopher thus leads to nothing” (ibid., p. 60). Many readings of Senghor have been undoubtedly critical, usually on account of his identitarian essentializations. For example, famous criticisms of Senghor have been made by Wole Soyinka. He writes, “Leopold Sedar Senghor is a priest—but a failed one” (1999, p. 97). He argues that the main reason for the failure is: Senghor appears compelled to query deep into the humanism of the oppressed to escape the undeniable pressure of history, counter its imperatives in the present with an excursion into pristine memory, and forge

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However, there are also complementary readings of the Senghor work. Paul Gilroy writes of Senghor in quite favorable terms: Senghor is a convenient representative of the generation of colonial intellectuals who faced fascism on the battlefield and then used their confrontations with it to clarify their approaches to freedom and democracy, culture and identity. Senghor’s work exhibits a similar pattern in which fervent humanism is combined with, but somehow not contradicted by, a romantic ethnic particularity and an appreciation for cultural syncretism and transcultural symbiosis. The Senegalese poet, statesman, resistance fighter, socialist, and influential theorist of Négritude, hybridity, and cultural intermixture . . . . (2000, p. 91) This sort of reading transforms the traditional image of Senghor as a proponent of ethnic particularity and the cult of Black “inner rhythm” with its anti-rationalist connotations. Soyinka’s reservations in this light appear narrow minded while the usual allegations of essentialisms in the face of a restated quality “for cultural syncretism and transcultural symbiosis” appear lame and untrue. Kebede’s reading of Senghor is based on presuppositions of essentialism and within the frame of an unreconstructed logic of what postcolonialism entails. Kebede’s primary concern, as we have to keep reminding ourselves since it forms the thrust of the title of his book, is decolonization. Yet, as I have noted elsewhere, decolonization remains hardly theorized in the text. Wiredu, on the other hand, has demonstrated why the project of conceptual decolonization should be a central concern in contemporary African philosophy. Accordingly, he argues: the agenda for contemporary African philosophy must include the critical and reconstructive treatment of the oral tradition and the exploitation of the literary scientific resources of the modern world in pursuit of a synthesis. (Wiredu, 1996, p. 112). Wiredu has proffered both definitions and elaborations of decolonization as it relates to contemporary African philosophy. We do not come across the same qualities regarding the topic in Kebede’s text. Similarly, there are attempts to stress the relevance of postmodernism as a conceptual approach for processes of agentialization in Africa. Nonetheless, most of these attempts fall flat. Kebede subscribes to the only partially accurate view that postmodernism is overwhelmingly indebted to the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. There are far more influences than

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this narrow view admits. Kebede posits the opinion: “what makes postmodernism crucial for Africa is that the theory rehabilitates Africa even as it suggests alternative ways of achieving modernity and development” (2004, p. 140), and yet earlier, he had also expressed the view, “the emergence of postmodernism from the womb of Western philosophy remains a mystery” (ibid., 126). Deconstruction crops up a few times in Kebede’s text and he mentions Mudimbe as belonging to the African school of deconstruction. Surprisingly Achille Mbembe is hardly mentioned or discussed in this regard. Yet the term is, as Jacques Derrida once quite reluctantly called it, difficult and problematic. Deconstruction has as its central concerns: the deconstruction of the metaphysics of the “proper” of logocentricism, linguisticism, phonologism, the demystification or the desedimentation of the autonomic hegemony of language (a deconstruction in the course of which is elaborated another concept of the text or the trace, of their originary technization, of iterability, of the prosthetic supplement, but also of the proper and of what was given the name of expropriation). (1994, p. 92) These clarifications are absent in Kebede’s discussions of the topic. Let us examine a few more of Kebede’s preoccupations. On African historic religion he writes “Mbiti defends traditional African religions on account of their closeness to the original, non-Hellenized message of the Bible. What the West stigmatizes as primitive is the innocent human being, the one that remains loyal to the original wish of the Creator” (2004, p. 76). The discourses on African traditional religions have long since moved beyond these kinds of jaded anthropological notions (van Binsbergen, 2003). It is also imperative to note that Mbiti argues that religion is a key presence in African lives. It permeates virtually all aspects of existence within the African context such as apparently simple occurrences like waking up in the morning, activities during the course of the day, and preparations for winding down the day at dusk. Religion also influences birth ceremonies including naming festivals, burial rites, and communions with departed ancestors. According to Mbiti, religion in Africa is not a cerebral or scriptural affair. Instead it is a fundamentally organic phenomenon dating back to epochs in antiquity. Due to the organic nature of religion in Africa and African lives, Mbiti points out that the distinction between the secular and the sacred does not quite exist. Nonetheless, he does not go as far as to posit that the absence of this distinction is evidence of pantheism. Fanon is also discussed, but as usual the picture of him that emerges from Kebede’s reading is neither totally accurate, nor completely agreeable. According to him, “Frantz Fanon occupies a distinct place by the argument that only a philosophy of violence consummates the rejection of both otherness and the restoration of the past” (Kebede, 2004, p. 94). He also makes the point, “Fanon’s resolution to convince the colonized that they have no other

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option than recourse to violence is at best exaggerated and highly restrictive” (Kebede, 2004, p. 101). There are far more sophisticated readings of Fanon available. A more astute reading is offered by Homi Bhabha: It is not for the finitude of philosophical thinking nor for the finality of a political direction that we turn to Fanon. Heir to the ingenuity and artistry of [François-Dominique] Toussaint [L’ouverture] and Senghor, as well as the iconoclasm of Nietzsche, [Sigmund] Freud and Sartre, Fanon is the purveyor of the trangressive and transitional truth. (1986, pp. viii–ix) Bhabha’s analysis locates Fanon’s importance in a multiplicity of discursive domains, not just as a theorist of colonial counter violence or critic of ethnophilosophy as he is made to be in Kebede’s reading. Nigel Gibson on his part states that Fanon’s “[Les damnés de la terre] Wretched of the Earth [1961] is perhaps one of the most important pieces of engaged and critical transition literature available” (Bhabha, 2004, p. 1). Mudimbe is a theorist who warrants frequent mention. However, the discussions of Mudimbe are not altogether satisfactory. A remark such as “in terms of deconstruction and relativization, what Mudimbe has achieved does not seem to surpass Négritude” (Kebede, 2004, p. 127) is quite confusing. How does “deconstruction and relativization” figure within this particular equation? Mudimbe’s main project has been the Foucauldian deconstruction of the African subject, known as infrahumanity, and forms of subjectivity within the Western anthropological archive. His primary method in this regard is an archaeological focus on a wide range of disciplinary texts and domains: literary, linguistic, philosophical, religious, and anthropological. Kebede, at crucial moments, seeks to validate the political importance of his philosophical project. After all, any conception of decolonization ultimately has strong political implications. In this regard, a couple of passages are especially striking, “The recognition of the concomitance of myth and rationality, of traditionality and modernity, is the appropriate way to diffuse the African dilemma” (ibid., p. 208). Also, he writes: closely following the arguments of [Henri] Bergson, I endorse the autonomous existence of the myth-making function together with the empowering purpose of the function, the understanding being that excessive valorization of rationality results in the complete asphyxia of the power of the mind. (Ibid., p. 212). Two points are worth noting here: an easy acceptance of the influence of Bergson and the centrality of the poetic elements in the constitution of philosophical projects. How does this project differ from the more accomplished projects of Senghor and Mudimbe, who often come up for condemnation? The sudden espousal of poetry in the middle of the attempt to put up a front of

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philosophical respectability appears to be a problem with the philosophical enterprise itself. Kebede begins his discourse on decolonization on a quite familiar terrain with a representation of Levy-Bruhl’s ascription of pre-logicality to the African subject. Levy-Bruhl’s anachronistic anthropological project has been promptly criticized and stripped of any lasting intellectual value. In contemporary African philosophical discourse, the denigration of the African subject and the counter-discourses of that denigration have more interesting ontologies and intellectual frames of reference. For instance Mudimbe’s scholarly account of the mummification of the Black subject in Greek antiquity or Wiredu’s reconceptualizations of Akan traditional worldviews in the garb of analytic philosophy. The recurring figures in Kebede’s philosophical preoccupations are Levy-Bruhl, Tempels, Senghor, Bergson, and sometimes Marx. Other figures are Hountondji, Mudimbe, and to a lesser extent, Wiredu. However Kebede’s engagement with other projects of decolonization, together with his conceptualization of decolonization, is quite uneven. There are new genealogies of colonialism to be taken into consideration, including that of Anne McClintock (1995) and Ann Laura Stoler (2002). Even the Fanonian theorization of colonial relations has been radically rewritten and reinterpreted by contemporary theorists such as Bhabha, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Gibson. Such radical re-readings are necessary to ensure that meaning is not lost in the different processes and stages of decolonization. The inherent binarisms of the traditional colonial structure are always open to critique. Kebede’s assumptions about that structure reinforce the same stereotypes about colonial relations. In the present age of globalization, there exists the necessity to reconsider the meaning and possibilities of decolonization within contemporary politics. New forms of colonization are occurring in which definitions of “center” and ‘periphery” become quite problematic, as what is regarded as the global gets colonized by the local in ways in which its character is radically transformed (see Muppidi, 2004). Kebede’s concept of decolonization excludes the vital cultural, sociopolitical, and economic configurations of contemporary globalization and it is based instead on the reinforcement of different primordialisms within an understanding of the global; the nation-state, the old international and national identitarian form of politics. The new configurations, within the political economy of the global, that are occurring have affected the trajectories of decolonization and the meaning of the term. Kebede does not demonstrate an appreciation of this radical transformation which shows that he still operates within a pre-Fanonian mindset. We have to rethink the notion and possibilities of decolonization and their usefulness in the age of contemporary globalization. Similarly, in Kebede’s text, the project of decolonization is represented within an undeconstructed format which excludes the necessary and important categories of class, gender, and sexuality. Patriarchal nation-state structures in

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Africa need to be appropriately critiqued to demonstrate much of what they exclude. We have to learn to tell new stories not only within the old narrative frameworks but with new languages as well. Perhaps decolonization as conceived by the pre-Fanonian consciousness in the face of the contemporary politics of the global has become obsolete as a conceptual category; and perhaps it is time to theorize the notion of de-agentialization within the context of the global. 5. Different Shades of Decolonization Interestingly, there are many other accents to the project of ideological decolonization in Africa. For instance, the corpus of Diop represents an influential dimension not only to the project but also for other struggles for the affirmation of African forms of subjectivity and historicity. These forms are not only affirmed but their historic significance is explored and projected into more poignant frames of reference. Diop’s project is undergirded by the ideology of Pan-Africanism. He celebrates the authenticity of Black Africa’s cultural attainments which he goes on to link the intellectual achievements of ancient Egypt. In this regard, his project is transformed into a philosophy of Black consciousness which in many ways bears a close resemblance to the ideology of Négritude as an affirmation of Black subjectivity. Through both conscious and unconscious multidisciplinarity, and by a broad conception of the African ideological project, Diop expands the possibilities for the emancipation of the African collective self. Wa Thiong’o, another intellectual concerned with the cultural possibilities inherent in decolonization, affirms the overriding importance of language and culture as indispensable tools for the project of global ideological decolonization. On the question of language as an impediment for the reconstitution of the African self, both wa Thiong’o’s and Wiredu’s projects are similar. However, wa Thiong’o’s project is also marked by the globality of its conception. For him, the project of ideological decolonization of language and culture does not remain confined to the theoretical realm. Instead, it is extended to the critique of cultural imperialism and its multiple links with global capital. This globality of conception marks wa Thiong’o’s project from Wiredu’s theory of decolonization. The globality of conception inherent in wa Thiong’o’s project does not undermine its potency in local sites of struggle since a prominent part of the program involves cultural and linguistic reconstitution, a radical reformulation of post-coloniality itself dictated by an unambiguous politics of indigeneity. In this way, wa Thiongo’s project involves: (1) a broad critique of imperialism and its intimate relations with global capital; (2) an affirmation of an ethics and politics of indigeneity; and (3) an incorporation of these conceptual approaches into a single program for a more general struggle of the global dispossessed against global oppression. In the main, these elements constitute

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wa Thiong’o’s project of ideological decolonization. We would recall that wa Thiong’o elaborated on his project of ideological decolonization by writing in Kikuyu (Bantu native language) and by his involvement with a community based drama group, the Kamiriithu Community and Education and Culture Center. These activities and engagements led to a conflict with the Kenyan government and his subsequent detention which in turn led to his exile. The politics of ideological decolonization has become even more complex in the era of contemporary globalization. The colonizer and colonized dichotomy, which at the moment of political liberation appeared quite understandable, is no longer as lucid. The transnationalization of capital, material resources, interests, and people have transformed the logic of global oppression that had previously held the demarcation between local and global interests and configurations of power in place. The scramble for the political dismemberment of the DRC is an apt example of this development. The DRC is a mineral rich country with large deposits of copper ore, tin concentrates, cola, zinc concentrates, colbalt, uranium, tungsten ore, industrial diamonds carats, gem diamonds, silver, gold, crude oil, tantalum, and niobium. Joseph Désiré Mobutu, the ruler of the DRC (formerly Zaire), had been installed by the West to checkmate the political development of Patrice Lumumba, the elected nationalist prime minister who was eventually assassinated in 1961. Mobutu then led his nation through a protracted saga of plunder and mismanagement. When the West believed it was no longer in its interest to have a large, if amorphous, state apparatus in existence, it withdrew its support for Mobutu and instead collaborated with his opponents, such as Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, and Laurent Kabila of the DRC, in undermining his reign. Mobutu was eventually defeated and Kabila installed. Kabila soon fell out with his main supporters, Museveni and Kagame, and was eventually killed in the struggle to remain in power. Political analysts often claim that the DRC never received independence. The quest for political liberation was truncated at the moment of the death of Lumumba who symbolized the politics of sovereignty. Mobutu, on the other hand, pursued and acted as a stooge for the politics of neoimperialism which discarded him when he was no longer useful to its aims. Kabila, even with his rhetoric of liberty, pursued a contrary logic of neoimperialism. In the DRC, the contestation between the politics of sovereignty and neo-imperialism has not been resolved. Within this particular historical juncture, the political and theoretical meaning of decolonization is bound to be peculiar. In the context of this protracted struggle, the figure of the intellectual as political participant reemerges: Wamba dia Wamba. In Africa, the line between artistic creativity, intellectual production, and political activity in many contexts is almost nonexistent. Wamba dia Wamba, as an intellectual and former university professor, went further than wa Thiong’o in his engagement with political processes. In

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the event, he assumed the profile of an armed rebel. However, Wamba dia Wamba’s profile does not project the singularity of vision, or the vision of the intellectual as revolutionary that wa Thiong’o reflected in his political heyday. Arguably, Wamba dia Wamba is engulfed by the struggle between the politics of sovereignty and the complex logic of global imperialism in which his so-called African brothers, including Museveni of Uganda and Kagame of Rwanda, are deeply enmeshed. Due to the undermining of the ethos of nationality and territoriality by a combination of forces, Wamba dia Wamba has few credible resources from which to draw from to articulate an ideological project that will overcome the divisions between the attractions of sovereignty and the ubiquitous interests of transnationalization. In many ways, Wamba dia Wamba has experienced a loss of credibility: The Assembly of the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD) comprised only twenty-eight members from groups which were approved by Uganda and Rwanda. Some of the leaders such as Wamba dia Wamba and Ngoma had the direct backing of the Americans, the Belgians, and the French. As it turned out, the rebellion was popular and the liberators in the eastern part of the DR, where the rebellion was located, were hated and called “collabos” or “traitors and puppets of foreign interest. (Nabudere, 2004, pp. 46–47) Moreover, the case of Wamba dia Wamba exposes the theoretical limitations of decolonization as a political project. This is to demonstrate the topicality and complexity of decolonization in the era of contemporary globalization. The politics of decolonization within the present context is not only undermined by a subtle eradication of the colonizer and colonized dichotomy but also by the transnationalization of the ideology and project of recolonization in which African agents play a crucial role. In addition to the reconfiguration of colonized and colonizer binary and the logic of contemporary recolonization, two other developments compound the politics of decolonization; first, the emergence of new processes of territorialization in which old colonial and postcolonial boundaries are being contested. The second development relates to exportation of theaters of war and conflict in Africa to other nations and regions within the continent. Apart from creating new territorial pressures, these conflicts and new forms of territoriality affect the politics of place, belonging, identity, and citizenship in ways that mean that the general notion of decolonization will have to be rethought. Within the context of de-apartheidization, the dynamics of discursive agency assume quite distinct forms. Fortunately, in present-day South Africa, debates, both in the media and in the academy, on the question of African scholarship are gaining momentum again. The question of African scholarship in the context of contemporary South Africa entails many facets and consti-

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tutes in many ways the theoretical dimension of the ongoing project of deracialization. To begin with, there exists the need to interrogate what the term “African” meant during the period of apartheid. The term has deep historical meanings. During the apartheid period, it was a devalued term and so part of the thrust of present scholarship ought to be to: (1) probe why the term was devalued in the first instance; (2) investigate the mechanisms of power by which the apartheid regime devalued the term; (3) undertake a rigorous study of the official and academic texts that legitimated this devaluation; and (4) interrogate what the term means in the post-apartheid dispensation together with a thorough examination of the official and academic texts that valorize the post-apartheid understanding of the term. This set of problems appears to be quite daunting. It begins by interrogating the historical moorings of the term within different sites—officialdom, academia, and the popular imagination—and then proceeds to analyze what the term entails in present-day South Africa. To better understand the term, there is also the need to examine the concepts of identity and the politics of identity construction in relation to South Africa. This entails a secure grounding in history and a systematic critique of the apartheid system and its modes of identity construction to expose its myths and realities. It necessitates an understandable conception of official post-apartheid politics in relation to its aims and objectives. How does South African officialdom define what it means by “African”? How do the different peoples and races of South Africa define it? Do the debates around it create uneasiness? If so, why? In posing and addressing this spectrum of questions, an attempt is being made to put into greater relief the condition of the contemporary South African against the backdrop of his or her past, present, and future. At this juncture, one might as well suggest that the understandings of the term are bound to be many according to different spatio-temporal frames. Nonetheless, the objectives of this sort of undertaking ought to be (1) to attempt to understand the shifts in meaning the term has experienced and the reasons behind them, and (2) to attempt to formulate new conceptions of the term, bearing in mind the pressing exigencies of the postapartheid moment. This is the set of tasks which can serve as opportunities for discovering avenues for a conceptual clarification for the term “African,” in ways that relate the present and the future. Finally, one of the ways of understanding what is meant by “African” is to engage with the continent itself and its mechanisms for knowledge generation. Some critics have decried the preoccupation of Black writers in the apartheid era with the hardships and politics of revolutionary life. They argue that life is not all about revolution alone. The great motivating themes of literature, they assert, are about love, death, betrayal, and other apparently mundane issues that have universal resonance. Accordingly, some critics have noticed a shift in the general preoccupation with the revolutionary ethos. For instance, it is claimed that the work of the late Kabelo Sello Duiker—Thirteen

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Cents (2000), The Quite Violence of Dreams (2001), and The Hidden Star (2006)—a novelist of immense promise, constitutes a shift from what is perceived to be a largely jaded revolutionary ethos to the unifying spirit of the postapartheid dispensation. Duiker is primarily concerned with issues of identity and masculinity and the sort of fissures created by postmodern existence. For his part, the late Phaswane Mpe, in his novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), addresses the scourge of HIV/AIDS in contemporary South Africa and so in this sense embraces what is perceived to be a post-apartheid sensibility. Sadly both Duiker and Mpe passed on in early 2005. Other Black writers such as Nicholas Mhlongo (Dog Eat Dog, 2004), Johnny Masilela (We Shall Not Weep, 2002), Kgebetli Moele, (Room 207, 2007; The Book of the Dead, 2009) Martin Koboekae (Taung Wells, 2004), Mtutuzeli Nyoka (I Speak to the Silent, 2004), Sandile Memela (Flowers of the Nation, 2005), Letepe Maisela (The Empowered Native, 2004), Ishtiyaq Shukri (The Silent Minaret, 2006) and other writers, both White and Black, all exemplify this new sensibility in contemporary South African letters. Scholars of literature should find it profitable to track how this new post-apartheid sensibility has taken shape and what it means for the definition of the South African collective self. Scholars in South Africa generally are compelled to examine the histories of racial oppression and segregation and the histories of de-racialization and desegregation. It is between these discursive polarities that we can begin to make greater sense of the entire project of African scholarship within the context of contemporary South Africa. Presently, the discursive domains that constitute African scholarship are many and accordingly a diverse variety of disciplines, scholars, and competencies are required to sharpen its focus and orientations. As mentioned earlier, the project of African scholarship in South Africa will be more meaningful if pursued on the terrains that surround and lie between the histories of racial oppression and the multiple contexts of deapartheidization. Finally, the challenge of de-apartheidization is a different, but fundamentally related, formulation of the dynamics of decolonization. 6. The Promise and Limits of Invention The limits of Wiredu’s conceptual inventiveness lie in not locating a broad ideological compass for situating his odes to conceptual brilliance in the face of the contemporary forms of imperialist de-subjectification of the Black subject. The scope of his epistemological reconstructions is more impressive than that of his other great contemporary, Hountondji, who wages his battle for the consolidation of an African philosophical practice at a largely metaphilosophical level. However, Hountondji’s location at the metaphilosophical plane serves as a powerful ideological armature, even though it is often misinterpreted by dogmatic socialists. For Wiredu’s impressive epistemological reconstructions to acquire their fully deserved importance, the invention of a structure of ideology is required to meet the demands of the ideological field

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and to track the trajectories of the Black subject’s movement from the different histories and events of oppression—slavery, colonization, and apartheid— to the resumption of unhindered philosophical speech. Philosophies of Black subjectivity such as Négritude, Pan-Africanism, and Afrocentricism—whatever shortcomings they might have—are attempts to identify and reconfigure the meanings of these histories and events of racial oppression. The disconnection between a more involved reading of the histories of racial oppression and Wiredu’s unquestionably inventive epistemological reconstructions reveals the limits of his entire conceptual approach. The recuperation of the figures of the Black subject within the histories of oppression when linked to Wiredu’s theory of conceptual decolonization becomes a compelling blend of discourse and subjectivity; an unassailable conceptual refinement and rewriting of the existing philosophies of Black subjectivity. Apart from these available philosophies of Black subjectivity, Wiredu has indicated another direction and theorists have the challenging task of reconciling the apparently opposing tendencies, within these two crucial movements, of decolonization as ideological struggle and the theory of conceptual decolonization, in Black thought. A suspicion exists that there is the need for an amalgamation of these two critical movements of African thought as new technologies of domination and dispossession wreak untold havoc on African populations in the livid quest for profit (Nabudere, 2004). In this understanding of the processes of contemporary globalization, Africa is being reprocessed as it was during the 1885 Congress of Berlin, only this time around the forces, mechanisms, and peoples, both African and non-African, that are orchestrating the new scramble are stronger. Wiredu’s project of conceptual decolonization exposes both the limitations and strengths of the discourse of African philosophy. First, he bypasses a fundamental theoretical aporia about its disciplinary status by instituting a new kind of epistemology. However this epistemology reaches beyond the confines of conventional African philosophical practice into the tumultuous universe of politics. Decolonization in Africa is being reconfigured as recolonization, in which the distance and relationship between life and death are also being transformed. The murky world of politics shows the limits of conceptual decolonization as a theoretical and an ideological project. Once conceptual decolonization meets with the exigencies of political activity and the traditional demarcation between life and death has been abolished by relentless conflict, conceptual decolonization loses much of its attraction as a theoretical project. It should also be pointed out that Wiredu’s advocacy of consensual democracy as part of his theory of conceptual decolonization brings about closer relations with politics. However, his version of consensual democracy does not draw its main inspiration from contemporary forms of African political life or politics. Instead, it reaches into pre-coloniality for its epistemological resources. This bypassing of contemporary African forms of politics does not engage

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with crucial sociopolitical configurations within the African continent that have become the defining features of general existence and ways of death in the continent. An engagement with politics in Africa entails an awareness of the politics of ethnicity, (in the case South Africa, race and ethnicity), the dissolution of the state, resource control and distribution, deterritorialization, and the transnationalization of the politics of recolonization, all of which have transformed the nature and meaning of politics in Africa. Since the question of decolonization remains vital in Africa and regions experiencing the transnationalization of recolonization, it is necessary to reformulate the process as it relates to other global counter-ideologies and counter-articulations of global recolonization, such as postmodern Pan-Africanism, postcolonial territoriality, and the politics of indigeneity, for it to engage with a wider field of vital significations. Wiredu’s theory of conceptual decolonization has its shortcomings. However, one of its main strengths lies in bypassing the obsolete problem of identity that constitutes the foundations of African philosophy. In formulating those odes to conceptual brilliance, Wiredu surmounts a crucial rhetoric in African philosophy, identifies a path of fertility in relation to the problem of identity, and finds theoretical agency and momentum on grounds that had in critical moments been barren. His attention to the general question of decolonization leads to other ways by which it can be posed. At the conceptual level, the current dilemmas of decolonization within the canon of philosophical discourse have to be addressed so as not to fall into the position, for instance, of (re)inscribing the problem and crisis of relevance into the context of intellectual production. Wiredu’s formulation of his theory of conceptual decolonization can also be regarded as a confrontation with the problem of relevance in African philosophy. However, the epistemological resources to address this dilemma are not all to be found within the archive of African philosophical discourse. Neither does one nation or region exhibit all the different dimensions and possibilities of decolonization. For my part, I have argued that the question of decolonization needs to be framed not only within the strictures of the conventional African philosophical canon but also beyond it. Posing the question beyond the conventional disciplinary canon entails an engagement with different processes and pressures—globalization, new technologies of violence and domination, and the transnationalization of the politics of recolonization—that are transforming essential variables of the project of decolonization. In addition, issues such as ethnicity, postcolonial territoriality, the politics of belonging and identity, and the issue of citizenship all have to be included in the equation. Decolonization as a theoretical project encounters serious limitations when it fails to engage with these significant variables. As the epistemological and existential resources by which the struggle for decolonization can be waged are being depleted by the new pressures on the nation-state, the local community, and the family, the struggle can reinvigorate itself by a widening

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of the conceptual terrain of decolonization as both theory and praxis. Decolonization remains relevant, but what must change is its theoretical and ideological conception as a project. Diop, Fanon, and wa Thiong’o have indicated different trajectories of the project of decolonization, but Wamba dia Wamba’s challenge best exemplifies the current dilemmas of decolonization as an ideological project. It also demonstrates that decolonization is an inherently political project that changes according to different sociopolitical demands and exigencies. In this way, the contemporary pressures of transnationalization have transformed the political complexion of decolonization and so critiques and critics of it would be better served by acknowledging and engaging with this wave of transformations. Some changes within the logic of decolonization invariably invite reformulations of the procedures of critique.

Two THE LURE OF ETHNOPHILOSOPHY Several African thinkers ascribe the emergence of modern African philosophy to a discourse known as ethnophilosophy which in a way is an outgrowth of colonial anthropological interventions. Ethnophilosophy in recent times has become greatly undervalued because (1) it is conceived as a product of a vast imperial undertaking that has its beginnings in the legitimation of colonialism, and (2) because of its relentless and systematic de-agentialization of subject peoples and agents, and then (3) even at its best, because it can be excessively patronizing in its claims to give voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless. However, it can be argued that ethnophilosophy in the wave of decolonization might, in some respects, have aided nationalist agitations and postcolonial ideologies of liberation that gave rise to counter-discourses, to colonialism and the master-discourses that promoted it, through which modern African thought gained its different discursive orientations, momentum, and stability. For an African philosopher like Paulin J. Hountondji, ethnophilosophy provided the fertile grounds on which to develop a powerful philosophical practice such that is unique within the canon of modern African thought. This chapter revisits Hountondji’s famous critique of ethnophilosophy by: (1) rereading his landmark text, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1996); (2) discussing the debates that attended its sometimes problematic reception by several African scholars; (3) providing a reading of Hountondji’s other major text, The Struggle for Meaning (2002), to demonstrate the multiple ways in which the second text amplifies the arguments of the first; and (4) evincing how the second text reduces the philosophical exclusivity of the first as a strategy for popularizing his central theoretical concerns. Hountondji’s major contribution to African philosophy, the critique of ethnophilosophy, is implicated in the problem of origins, which is also a quest for foundations. In erecting this particular discursive frame we will see how little Paulin J. Houndonji’s thought has changed and demonstrate how the second text (The Struggle for Meaning) provides the contexts and conditions for a better appreciation of his structures of thought together with several other equally significant African thinkers. In some ways, it can be argued that The Struggle for Meaning is not an advancement of Hountondji’s thought. Instead, it is a largely eloquent recapitulation of earlier theoretical positions that often employs para-philosophical modes of discourse to restate what is philosophical in African thought and what continue to be the enduring problems and challenges that face the contemporary African philosopher in considerably harsher milieus and times.

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In his forward to The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture and Democracy in Africa, Kwame Anthony Appiah calls African Philosophy: Myth and Reality perhaps “the most influential work of African philosophy written in the French language” (Hountondji, 2002, p. xii). In his preface to a more recent edition of the controversial text, Hountondji explains why he makes the critique of ethnophilosophy his theoretical point of departure in addition to restating the conditions of mental enslavement in Africa, the ever unfavorable relations in the international division of labor, the continuing peripheralization of so-called peripheral knowledge, and the abiding interest in science and technology in the African postcolony. These different concerns are important for him because they have a profound impact not only on how Africa relates to itself but also to other parts of the globe. Abiola Irele, echoing Hountondji, writes: No cultural development of any importance will be possible in Africa until she has built up a material strength capable of guaranteeing her sovereignty and her power of decision not only in the political and economic but also in the cultural field. (1996, p. 25) Since the publication of African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, the multiple problems of the African continent have worsened. Africans know what needs to be done to get out of the unending cycle of degradation, violence, and general sociopolitical disequilibria but the material power and conditions together with favorable international contexts are usually lacking. Placide Tempels initiated the ethnophilosophical tendency in philosophico-anthropological studies in Africa with the publication of his work, Bantu Philosophy 1945. Houndonji argues that this pioneering text was written primarily for a European audience, in which the presumed Bantu subject features as a mere anthropological object, a passive presence awaiting the attentions and ministrations of the European adventurist in material, intellectual, and psychic terms. In his words: it aims on the one hand at facilitating what it calls Europe’s “mission to civilize” (by which we understand: practical mastery by the colonizer of the Black man’s psychological wellsprings) and, on the other hand, at warning Europe itself against the abuses of its own technocratic and ultra-materialistic civilization, by offering her, at the cost of a few rash generalizations, an image of the fine spirituality of the primitive Bantu. (1996, p. 49) A crucial problem is raised: the colonizer can “civilize” the “native” on the condition that she spiritually redeems herself. Tempels’ work elicited a number of scholarly responses as it signaled the formal emergence of the discourse of ethnophilosophy. Hountondji argues

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that African scholars who engage in ethnophilosophy are no better than their Western counterparts in constructing doubtful mythological theories and depictions of Africa. In his view: The African ethnophilosopher’s discourse is not intended for Africans. It has not been produced for their benefit, and its authors understood that it would be challenged, if at all, not by Africans but by Europe alone. Unless, the West expressed itself through Africans, as it knows so well how to do. In short, the African ethnophilosopher made himself the spokesman of All-Africa facing All-Europe at the imaginary rendezvous of give and take—from which we observe that “Africanist” particularism goes hand in glove, objectively, with an abstract universalism, since the African intellectual who adopts it thereby expounds it, over the heads of his people, in a mythical dialogue with his European colleagues, for the constitution of a “civilization of the universal.” (Ibid., p. 45) In several instances, Hountondji argues that the discourse of ethnophilosophy, instead of instituting a genuine philosophical practice in Africa, has instead prevented its development. It is a waste of time as a scholarly endeavor and a misdirected kind of labor in which preconstituted structures of thought are mummified. In short, the preoccupation with ethnophilosophy discourages confrontation with the problems and challenges of the present. By the practice of ethnophilosophy: we have unwittingly played Europe’s game—the Europe against which we first claimed we were setting ourselves to defend. And what do we find at the end of road? The same subservience, the same display of wretchedness, the same tragic abandonment of thinking by ourselves and for ourselves: slavery. (Ibid., p. 50) Within ethnophilosophical literature: here is a myth at work, the myth of primitive unanimity, with its suggestion that in “primitive” societies—that is to say, non-Western societies— everybody always agrees with everyone else. It follows that in such societies there can never be individual beliefs or philosophies but only collective systems of belief. (Ibid., p. 60) By the time Hountondji attained the height of his intellectual and philosophic powers, ethnophilosophy had been deprived of its theoretical momentum, “that discourse has lost its critical edge charge, its truth. Yesterday it was the language of the oppressed, today it is a discourse of power. Formerly a romantic protest against European pride, it is an ideological placebo” (ibid., p. 171). Perhaps one of the most damaging remarks Hountondji makes regarding

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is that the concept of ethnophilosophy is “a mystified discourse and a dreamlike description of a collective thought that exists only in the inventor’s head” (ibid., p. 173). Similarly, Hountondji has criticized the trend in Africa called philosophic sagacity or what he terms a literature de pensee (literature of thought) (ibid., p. 81). The word ethnophilosophy was not coined by Hountondji or Marcien Towa as often assumed. Kwame Nkrumah registered for a doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania in 1943 and proposed to work on what he termed “ethnophilosophy.” In one of his many definitions of ethnophilosophy, Hountondji writes: the extension into the field of thought in general of the inventory of the corpus of so-called primitive knowledges [an inventory], . . . had been undertaken at that time for plants and animals by two pilot-disciplines: ethnobotany and ethnozoology” (2002, p. 208). Consequently, Hountondji, together with Towa, made his reputation as a philosopher based on his relentless critiques of ethnophilosophy. Hountondji has made many metaphilosophical reflections, indulged in elaborate political philosophizing and written about the adverse conditions that prevail as a result of the international division of intellectual labor. First, he is a committed intellectual in some of the most illustrious connotations of the term. For instance, he has argued that: the responsibility of African philosophers (and of all African scientists) extends far beyond the narrow limits of their discipline and that they cannot afford the luxury of self-satisfied apoliticism or the quiescent complacency about the established disorder unless they deny themselves as both philosophers and as people. In other words, the theoretical liberation of philosophical discourse presupposes political liberation. (1996, p. 46) One of the charges often made against Hountondji is that he is not sufficiently political for an African philosopher and that he is too theoretical to have any redeeming political value in the continent. But more on this claim later. Ethnophilosophy, we are constantly reminded, is an invention of the West; an invention that defines what is “primitive” and what is “civilized,” what is “natural” and what is “unnatural,” what is “normal” and what is “abnormal,” and so on. Hountondji points out that these classifications and different myths of unanimity only serve to “feed the Western taste for spice, sensation, and exoticism” (ibid., p. 80). The native is violently otherized, violently abused, and laid prostrate for Western gaze, scrutiny, fetish, and consumption. In this way, “the essential fine responsibility of the primitive was preserved, along with his good-natured insouciance, his passivity, his impotence” (ibid.). Many of Hountondji’s conclusions are relevant for postcolonial

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theory and cultural studies. Unfortunately, theorists of postcolonial and cultural studies do not always cite his work. But this grave oversight is perhaps not as damaging as the charges made against him by his fellow African scholars. Olabiyi Yai wrote a searing critique of African Philosophy: Myth and Reality that provoked a multiplicity of reactions within and beyond the African continent. First, he accuses Hountondji of not giving an adequate definition of African philosophy itself. Specifically, he writes, “the flight from a debate on the content of African philosophy tells of the inadequacy of the political and philosophical discourse conducted by our abstract philosophers” (Yai, 1977, p. 7). Yai charges Hountondji of “elitism, philosophism, and scientism” (ibid., p. 16). He strikes hard at Hountondji when he writes: the philosophical stake in Africa is not an interest that concerns only the “philistine” or “intellectual” strata of the petty bourgeoisie, for the masses too must make their voices heard. And here dialectical materialism becomes pertinent, with its irreplaceable role as philosophy of praxis and as philosophy of the oppressed. (Ibid., p. 18) Hountondji’s thought has virtually no political relevance. Oyekan Owomoyela also published a long critique of Hountondji’s work which is less strident than Yai’s. Owomoyela’s general contention about Hountondji’s philosophical project is: Whereas the case against ethnophilosophy could be construed as being against the misguided concoctions of foreigners and their African cohorts, the philosophers’ pronouncements leave one with the certainty that the real object of their displeasure is African tradition and not what ethnophilosophers make of it. (1987, p. 80) He also states with a modicum of demonstrable hesitation, “Hountondji’s suggestion that African Studies as a discipline is suspect because it was invented by Europeans and is, therefore, part of the European tradition, is strange” (ibid., p. 92). Finally, he claims, “Anglophone philosophers tend to be more receptive to the philosophical traditions of African traditions than are their Francophone colleagues” (ibid., p. 96). We have two popular arguments against Hountondji’s corpus. One is the claim that he is not sufficiently political. The other is the charge that, in his attempts to denigrate ethnophilosophy, he ignores the importance and possibilities inherent in indigenous African traditions. How accurate are these assertions? Do they do justice to Hountondji’s landmark text, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality? How has his subsequent work tried to grapple with these two main charges? These two charges relate to two of the most powerful tendencies in modern African thought: Marxism and nativism, which a formulation of poststruc-

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turalist thought in Africa has revealed to be fake philosophies [philosophies du travestissement] (Mbembe, 2001b). Are Yai and Owomoyela fair in their assessments of Hountondji’s work? Hountondji had defined African philosophy to “mean a set of texts, specifically the set of texts written by Africans and described as philosophical by their authors themselves” (Hountondji, 1996, p. 32). This appears to be an agreeable starting point. However, this not only the definition he gives. He also concerns himself with the different tasks that face the contemporary African philosopher: In the case of Africa, philosophy as a meditation on the logic of sciences, on the conditions of their constitution and their development, on the theoretical and historical relationships that they have between them, and, as the case may be, between them and their technical applications, on the forms and ways of their social insertion, the modes of social appropriation of their theoretical and practical results, briefly, philosophy as theory of science in the widest sense of the term, can play a considerable role by illuminating with a new light the problem, henceforth classic, of the contribution of science and of technology to the development of our societies. (Hountondji, 1987, p. 19) To identify and appreciate the value, richness, and range of Hountondji’s philosophical contributions in Africa we have to look beyond Marxian and nativist critiques to refocus on the historical conjuncture in which his work took shape in terms of cultural, political, and intellectual parameters and how they affected the production of philosophical thought. We also have to consider the contributions of his contemporaries in relation to his thought and how they have fared over time and space. If we employ this set of criteria, Hountondji remains vital to modern African thought. However, I think his importance lies beyond his critique of ethnophilosophy that oftentimes is overdrawn. It lies instead in his readings of African thinkers such as Anton-Wilhem Amo and Kwame Nkrumah and what their works and contributions accomplished in particular contexts. This is a point I will stress later on. Apart from his extensive metaphilosophical preoccupations, Hountondji also employs empirical instruments to define the boundaries and possibilities of African philosophy. He not only identifies what he understands to be African philosophy but also identifies the pioneers of the field. Part of his empirical strategy is bibliographical. For instance, he mentions authors and their works that have had an impact on modern African philosophy: The Rwandais abbot, Alexis Kagame, Archbishop André Makarakiza of Burundi, Antoine Mabona, a South African priest, Antoine de Padoue Rahajarizafy, a Jesuit priest of Malagasy, François-Marie Lufuluabo of the former Belgian Congo, Vincent Mulago also of the former Belgian Congo, Jean-Calvin Bahoken, the former Protestant clergyman of Cameroon, the Kenyan pastor, John Mbiti, the

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Nigerians, Adesanya and Jeremiah Omosade Awolalu, Alassane N’Daw from Senegal, Prosper Laleye, from the Republic of Benin, and so many others who contributed to the making of modern African philosophy (Hountondji, 1996, pp. 58–59). In retrospect, most of Yai’s charges seem insubstantial. Some quite sympathetic readings of his work includes: Hountondji outlines . . . criteria that if met, would give substance to African philosophy. The first criterion is a shift away from the metaphysical issues; for example, the meaning of life, human dignity, and the existence of God, that have infused ethnophilosophy and stifled genuine philosophical activity. (Jaya, 1999, p. 208) On the other hand, Owomoyela’s misgivings about the general criticisms of ethnophilosophy go beyond his reading of Hountondji. He claims, for instance, that Anglophone philosophers tend to be more receptive to traditional African religions than their Francophone counterparts (1987, p. 96). This claim is highly suspect. In their works, Hountondji and Valentin Yves Mudimbe demonstrate that Francophone Africa, with its strong traditions of colonial Catholicism, was at the forefront of philosophical deliberation on the continental level. Ethnophilosophy, as a discursive branch of African philosophy, gained its initial indigenous impetus, and counter-discourses, through the efforts of authors such as Kagame, Towa, Fabian Eboussi-Boulaga and Hountondji who are and were from the French-speaking parts of Africa. Most of the central texts of African philosophy that Mudimbe names are Francophone or have French authors: Tempels’ La philosophie Bantoue (Bantu Philosophy, 1945); Marcel Griaule’s Dieu d’eau: Ententiens avec Ogotemmeli (God of Water: Interviews with Ogotemmeli, 1948/1975); Leopold Sedar Senghor’s, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin et la politique africaine (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and African Politics, 1962); Eboussi-Boulaga’s “Le Bantu problématique” (“The Bantu Problématique,” 1968); Eboussi-Boulaga’s La Crise du Muntu. Authenticité africaine et philosophie (The Crisis of Muntu: African Authenticity and Philosophy, 1977); and Alfons Josef Smet’s, Histoire de la philosophie africaine contemporaine (History of Contemporary African Philosophy, 1980) (Mudimbe, 1991, pp. 52–53). Finally, Hountondji claims, “Kagame began the era of African philosophy stricto sensu [in a strict sense], that is, of the acceptance of responsibility for philosophical discourse by the Africans themselves” (2002, pp. 90–91). Consequently, both Yai and Owomoyela have little of enduring value to say of Hountondji’s work. This is not to say there are no shortcomings to be found. There are some. Hountondji’s second major book on African philosophy, The Struggle for Meaning, rehearses most of the arguments in African Philosophy: Myth and Reality in addition to providing the biographical, cultural, political, and intellectual contexts that formed the background of the second text. In terms of new major philosophical breakthroughs, one finds

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little to say about it. However, it is a crucial text since in many respects, it is consistent with his earlier book and since it has so much to say about the processes of intellectual conditioning that informed the work of one of the most influential and most consistent philosophical minds of modern Africa. Hountondji began by writing his doctoral dissertation on Edmund Husserl under the watchful eyes of Georges Canguilhem, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, and Louis Althusser, who were his teachers at Ecole Normale Superieure. He was fascinated by “Husserl’s effort to ‘purify the sign.’” First, he excluded from his concerns the indicative sign—a material and empirical sign that is neither discourse, nor part of discourse—to concentrate solely on expression. Next, he excluded from discourse itself those body movements and different gestures that involuntarily accompany speech and still derive from empirical indication, to focus on expression proper—on the linguistic which alone is the true bearer of meaning. Finally, he amputated the communicative dimension from language in which expression functions simultaneously as indices, to concentrate solely on the expression in “solitary mental life” (Hountondji, 2002, p. 54). More than two decades after his doctoral examination, Hountondji returns to Husserl this time (1995) for a doctorat d’etat at the Universite’ Cheik Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal. What influenced his return to Husserl after a lapse of about twenty-five years? Hountondji gives a few hints: any conclusion, provided at this precise stage of my thinking, would have seemed premature to me. I necessarily left the reader dissatisfied and even I had a feeling that I had interrupted myself midway through a sentence . . . . (2002, p. 72) It is as if Hountondji had to return to complete an unfinished sentence in both a metaphoric and literal sense. But what does this consummation mean in a philosophical sense? That is difficult to tell given his earlier reservations about continuing his research on Husserl with the ultimate aim of publishing his findings. After his doctoral dissertation defense in France, Houtondji decided not write for a foreign public or over the heads of his compatriots (ibid., pp. 72– 73). The fate of Amo, a philosopher from the former Gold Coast who lived and worked in eighteenth century Germany had indicated to him that an epistemic break was required. On Amo, he says: I considered it a failure that the work of this African philosopher could only be part, from beginning to end, of a non-African theoretical tradition, that it exclusively belonged to the history of Western scholarship. I concluded on the urgent need to put an end to the extraverted nature of all European-language discourse. (Ibid., p. 73)

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He concludes, “to publish on Husserl was not the obvious thing for an African academic” (ibid.). Yet, more than two decades later, he returns to Husserl as if it were a project he had to complete. Whether he completes it is uncertain. Instead, he merely retreads a well-known path; this maneuver can be seen as a strategy to revalidate his major philosophical trajectories to date. Husserl remains an abiding interest for him, but this long-standing preoccupation had to be matched and counteracted with the quest to create a non-Western theoretical practice. In view of this, his fascination for Husserl had to be held in check: I therefore had to work on the margins and, rather than plunge head-first as a narrow specialist on an author or a current of thought, to clear the field patiently, establish the legitimacy and the outlines of an intellectual project that was at once authentically African and authentically philosophical. (Ibid) He moves from a preoccupation with Husserl to reading Tempels, which entails the beginning of his critique of ethnophilosophy. He retains the view, “the critique of ethnophilosophy is still largely a Western affair, because the ethnophilosophy that denounces it is itself an invention of the West” (ibid., p. 79). Henceforth, his project would be to show “that ethnophilosophy had a more ancient history that was linked to the history of anthropology in general—that is, to the history of the Western gaze on so-called ‘primitive’ societies.” (ibid.). Olabiyi argued in his famous article (“The Theory and Practice in African Philosophy,” 1977) that speculative philosophers such as Hountondji ignored the issues of praxis in their theorizing. Hountondji, on his part, claims that theory has no usefulness for him unless it is linked to practice. In his words, “theory has meaning only if it is organized and subordinated to practice, that it derives its legitimacy—insofar as it is itself a form of practice—from its foundational role in relation to other practices” (2002, p. 85). In organizing his philosophical practice, he acknowledges his debts to Frantz Fanon for indicating the relations between the political and language and Aime Cesaire who he calls the “unrivaled awakener of consciences” (ibid., p. 87). However, there existed the problem of foundations. The inferiorization of the Black race by the histories and experiences of slavery and different forms of colonization—political, economic, and cultural—had the effect of depicting the African continent as a tabula rasa: The question of writing became unavoidable: to what extent could one conceive a history of African thought in the absence of a writing that would have enabled the different doctrines to situate themselves in relation to others. (Ibid., pp. 91–92)

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There was the urgent need to initiate, expand, and sustain traditions of philosophical writing in Africa. Hountondji recounts his role in accomplishing this through his participation in different initiatives that aimed to establish, and consolidate where necessary, modern traditions of African philosophy. The absence of theoretical traditions, before and after the dawn of political liberation, and universally recognizable philosophies of the self in Africa has been contentious issues of much theorizing. So the textual tabula rasa that Hountondji identifies as a crucial theoretical problem can be tied to deeper sociopsychological concerns and patterns. The problem has its origins in the events of slavery, colonization, and decolonization. On the level of individual subjectivities, there is the idea that through the processes of slavery, colonization, and apartheid, the African self has become alienated from itself (self-division). This separation is supposed to result in a loss of familiarity with the self, to the point that the subject, having become estranged from him- or herself, has been relegated to a lifeless form of identity (objecthood). Not only is the self no longer recognized by the Other; the self no longer recognizes itself. (Mbembe, 2002, p. 241) The trauma of the event of colonization affected the collective African psyche directly and this is a point that Hountondji does not stress. Instead, he concerns himself with the challenges of creating a philosophical tradition that is a preoccupation that has its own peculiar problems. The problem of creating an appropriate theoretical practice to deal with the multiple disorienting effects of the colonial encounter has been framed, “The effort to determine the conditions under which the African subject could attain full selfhood, become self-conscious, and be answerable to no one else soon encountered historicist thinking in two forms that led to a dead end. The first of these is what might be termed Afro-radicalism, with its baggage of instrumentalism and political opportunism. The second is the burden of metaphysics of difference” (ibid., p. 240). This reading of historicist thinking can be said to have acquired its first impulses and manifestations in African philosophical discourses in which a tradition of discursive radicalism arose out of the different nationalist liberation struggles as exemplified by the works of Nkrumah, Nyerere, and Cesaire. In this tradition, there is usually a reappropriation and spectralization of Marxist and socialist ideologies, on the one hand, and the multiplicity of tendencies and discourses that have been generated by theoretical validations and counter-discourses of ethnophilosophy on the other. The opposing divisions in historicist thinking have deep philosophical implications and perhaps also philosophical origins. However, this largely convenient theoretical dualism is more complex in the case of ethnophilosphy and its critiques and counterdiscourses since it is problematic to typify ethnophilosophy as a form of na-

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tivism and nothing else. Hountondji has pointed out on several occasions that ethnophilosophy is an invention of the West but was later adopted by Africans for instrumental reasons. Many strands and orientations characterize the problematic course of its gestation and development as a philosophical tendency; Western and African, Marxist and non-Marxist, Eurocentric and Afrocentric, Francophonic and Anglophonic, and others. Even Hontondji’s project does not address these multiple tendencies and their concrete manifestations to their fullest possibilities. In one of his many critiques of African forms of ethnophilosophy, Hountondji writes: The return to the real thus shatters into smithereens the founding myths of ethnophilosophy: the myth of primitive unanimity—the idea that in “primitive” societies, everyone is in agreement with everyone else— from which it is concluded that there could not possibly exist individual philosophies in such societies, but only belief-systems. In reality an unbiased reading of the existing intellectual production reveals something else. The African field is plural, like all fields, a virgin forest open to all possibilities, to all potentialities, a host to all contradictions and intellectual adventures like all other sites of scientific production. (2002, p. 107) In this way, he differentiates between European and African forms of ethnophilosophy and suggests ways in which to move beyond the second form. If the critique of ethnophilosphy is one of the most valuable and one of the most consistent contributions of Hountondji to the development of modern African philosophy, then his preoccupation with the structures and institutions of knowledge production in Africa and on the global level is equally worthy of attention. For instance, he has committed himself to critiquing a trend within ethnophilosophy to demonstrate: how scientific exclusion connects to political exclusion and how, . . . the double problem of Europe’s “civilizing mission,” and inversely of the “heightening of the soul” expected from Bantu cultures, is only meaningful as the “ideological problematic of triumphant imperialism.” (ibid., p. 103). This scenario lies at the heart of the European projects of ethnophilosophy that, as we ought to have noticed, are different from African projects. Hountondji explains “the exclusion practiced by the European scholar becomes, when it is taken over by the African intellectual, extraversion” (ibid.). To overcome this pitfall of the impasse of intellectual extraversion, there is the necessity to create “an autonomous space for reflection and theoretical discussion that is indissolubly philosophical and scientific” (ibid.). Hountond-

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ji gives greater resonance to his analyses in pointing out that the need to deghettoize African modes of intellectual production exists: Thought must be brought out of its Africanist ghetto by acknowledging its right to be occasionally interested in something other than African— for instance in Plato, in [Karl] Marx, in the theoretical heritage of Western civilization to assimilate and transcend it. (Ibid.) The problem of intellectual extraversion is one that provokes many useful insights from him. For instance, this is noticeable in his conceptualization of “distance” (Hountondji, 1983). According to him, “distance meant first of all geographical distance, the distance from which our scientific, economic, and political dependence is organized” (Hountondji, 2002, p. 232). On the concrete academic level, “distance” manifests in the following way: first and foremost, theory is elsewhere, in the sense of being physically distant. The best universities, the best equipped laboratories, the most authoritative scientific journals, the greatest libraries, and the most credible publishing houses are located in the industrialized countries. (Ibid., p. 233) In view of these kinds of conceptualizations, Olabiyi’s charge of excessive elitism on the part of Hountondji appears unwarranted. In addition Hountondji either draws from or adds to postcolonial theory with regard to his stance on postcolonial conditions of knowledge production which condemns the cashstrapped academic trapped in a postcolony into playing the role of a mere native informant for dominant knowledge producing systems based in the West. Hountondji’s views here echo those of Gayatri Chakravory Spivak who has done a great deal of work in this area. Hountondji’s disapproval of unanimism, one he shares with Appiah and Mudimbe, and which is embedded in his critique of African forms of ethnophilosophy, is also one of his central themes. It is a stance that rejects the urge to subsume African beliefs, perceptions, modes of being, and orders of production under one name. On the origins of the word, Hountondji writes: I borrowed the word “unanimism” from Jules Romains but used it in a different context to signify something different: to stigmatize both the illusion of unanimity in the reading of the intellectual history of a given culture, and the ideological exploitation of this illusion for the present and the future. The French writer had used the term, on the contrary, in a laudatory way. (Ibid., p. 132) Hountondji seeks to explode all theoretical ghettoes but sometimes he appears to be deliberately creating problems for himself. At one point, he states:

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African philosophy was first and foremost a European invention, the product of an intellectual history at the intersection of the most diverse disciplines, notably anthropology, the psychology of peoples, missiological theory, and a good many concerns. (Ibid., p. 124) It is not enough to make this kind of assertion and leave it at that. This is evidently an issue that requires far more exploration and elaboration. He sets immense goals for himself: I sought to demarginalize Africa, and to place it firmly at the center of its own history in a world that is henceforth plural; a world whose unity cannot be the result of annexation, or some kind of hegemonic integration, but of periodic renegotiation. (Ibid., p. 141) With equal lack of irony, it can be argued that the only kind of demarginalization that Hountondji has accomplished has been for himself. Being a major African philosophical figure, he is highly sought after within international circles, but it is not certain how this unquestioned commodification affects institutional structures of knowledge production in Africa. In addition, strategies for demarginalization in postcolonial regions require a continuous foregrounding and rethinking of the (post)colonial situation and the different categories and frames of perception to which it gives rise: colonizer and colonized, premodern and modern, private and public, the existential and conceptual inbetweenesses, the categories of race, sex, class, and gender, and a host of other variables. These are crucial issues for any serious project of demarginalization. Hountondji also replies to his many critics—Koffi Niamkey, Abdou Toure, Yai, Owomoyela, and others—in often uncomplimentary ways. In one such response, he writes, “one was clearly faced with a terrorist discourse, a discourse of intimidation whose aim was to frighten: a discourse that brandished the worst threats to achieve its end” (ibid., p. 168). He calls Yai “an irritated Africanist.” His attitude toward his critics who had contributed immensely to the dissemination of his thought is contradictory given his views that the African intellectual had to demonstrate, “that no doctrine, no form of thought was forbidden to him, that at the conceptual level, the freedom of the individual could not, in Africa any more than elsewhere, be restricted in advance” (ibid., p. 125). He constantly declares the wish to see “established in Africa an autonomous, theoretical debate, which would be the master of its problems and its themes rather than simply . . . being a distant appendage to Western theoretical debates” (ibid., p. 96). Again, the majority of his critics have, by critiquing his work, contributed to the broadening of the theoretical space he fought so much to get established. Politics also forms part of Hountondji’s concerns. Between 1991 and 1994, he held a ministerial position in the Republic of Benin that in some ways parallels Ernest Wamba dia Wamba’s move to join the military struggle

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of Congolese guerrilla fighters to remove Laurent Kabila from power in 1998. Hountondji’s flirtations and involvement with politics are less dangerous than Wamba’s but say much about the choices available to an intellectual in a postcolony and the existential peculiarities that result from the ceaseless conflict between the “private” and “public” domains in such a context. He makes a few remarks about the Democratic Republic of Congo which, though significant, require greater elaboration; “the ‘philosophy of authenticity,’ the state’s official doctrine, managed to reduce this identity to its most superficial and abjectively folkloristic level” (ibid., p. 112). These state-imposed attempts at identitiy construction, at regulating the infrastructure of consciousness were a ploy by Mobutism to consolidate its own myths of power and invincibility that had far more dramatic manifestations and consequences in everyday life. The torture, rape, pillage, and massacres that were commonplace under Mobutism and post-Mobutist forms of political contestation are issues Hountondji does not conceptualize, even as politics in most parts of Africa are being transformed to the “work of death” (Mbembe, 2003). The new forms of political contestation and the emergent technologies of domination in Africa require a new vocabulary and new modes of theorization as states are enfeebled or collapse under a multiplicity of pressures ranging from the usual local struggles for political power to adverse conditions brought about by neoliberal economic globalization. For instance, space, in its use and misuse, has given rise to an awareness of new forms of both statist and non-statist domination and aggression. In the so-called peripheries: the domestication of world time . . . takes place by domesticating space and putting it to different uses. When resources are put into circulation, the consequence is a disconnection between people and things that is more marked than it was in the past, the value of things generally surpassing that of people. That is one of the reasons why the resulting forms of violence have as their chief goal the physical destruction of people, including massacres of civilians, genocides, and various kinds of killing, and the primary exploitation of things. These forms of violence, of which war is only one aspect, contribute to the establishment of sovereignty outside, and are based on a confusion between power and fact, between public affairs and private government. (Mbembe, 2000b, p. 260) In The Struggle for Meaning, Hountondji’s remarks on politics in Africa have not advanced beyond how he conceptualizes it in his first book. So how productive has his critique of ethnophilosophy been? It has been critical in solidifying a new set of problems for African philosophers who wish to move beyond the founding problem of African philosophy that is: “Does it exist?” Ironically, much of his thought might have been impossible to accomplish without the existence of ethnophilosophy in both its Eurocentric and indigen-

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ous forms. Also, the critique of ethnophilosophy, which is largely a metaphilosophical undertaking, is caught up in the founding problem of African philosophy and its concomitant dead end. It is caught up in the same problem of origins. This problem is projected by the attempts to formulate definitional and taxonomic grids for African philosophy—ethnophilosophy, philosophic sagacity, nationalist-ideological philosophy and professional philosophy, (Bodunrin, 1981), and in related forms of African intellectual production such as the discourses of nativism, developmentalism, and Marxism which have been criticized as largely counterproductive (Mbembe, 2001b). Hountondji makes useful discoveries in evaluations of Amo and Nkrumah. For instance, his assessment of Nkrumah bears quite enduring insights: “the critical reading of Nkrumah’s development and of the social and political struggles in Ghana of the period did not aim solely at shedding light on the intricacies of the book. It proposed a method that is applicable, if needed, to other texts. The reinsertion of thought in the real movement of history should enhance both recognition of the specificity of works of speculative thought, and their relationship to the social, economic, and political context of different periods. It should finally found a pluralist vision of philosophy and African culture by sweeping away, once and for all, the unanimist prejudice and the myth of a society without history” (2002, p. 142). Those earlier critiques of these two African philosophical figures bypass the dead ends of the critique of ethnophilosophy and the founding problem of African philosophy. But we need more of them to expand the theoretical space of African philosophy. The metaphilosophical debates on ethnophilosophy were much too protracted. Appiah discovered a worthwhile path and so did Mudimbe in their separate and distinctive ways. Even Hountondji acknowledges this at several instances (ibid., p. 127). In his mature years, and perhaps also the declining days, of his career, Hountondji returns to his old philosophical concerns: the (re)discovery of Husserl with his largely Eurocentric situationality, and the familiar critique of ethnophilosophy and its inevitable problem of origins, leaving little between except a narrative of a fortunate and eventful intellectual itinerary.

Three AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF COLONIALISM AND CONTEMPORARY GLOBALIZATION 1. Introduction The work of John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff is no doubt unique in the field of African studies due to its learned multidisciplinarity, scope, depth, and startling freshness (1991; 1997; 2000a; 2000b; 2002). It is difficult to cover the grounds made by their corpus within a single chapter of a book and therefore this discussion does not intend to do that. On the other hand, I will explain their insights into the nature and ramifications of colonialism within the context of South Africa and I will demonstrate why these insights are unique within the field of African studies. The second part of the discussion will focus on their work on globalization and the relation(s) of parts of Africa to the millennial process. The purpose is to show that the colonial encounter with all its disruptive, reconstructive, and transformative processes can be read and constructed along some thematic lines. In this way, colonialism within the African context can be read into and away from the dynamics of global capitalism with a cogent theoretical and empirical point of view. It is possible to do this in a way that is not found in the work of Valentin Yves Mudimbe (1988) and (1991), Mahmood Mamdani (1996), Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1981, 1986, 1993), or Kwasi Wiredu (1996). The theorists cited above have all been concerned, in a profound manner, with the historical antecedents of the colonial encounter and its enduring contemporary effects, but the theoretical models they have developed have had quite different resonances from the post-structuralist tropes adopted by the Comaroffs. Their work offers us fresh ways of linking the event of colonialism with the current wave of global capitalism. This theoretical expanse and continuity allows us to read the African predicament away from and into a contemporary global system. Oftentimes, theoretical readings of the colonial encounter are decidedly rigid and discontinuous, precluding a satisfactory engagement of the African continent with the processes of contemporary globalization. The Comaroffs turn this state of affairs around and the African continent, even with its position of extreme marginality and continuing peripheralization, can be inserted in interesting ways into the age of virtuality. This is one of the views contained in their work. To understand the multifaceted dimensions of colonialism in the work of the Comaroffs, volumes I and II of their opus, Of Revelation and Revolution

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(1991; 1997), should prove sufficient. Their theoretical reflections of the processes of contemporary globalization span several essays in which their insights are complemented by the work of theorists such as Achille Mbembe and Arjun Appadurai. The coupling of processes of colonialism with those of contemporary globalization offers unexpectedly vast apertures for inventive theoretical reconstructions of the event of colonization beyond its immediate historical limits. Those processes transcend their limits in a way such that they continually reinvent the African postcolonial subject, not only as a product of historical colonialism, but as a participant in the millennial moment whose central features she has not actively created, but whose evolving and transformative dynamics she is always subverting, replacing, and displacing in local terms. For the African postcolonial subject, the history and event of colonialism remain key parameters for the apprehension and transcendence of the millenial moment. Also evident within this discursive framework is the theme of the agency of the postcolonial African subject. 2. Colonialism and the African Body The first volume of Of Revelation and Revolution begins with a sustained discourse on the colonization of consciousness and the consciousness of colonialism. It points out: colonizers everywhere try to gain control over the practices through which would-be subjects produce and reproduce the bases of their existence. No habit is too humble, no sign too insignificant to be implicated. And colonization always provokes struggles—albeit often tragically uneven ones—over power and meaning on the frontier of empire. (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991, p. 5) Appadurai (1996) explains how cricket, as an apparently harmless sport, became an elaborate instrument of the colonial enterprise and then subsequently became an indigenized medium of decolonization when the time came. This only underscores the idea that no habit or sign was too insignificant for the “civilizing” and transformative imperatives of colonial process. Although the Comaroffs claim that their study is “a historical anthropology of the Non-conformist mission to southern Tswana,” there are deep lessons to be drawn from their wide-ranging analyses of the effects of colonialism as a whole. Their study establishes fresh guidelines for constructing similar productive genealogies regarding the antecedents, nature, and continuing impact of different forms and events of colonialism. Usually theorists of colonialism are unduly schematic or disappointingly Manichean in their analyses. The Comaroffs compel us to discard our explanatory binarisms in favor of deeper and more nuanced modes of analyses. For

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instance, what was the background and general culture of the missionaries who sought to transform Tswana land and how did this affect their work and general outlook? What role did their involvement play in changing the socioeconomic landscape in traditional southern Tswana? Between these general questions are to be found several challenges that compel us to modify our strategies of theorization so as to invigorate our discursive practices. We are compelled to pay much closer attention to issues of race, class, sex, and gender within a constantly mobile conceptual landscape than we find in other studies concerned with the consciousness of colonization. Wa Thiong’o offers radical critiques of colonialism and truncated options of decolonization. Mamdani explains the civic and ethnic spaces the postcolonial subject has to negotiate to meet the demands of post-Englightenment modernity. On his part, Mudimbe (1988) focuses on the textual and disciplinary invention or otherization of the African colonial and postcolonial subject. All these approaches are valid and constitute part of a general effort to locate the agency of the postcolonial subject within a context of constantly mobile conceptual landscapes. We need to carry out our interrogations not only between different conceptual schemes but also beyond them. This is one of the most obvious lessons we derive from the Comaroffs. The Comaroffs as anthropologists concern themselves with how a selfchosen group of Britons elected to work upon and transform the “passive” Black people of southern Tswana. They write: the essence of colonization inheres less in political overrule than in seizing and transforming “others” by the very act of conceptualizing, inscribing, and interacting with them on terms not of their choosing; in making them into the pliant objects and silenced objects of our scripts and scenarios, in assuming the capacity to “represent” them, the active verb itself conflating politics and poetics. (1991, p. 15) Also of note is that African subjects and problems continue to be ghettoized. To de-ghettoize African concepts, we have to construct a universally acceptable vocabulary in theoretical terms. If this cannot be done, then we have to incorporate already existing theoretical models that have universal applicability into our “modes of self-writing” (See Mbembe, 2002). The Comaroffs suggest that there are many gains to be received from some of the more acute practices of critical postmodernism. What this ultimately implies is that established anthropologies of colonialism can be productively subverted in view of the latest theoretical developments to increase not only our layers of interpretation but also enrich our ways of understanding how the event of colonization is far more profound than we are often led to believe. We would profit to take cognizance of that fact, “while signs, social relations, and material practices may become unfixed, resisted, and recon-

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structed—history everywhere is actively made in a dialectic of order and disorder, consensus and contest” (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991, p. 18). Another concept they on which they focus, unsatisfactorily formulated by Antonio Gramsci, is “hegemony.” They note, “the construct remains underspecified and inadequately situated in its conceptual context” (ibid., p. 20). However, they transcend Gramsci’s conceptual shortcomings in two key ways. First, they reformulate the notion of hegemony which they define as: that order of signs and practices, relations and distinctions, images and epistemologies drawn from a historically situated cultural field—that come to be taken for granted as the natural and received shape of the world and everything that inhabits it. (Ibid., p. 23) Next, they establish the difference between hegemony and ideology: Whereas the first consists of constructs and conventions that have come to be shared and naturalized throughout a political community, the second is the expression and ultimately the possession of a particular social group, although it is widely peddled beyond. (ibid., p. 24) An understanding of hegemony and ideology is shown to be necessary to come to grips with the full implications of the consciousness of colonization and the colonized consciousness. Both are never completely mutually exclusive since hegemony as a construct is always unstable and vulnerable. Similarly, the colonizer and the colonized in spite of the forces of hegemony and ideology are conjoined in often startling ways to produce meaning and value. The colonized as such is not always the passive subject she is often presumed to be.Comaroff and Comaroff write: “native people” seek to plumb the depths of the colonizing process. They search for the coherence—and, sometimes, the deus ex machina— that lies behind its visible face. For the recently colonized, or those who feel the vibrations of the imperial presence just over the horizon, generally believe that there is something invisible, something profound, happening to them—and that their future may well depend on gaining control over its “magic.” (Ibid., pp. 31–32) Just as the Tswana world and politics were transformed in all sorts of ways by the colonial encounter, the world and politics of the colonialists did not remain the same. The Boers, of Dutch, German, and French descent, struggled with the British over the control of Tswana land. In more precise terms: the African communities along the frontier became the object of struggle among White colonists with designs on their land and labor and the

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Dutch Reformed Church had long opposed mission work among the slaves at the Cape. Not unexpectedly, then, the Nonconformists entered this troubled arena as marked men and were soon drawn into the thick of the dispute. For they, too, were competitors in the battle to gain control over Black populations. Fresh from an abolitionist climate, they tried to force the issue of ‘native’ social and legal rights upon the administration. (Ibid., p. 45) This scenario, in which different European nationalities participated in the colonial process, was quite unique within the South African context, since the colonialists of other African regions were usually solely Anglophonic, Francophonic, or Lusophonic. In Tswana land, the combustible mix of these different European nationalities must have contributed immensely to the strange brew that came to be known as apartheid. The Comaroffs also draw well-deserved attention to the sociopolitical background of the evangelists who defined the shape and trajectory of the civilizing mission. This background is not depicted with the aid of anthropological or historical texts alone. Classic English literature is employed as a credible source of information into the background of the crusading evangelists. Daniel Defoe was aware of the formation of missionary societies. Charlotte Brontë drew “deft strokes” of the missionary in fictive discourse and, it is pointed out, “[Charles] Dickens called upon all his powers of polemic and sarcasm to attack the very idea of missionary philanthropy, and he dismissed Africa as irredeemably unfit for civilization” (ibid., p. 51). This evinces the extent to which the public sphere in England was affected by the missionary effort at the time. It is emphasized that we need to be less partial regarding our analyses of the encounter between Christian missionaries and African peoples. As such anthropological studies also need to focus on the sociopolitical conditions that produced and directed European missionary activity. As noted, the literary context of the period is equally essential if we are to understand the many antecedents of colonialism in their continuous and discontinuous forms: [William] Wordsworth’s romantic idealism, Defoe’s gentle skepticism, and Smith’s editorial cynicism, [Robert] Southey’s polemic imperialism, Brontë’s fictional ambivalence, and Dickens’ populist criticism. (Ibid., p. 54) are all elements that provide crucial keys for understanding the impulses that propelled Nonconformist missionary activity. To accomplish analyses that have sufficient depth and subtlety, it is necessary to bear in mind, “the missionary encounter must be regarded as a twosided historical process; as a dialectic that takes into account the social and

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cultural endowments of, and the consequences for, all the actors— missionaries no less than Africans” (ibid., p. 54). In the past, most anthropological studies, historical texts, philosophical constructs, and postcolonial themes generally excluded these crucial elements. One of the vital features in the work of the Comaroffs is the ability to carry out this two-sided project of analyses. The typical missionary who sought to change his fortunes and those of Southern Tswana was often a product of the drastic socio-economic upheavals taking place in England. Accordingly, “the industrial revolution, then, forged the particular sociological context from which rose the clerical army of Nonconformist missionaries to the colonies” (ibid., p. 59). They were also the “dominated fraction of a dominant class” as propounded by Pierre Bourdieu. In more ways than one, Christianity itself became a site of intense political struggle. Consequently, it is essential to bear in mind, “from the moment that the church had, like other human agencies, to negotiate its position in the world, its absolutist spiritual dominion began to melt away” (ibid., p. 78). This weakening of the powers of the church in Britain in turn intensified the drive to appropriate and reconstitute the African world as part of the imperial logic of colonization. But the Kingdom of God in Tswana also paved the way for the Empire of Britain. Before the advent of the Empire of Britain in southern Tswana, it is important to note that the clergy at that time were caught up in a struggle to rise above the underclass and be counted among the bourgeoisie. They had little theological education and actively sought to recreate an idyll of British yeomanry within the apparently virgin stretches of African lands or wastelands as the case may be. The epistemological and psychological framework that defined the relationship between Britain and precolonial Southern Africa is described here: We witness the rise of a more and more elaborate model of the relationship of Europe to the “dark continent”: a relationship of both complementary opposition and inequality, in which the former stood to the latter as civilization to nature, savior to victim, actor to subject. It was a relationship whose very creation implied a historical imperative, a process of intervention through which wild would be cultivated, the suffering saved. (Ibid., p. 87) From this point on, the racist biases of the colonial enterprise begin to pile up. Mungo Park, an esteemed explorer regarded “Black men as nothing” (ibid., pp. 116–117). An entire epistemology within Eurocentric discourse was initiated to liken the African continent with a passive female body waiting to be penetrated by the heroic European “spirit of improvement” and adventure. Henry Lonis Gates Jr. contends in his essay, “‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference” that Francis

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Bacon, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel were all great Western intellectual racists (Gates, Jr., 1992, p. 73). The social epistemology regarding not only the mythological classification of the passive African body and landscape, but also the need for its urgent penetration, went along with quite a remarkable intellectual vocabulary. The Comaroffs add, “the vocabulary of dark continents with Black bodies and dim minds” became a prominent mode of signification (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991, p. 99). Georges Cuvier, a prestigious Swiss comparative anatomist, believed qualities such as “self-awareness and control were underdeveloped among non-Europeans” (ibid., p. 101). This kind of view contributed immensely to the social epistemology of the period in terms ascribing tropes of gender, subjection, and denigration to questions of race. For instance: in late eighteenth-century images of Africa, the feminization of the Black “other” was a potent trope of devaluation. The non-European was to be made as peripheral to the global axes of reason and production as women had become at home. Both were vital to the material and imaginative order of Europe. Yet both were deprived access to its highest values. (Ibid., p. 105) Having explored the different contours of colonialism from both sides of the racial divide, the Comaroffs begin to analyze the internal construction of southern Tswana. Prior to that, they had depicted in elaborate terms, “a colonialism, whose founding charter fixed contemporary images of nature and gender, race and reason, savagery and civility, into a compelling mythological mosaic” (ibid., p. 116). They also carry out an intensive exploration of the traditional Tswana before the intrusive excursion of colonialism. Of that supposedly stable traditional world they write: an incessant stream of political, social, and ritual acts reiterated the precedence of agnation over matrilaterality, of males over females, of pastoral production over cultivation, of the dictates of the public arena over those of the domestic sphere. (Ibid., p. 137) This extract captures the nature of traditional Tswana society. Within this broad context, we encounter different tropes of dominance and subjugation within and outside the domestic sphere, continual struggle for chief control of the realm, and its perpetual themes of power, legitimacy, centralization, and decentralization. Such were the sociopolitical tropes that were at play in Tswana society before the advent of the colonial encounter. The stage was set for the collision of two worlds, “one imperial and expansive, and the other local and defensive” (ibid., p. 171). Significant to note also is:

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POSTETHNOPHILOSOPHY despite the fact that the colonization of the Tswana began with polite ceremony rather than with a crashing military onslaught or a crippling economic invasion, there was, hidden in the politesse, oblique forewarning of later struggles. (Ibid.)

Those struggles had to do with control over local resources and human capital. Tswana society was not exactly the passive virgin territory entertained by the Eurocentric imagination and the social epistemology of colonialism. Within the apparently pacific undercurrents of the initial colonial encounter loomed the imperial figure of the evangelist: The evangelist was an intrusive, forceful figure within the chiefdom, a figure not subject, finally, to indigenous control. Not only did his knowledge and technology challenge their categories, conventions, and forms of creativity, but his commanding bearing also contested existing lines of authority. (Ibid., p. 196) Soon after being admitted into the chiefdom, the primary task of the evangelist became the transformation of the habits of the local people, to remove the detritus of a counter-productive culture and replace with it European technological reason. This decisive effort at cultural transformation on the part of the Nonconformist missionary was extended into the sphere of language, a sphere that has been the preoccupation of major theorists of decolonization such as wa Thiong’o and Wiredu. The Comaroffs describe this crucial aspect of the colonization process in the following terms: the colonization of language became an increasingly important feature of the process of symbolic domination at large. Indeed, Setswana was to carry the lasting imprint of Christian Europe in its lexicon. This was evident in the commandeering of everyday terms like moruti (teacher), which took on the connotation of “minister of the church,” and modumed (one who agrees), which came to imply “Christian believer”; unlike badimo [ancestors], these were subtle acts of appropriation rather than bold mistranslations and hence were potentially all the more invasive. The process was also marked by the use of Dutch and especially English loan-words for features of the emerging colonial universe. (Ibid., pp. 218–219) For the European linguistic scholar, the domestication and restructuring of Setswana was a welcome challenge. It meant reducing a “folk” tongue into some civilized, manageable form. In a similar vein, it should be noted “it was language . . . that provided the fixed categories through which an amorphous cultural landscape became subject to European control” (ibid., p. 222). In es-

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sence, the conquest of Setswana as dialect should be perceived as a vital part of what the Comaroffs have termed “the colonization of consciousness.” Embedded in the colonization of consciousness were processes of conversion. The Comaroffs explain: “Conversion,” the ultimate objective of the Nonconformists, was a process involving the removal of difference and distinction—a process whereby the Tswana were to be assimilated into the moral economy of civilized man, in which human worth was evaluated against the single currency of absolute truth. Over the long run, the process would not efface human differences but would extend the European system of distinction over Africa, drawing its peoples into a single scale of social, spiritual, and material inequality. (Ibid., pp. 244–245) After sufficient physical and cultural penetration of Tswana political psychology by the Nonconformists, the powers of the chiefs started to wane because their previous control over tributary wealth, cattle, and serfs became far less secure. European ways of seeing and doing things had ensured that the chiefs no longer had a monopoly of power and knowledge. In overturning the powers of chiefs, the Nonconformists often conflated secular power with religious authority that within the Tswana context was quite different from European doctrines of separation of power. In Tswana society, the secular and sacred domains were fused to form a cosmological totality just as in many traditional cultures where the modern distinction between the “private” and “public” realms hardly exists. As such, the Nonconformists’ intrusion in the realm of power and authority was to prove extremely disruptive because the chiefship, instead of being the sole focus of authority, became one of two contending powers. Once this had taken place it was left for the Boers to assume control not only over the lands but also human capital. The seizure was almost total and was brutal due to the quest of the Boerish masters to possess and transform the physical landscape. The Boers continued their cruel domination and exploitation of the indigenes of Bechuanaland that eventually led to the first Anglo Boer War between 1880 and 1881. Subsequently, the Gladstone administration in Great Britain decided to install a protectorate over Bechuanaland in 1884. In the end, the missionaries had done their part for the colonizing process, but ultimately, they were not equipped for the demands of realpolitik since it entailed a tough-minded secularism. A passage in the conclusion of the first volume of Of Revelation and Revolution captures the spirit of the colonial encounter in southern Tswana. This extract summarizes the impact and ambivalences of the missionary encounter: the meeting of these two worlds was driven by a logic that transcendded—shaped—the explicit intentions of the actors on either side. On the

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POSTETHNOPHILOSOPHY one hand, it was prefigured in the imperial thrust of Europe into the nonEuropean world, itself a product of the post-enlightenment imagination. The evangelists were not just bearers of a vocal Protestant ideology, nor merely the media of modernity. They were also the human vehicles of a hegemonic world view. In their long conversation with the Tswana, whether they knew it or not, they purveyed its axioms in everything they said and did. And yet despite this, they were themselves deeply affected by the encounter. (Ibid., p. 310)

The second volume of Of Revelation and Revolution continues the exploration of the conversation and cultural struggle between Africans and Europeans and how this process was also marked by a fluid context of hegemonic contestion, ideological squabble, and religious argument. This analysis of the second volume is shorter than the previous one since there is another aspect of the work of the Comaroffs to be examined—the South African postcolony in the age of contemporary globalization. It is interesting to note, “it was in the confrontation with non-Western societies that bourgeois Britons honed a sense of themselves as gendered, national citizens, as Godly, right-bearing individuals, and as agents of Western reason” (ibid., p. 6). The development of this line of thought further distinguishes the work of the Comaroffs from those of other theorists, especially African, who concern themselves with the colonial encounter. In epistemological terms, it relates to the same/other dynamic in which the colonizer constructs an otherized subjectivity as a result of constant contemplation of the notions of difference and distance. Undoubtedly, insights such as these are bound to change in a significant way current discursive approaches to the study of the colonial event and encounter. Still on the effects of the encounter, the Comaroffs state: The encounter between Nonconformists and the peoples of the South African interior, then, joined populations with divergent cultural perspectives, dissimilar intentions, dissonant notions of value—and distinctly unequal capacities to control the terms of the unfolding relations. Not surprisingly, their early exchanges initiated a protracted dialogue based in a part on misrecognition, in part on shared interests, in part on alliances across the lines that divided them. These parties acted as mirrors to and for each other, refracting and reifying new orders of social distinction and identity and struggling to master the hybrid language, the swirl of signs and objects that circulated among them. (Ibid., pp. 6–7) In the second volume of Of Revelation and Revolution, the contradictions of the colonial enterprise are unearthed on several levels and with many analytical registers. The Comaroffs argue, for instance, that the missionaries “to convert ‘natives’ into ‘civilized’ Christians, . . . had to make other into same,

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to erase the distinctions in which colonialism was founded” (ibid., p. 7). But part of what emerged from this cultural encounter, or argument as the case may be, was “the reality of a creolized African Christianity whose very vitality—often ascribed to the peculiarities of African ‘nature’—spoke to the Europeans of apostasy, even paganism” (ibid.). Nonetheless, the Nonconformists continually strove to impart the value of honest toil among the converts so as to create God’s kingdom on earth. For them, this was a substantial way to construct a moral and self-regulating civil society in Bechuanaland. This, in turn “opened the door to the liberal forces of Euro-modernism and industrial capitalism” (ibid., p. 9). But even Western-style capitalism was not without its contradictions and incoherences. The Comaroffs suggest: European capitalism was always less rationalized and homogenous than its own dominant ideology allowed; always more internally diverse, more localized in its forms, more influenced by moral and material considerations beyond its control—and, finally, wrought more by its confrontation with the rest of the world than by purely endogenous forces. Despite its own self-image and its affinity for rationalization, it was shot through with the features it projected on colonial others’ parochialism, syncretism, unreason, enchantment. (ibid., p. 11) These are the kinds of issues the Comaroffs tackle in the second volume of Of Revelation and Revolution. The construction of the colonial world was never a harmonious or strife-free endeavor. Instead, it involved complicated processes of construction that the colonial subject “contested, appropriated, joined, turned aside, acquiesced” (ibid., p. 9). In short, it was a world produced by “hybridity, mimesis, and cultural fusion.” Several of the theoretical tropes employed by the Comaroffs are postmodernist, but as we have noted within the course of this discussion, such an enriched discursive expanse definitely increases and improves our approaches to the analysis of the colonial encounter. In both volumes of Of Revelation and Revolution, they manage to develop several analytical models that can be employed in the study of different forms of colonialisms. For instance, we must always remember that the colonial encounter was never a one-sided affair with the rational, civilized, Christian Nonconformist missionary and adventurer on the one hand, and the passive, feminized colonial subject on the other. Further, in analyzing the colonial encounter, we must study in broad detail both the colonized and colonizer; their sociopolitical backgrounds, religious orientations, cultural affiliations, economic circumstances, and cosmological outlooks—all these factors go a long way in deepening our modes of analysis regarding the colonial encounter. The final section of this chapter, which is much briefer, deals with the work of the Comaroffs and the issue of globalization and the postcolony.

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POSTETHNOPHILOSOPHY 3. The Globalization of Colonization

The African postcolony in the age of contemporary globalization deserves to be studied and is being studied in interesting ways. The peripheralization caused by the decisive event of the colonial encounter bears some resemblance to the forms of sociopolitical, cultural, and economic dispossession created by the unparalleled expansion of global capitalism. In spite of the mechanics of exclusion created by the different manifestations of Western capital, non-Western societies are also inventing new modes of appropriation, rejection, and subversion. Again, tropes of hybridity and mimesis, and questions concerning cultural difference and the meaning of value, are being reformulated for greater relevance, as they should be. The entrenchment of all kinds of inequalities within the global system necessitates rethinking terms such as imperialism, domination, and subjection. Similarly, terms such as gender, class, and race have to be recontextualized within a far more complicated conceptual milieu. In some cases our conceptual tools are inadequate and have to be discarded, and in other instances we need to modify and complexify them for them to function in an increasingly complex universe. We need to examine how the twin processes of colonialism and global capitalism have continued to define the destiny of African territories and peoples. Again, this is an area in which the Comaroffs have done considerable work. Mbembe observes: Far from being simple products of colonialism, current boundaries thus reflect the rivalries, power relationships, and alliances that prevailed among the various imperial powers and between them and Africans through the centuries preceding colonization proper. (1999, p. 6) The collapse of state order within the “strategic ghetto that Africa has become in the aftermath of the Cold War” (ibid., p. 10) is an occurrence that most existing explanatory models cannot quite accommodate. To be sure, strange processes are taking place. Apart from chronic economic and institutional failure in the African continent, we also have to contend with the widespread debacle of democratization experiments which in turn has truncated in a fundamental way the project of modernization in most parts of the continent. Consequently, disturbing scenarios keep emerging. For example: Through the mediation of war and the collapse of projects of democratization, this interlacing of dynamics and temporalities leads to the “exit of the state.” It promotes the emergence of technologies of domination based in forms of private indirect government, and have as their function the constitution of new systems of property and new bases of social stratification. (Ibid.)

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The informalization of many African economies is also creating disconcerting scenarios of its own. In general, a tendency that can be described as “disinstitutionalization” is not only leading to the dissolution of the state, but is also causing the diffraction of society. To understand this process of disinstitutionalization it is imperative to note: new forms of territorialization and economies of scale, movements of money have accentuated fragmentation of national and regional economic spaces. Whereas some spaces were evincing an advanced demonetarization, and even experiencing a return to practices of bartering or self-subsistence, others were entering an economy based on the dollar, with unanticipated effects. (Mbembe, 2000a, p. 7) It would be interesting to give a glance, if only in passing, to the contributions of the Comaroffs regarding these disturbing events in the African postcolony. They point out that concepts such as citizenship, identity, national-building, heritage and patrimony are being recast even in the light of the most mundane events as processes of transnationalization and informalization continue to create ever newer instances of social stratification and fragmentation. A prolonged period of “debt, dependency, and structural maladjustment” has become the condition of existence coming after the political and economic realities of the dawn of classical colonialism and the after effects of decolonization. Since we inhabit a universe in which market forces have been set free in a context of extreme digitalization largely controlled by the West, Africans have to grapple with a situation where: geography is perforce being written; in which transnational identities, diasporas connections, ecological disasters, and the mobility of human populations challenge both the nature of sovereignty and the sovereignty of nature; in which ‘the network’ returns as the dominant metaphor of social connectedness; in which liberty is distilled to its postmodern ontological essence, the right to choose identities, subjectivities, commodities, sexualities, localities, and other forms of collective representation. (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2000a, p. 14) The same processes of disinstitutionalization, in addition to the diffraction of society referred to before, are considerably addressed by the Comaroffs. For instance, in relation to existence and conditions in the postcolony, they write: Almost everywhere in the postcolonial world, it seems, community and family are said to be widely at risk; the existence of “society” is under scrutiny, called ever more acutely into question as other kinds of attachment take precedent; regular, standardized blue collar jobs are

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At the institutional level, they observe: “the” state, an ever more polymorphous entity, is held, increasingly, to be in perpetual crisis, its power every more dispersed, its legitimacy tested by debt, disease, and poverty, its executive control repeatedly pushed to the limit and, most of all, its hyphenation—the articulation, that is, of the state to the nation, of the nation-state—everywhere under challenge. (Ibid.) These related developments can be construed as part of the outcome of globalization and the Comaroffs suggest an interesting theoretical possibility by relating, even if only obliquely, colonialism with the process. In the final analysis, they accomplish a theoretical consistency in explicating a historical anthropology of colonialism coupled with proffering revelatory insights about the processes—continuous and discontinuous—reconstitutions and dysfunctionalities yet unfolding within the postcolony. All this is accomplished while keeping in focus valuable questions of indeterminacy and contingency without the usual postmodernist excess. The matter of life and death has become unduly vulgarized and has assumed alarming proportions in Africa to allow for such an excess. In the final analysis, the Comaroffs establish the basis for a serious methodological reappraisal of different forms of colonialism, and in concentrating a significant amount of attention on the current wave of globalization they situate Africa in discursive centers that tend to be perpetually oppressive and permanently exclusionary. Not only is considerable attention devoted to the selection of discursive strategies suited for the network of presentations about Africa, they also deepened the modes of analysis by which those strategies may become enduring paradigms. The precolonial subject’s encounter with modernity begins when she becomes a colonial subject or when she is branded “native.” This apparently simple act has an infinite scope of implications. An entire universe of relations and epistemic constructs is thrown into disarray. A complete existential mode is reconstructed by coercion. Nonetheless, this coercive process is not a one-sided affair. Victim and victimizer are transformed in spite of the unequal relations. Hybridity and the eclectic ingredients of the newly evolving world are set into motion creating new satellites, languages, commodities, commonalities, differences, and beings. In short, a new mode of existence is set in motion. Neither victim nor victimizer, or colonizer nor colonized is free from its transformative currents, from the tyrannical forces at work and the equally vehement elements of résistance. The Comaroffs encourage us to rethink the

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possibilities inherent in these processes from a much larger backdrop than we had previously been accustomed. In that way, we will come to appreciate that processes of force and power, once let loose, mold and transform all beings, commodities, and values, in their way including perhaps also their long forgotten histories. Regardless whether the Comaroffs succeed in revealing the complexities inherent in colonized/colonizer relations, they are unfortunately silent about the complicities of anthropology in those relations. They also reveal little about how their private subjectivities interact with anthropology as a discipline. Anthropology does not have an innocent history in relation to the colonial encounter. It was a victor’s discourse and a suppressor of the voice of the victim. The Comaroffs neglect to deal with this compromised disciplinary history in a central manner.

Four THE FRONTIER OF INTERCULTURALITY In this chapter, I continue with explorations of present-day Africanist anthropology and the ways in which it engages with novel discursive frontiers. The two main strands of Africanist anthropology discussed in this study mark a departure from classical colonial anthropology and its intimate relations with ethnophilosophy. African philosophy, on the other hand, in transcending the problem of origins, gains a more organic discursive character. John L. and Jean Comaroff concentrate on the multiple and lingering effects of colonialism. They also address the unfolding dynamics of contemporary globalization using a welter of poststructuralist discursive approaches. Wim van Binsbergen’s approach is quite different. Through his personal interventions into concrete spheres of African life, he complicates the meanings of Africanity, subjectivity, place, and belonging. In addition, he questions the entire project of Africanist anthropology to make it more accountable (Osha, 2005). In this chapter, I explore van Binsbergen’s discursive approach to Africanist anthropology. Van Binsbergen’s huge book, at over 600 pages, Intercultural Encounters: African and Anthropological Lessons Towards a Philosophy of Interculturality (2003) is a bold, honest, and, to some extent, a quite disturbing work. An immediately striking feature is his relentless critique of his position as a North Atlantic subject, which, given its consistency, is quite remarkable. Again, this refers to the quality of honesty. Most academics—African and Africanist—concerned with Africa, tend to exclude this crucial angle. In this way, postmodernism can be employed in two devastating ways, though many other applications also exist. An uncritical version of postmodernism may not pay sufficient attention to the author’s antecedents and van Binsbergen’s selfcritique is sometimes embarrassingly frank. Also, a playful version of postmodernism may exempt the author from social responsibility. Van Binsbergen manages to produce a forceful text, one that may alienate the positivist mind, or structures of thought that tend toward positivism and scientism, but the text already anticipates this rejection, or denial, with a formidable intellectual arsenal. Let us concentrate for a moment on the unambiguous condition of van Binsbergen’s position. Many parts of his massive work address and capture its complexities in a compelling manner. There are continual themes that demonstrate the power of the events, turns, and upheavals that have influenced his life and work as an academic, such as the absence and even denial of ancestral antecedents, the unilateral identification with the women in his life, and hard struggles against the pain of personal rejection. His merciless self-critique is an

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extension of an equally unremitting critique of the entire project of anthropology in general and of Africanist anthropology in particular. So far, his wide-ranging anthropological explorations have led him through five different African contexts; rural Tunisia, urban Zambia, rural Zambia, rural Guinea-Bissau, and urban Botswana. During his first major anthropological project in Tunisia a crucial methodological dilemma, which he did not problematize at the time, came up: “problems of power, social change, the interplay between heterogeneous semantic, social and economic systems within one field of interaction, corporeality, self-reflection, and interculturality” (ibid., p. 64). Van Binsbergen’s relationship with anthropology tends to be unusually problematic, a love-hate relationship that has been mutually beneficial. Consider the view, “anthropology is more than just a sublimated form of sleuthing or espionage” (ibid., p. 73). The evocative association of anthropology with espionage is quite intriguing. He makes many other similarly evocative and intriguing associations in relation to the project(s) of anthropology. Van Binsbergen consistently points out that anthropology is, first and foremost, implicated by the project and discourses of imperialism. However, this conjuncture led to the emergence of African philosophy and has been both liberating and constraining. To redress its often disturbing historical antecedents, “anthropology, almost by definition, sides with the peripheral, the subaltern, the non-vocal, that which is excluded from sharing in the political and economic power in the modern world,” what has been termed an “anthropology of advocacy” is required to redeem some of the wrongs of the discipline’s complicities with imperial projects and colonization (ibid., p. 30). But the complicity of anthropology with colonization does not end with the moment of decolonization. The discipline is also implicated by the more important category of class. In this regard, van Binsbergen points out: anthropology could only rise, as a critical and comparative reflection, in a complex industrial society whose ideological tissue had been torn by secularization, capitalism, and the rise of new classes and political structures, in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries CE. (Ibid., p. 31) In the critique of anthropology’s complicity with forms of sociopolitical oppression, such as imperialism and colonization, van Binsbergen maintains a truly remarkable consistency: “North Atlantic anthropologists implicitly share in the privileges and the power of the Northern part of the world, as against the South” (ibid.). Anthropology represents “a form of intellectual appropriation and humiliation against which Africans in the nationalist era rightly protested” (ibid.). As a way of redressing the colonial imbalance, he advocates a radical deconstruction of the different biases and epistemologies of Africanist projects of anthropology.

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Presently, this project is not being conducted by North Atlantic Africanist anthropologists alone. Arcjie Mafeje, Ben Magubane, and Okot p’Bitek have all done crucial work in this regard. Van Binsbergen argues that a crucial strategy to reconstitute Africanist anthropology is to constantly acknowledge the significance and centrality of the process of interculturality as its logos. Interculturality transforms and diminishes its inherent violence as representation. In framing his anthropological project, van Binsbergen gained a great deal from studying the ideas of another anthropologist, Pierre-Philippe Rey. Rey’s work: encompasses, among many other things, intercontinental migrant labor to modern France, the history of capitalism in the North Atlantic region, Nambikwara kinship structures from South America, oriental despotism, and the history of historical materialist thought from pre-Marxism right through to [Louis] Althusser. (ibid., p. 76) In relation to Africa: Rey sees his work as the production of an anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois ideology, developing a theory of the class struggle of African peasants and proletarians, and thus providing the insights by which their struggle may be strengthened, may learn from earlier struggles, and may ultimately be successful. (Ibid., pp. 76–77) Van Binsbergen finds Rey’s work lacking in several ways in spite of its strenuous efforts to identify with sections of the agrarian underclass. He argues that the class location of North Atlantic anthropologists undermines the authenticity, force, and validity of their productions unless a relentless operation of auto-critique is instituted. Without this vital operation of self-critique, what they produce would be products of false consciousness. In the final examination, Rey’s analyses have grave shortcomings because (1) they are not sufficiently self-critical and (2) they do not offer a systematic critique of ideologies of North Atlantic capitalist modes of production. In articulating a different mode of anthropology, van Binsbergen’s critique of Rey’s work has proved crucial. Equally crucial are his readings of Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx. The presence and critique of marginality are also constants in van Binsbergen’s life and work. The figure of the leopard—sacred outsider—as a cosmological motif is quite instructive in several ways. Even van Binsbergen’s choice of an academic discipline speaks volumes about a marginal constant: an important factor in the relative intellectual isolation of the anthropological discipline has been the fact that that discipline has also attracted a remarkable number of outsiders: Jews, women, homosexuals, working-class children, . . . migrants, and moreover the spiritual heirs of the

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The discipline always provides space for individuals who need to work through different pressures and manifestations of wanderlust. In this regard, van Binsbergen’s earlier constitution of his anthropological project is in a way a reflection on its multiple disciplinary limits and on how the category of class undermines its capacities for adequate sociopolitical critique. Within the matrix of this ideological framework he begins his many anthropological experiments. Van Binsbergen’s academic experiments are avenues for understanding human cultures, gender relations, and the social and political systems of other peoples, and his cultural context. The Nkoya ethnic group of Zambia is quite significant in this regard. However, van Binsbergen often reminds us that the formal academic structure of textual production does not always capture all the different emotions, images, and psychological dimensions that emanate from his ethnographic excavations. To address this shortcoming he often turns to his talents as a poet and novelist. Van Binsbergen’s analysis of the sexual economy and gender relations among the Nkoya demonstrates the resilience and enduring qualities of some profound aspects of traditional cultures. On Nkoya husband and wife partnerships, van Binsbergen writes that after sexual intercourse, a Nkoya woman “kneels down before her partner and claps her hands respectfully, genuinely pleased that, of all women, this man has chosen her to manifest his manhood and donate his seed” (ibid., p. 108). She is also expected to “prepare and serve his food, then kneel before him and by hand clapping, invite him to come and eat it” (ibid.). The patriarchal mode of sociopolitical organization could not be more strongly reinforced. Yet, van Binsbergen affirms that women in Nkoya culture enjoy considerable agency and autonomy in their abilities to seek and find redress for forms of male oppression that they find unacceptable or unbearable. In the realm of sexuality, Nkoya sexual culture differed markedly from North Atlantic organizations of sexuality. Among the Nkoya: the recognition of male needs makes it normal that a woman, in cases of long periods of absence, looks for a temporary substitute for both her domestic domains and her sexual tasks: a “sister” or a friend, that will not represent a threat to her relationship with her husband. (Ibid., p. 112) Passages such as these may jar some sensibilities, but van Binsbergen’s selflacerating quest for ethnographic truth at many turns absolves him from charges of self-indulgence that ought to follow logically in contexts of this kind.

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A major event that had profound implications for both van Binsbergen’s personal and professional life was becoming a sangoma, or traditional healer. In becoming a sangoma, he writes: from an ancestor-less piece of flotsam of human history, I became a priest in an ancestral cult, in a decisive step not only of professional independence and Africanist exploration, but also of self-construction. (Ibid., p. 193) He tells us: sangomas are people who consider themselves, and who are considered by their extended environment, effective healers: as mediators between living people, on the one hand, and the ancestors, spirits and God (Mwali) on the other—in a general context where most bodily afflictions and other misfortunes of a psychological, social, and economic nature are interpreted in religious terms. (Ibid., p. 202) The transformation of van Binsbergen into a sangoma involved a long and elaborate process of trials and tribulations. In his demanding attempts to become a sangoma, van Binsbergen “was seeking existential transformation, fulfillment and redress, much more than anthropological data, across cultural and geographical boundaries” (ibid., p. 171). He also ascribes his absorbing quest to a deep and unfolding Lacanian conflict within him, in which he strives to fill the void left by the loss or severance of the mother. In this way, sangomahood becomes the balm of the unification of a splintered self; a therapeutic re-articulation of painful and strife-ridden subjectivity within the confines of a deeply felt spirituality. The trances and beauty of sangomahood are for van Binsbergen therapies of freedom in which catharsis and emotional healing are equally prominent. Not even the discouragement of gore could weaken his resolve: I had to join the other sangomas in drinking from the cut throat of my dying sacrificial goat; its gall was smeared onto my feet and its inflated gall bladder tied to a string for me to wear as a pendant. (Ibid., p. 173) Apart from the ecstacy of the trance and the beauty of the dance, van Binsbergen claims that sangomahood offers: a researcher a vast range of information, both of esoteric knowledge, and of social arrangements and bodily practices that may not be as accessible to the researcher who remains a relative outsider. (Ibid., p. 185)

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The quest for sangomahood entailed extremes of beauty and sacrifice. For Binsbergen, it began as a struggle to assuage and overcome what appeared to be an existential lack. Away from his biological home, he sought to escape the traumas of incest, violence, and despair. Becoming a sangoma opened up “the possibility of a non-egoistic, not primarily libido-driven, servitude to the suffering of others” which, in many ways, soothes and redeems his sense of primal loss and the violence of his past (ibid., pp. 230–231). He had to find or create another home which he sought first among the Nkoya of rural Zambia. Eventually, he became an adopted member of the royal family. Also, he succeeded in attaching himself to one of the lodges devoted to therapeutic religion in Francistown, Botswana. In different ways, van Binsbergen makes the suggestion that sangomahood heals psychic and existential schizophrenia—that it does not compound it as it may seem to do in many Western eyes. It is meant to release victims from the traumatisms of schizophrenic situations: The aim of sangoma divination is primarily therapeutic: to reinsert the client to what may be argued to be her or his place in the universe, so that the life force in principle available for that person but temporarily blocked by their drifting away from the proper place, can flow once more. (Ibid., p. 256) Sangoma divination reconstructed and healed van Binsbergen’s emotional and psychological landscape even before he fully became a sangoma: I had only joined the sangomas in search of therapy after my mental breakdown at the rejection I was experiencing from the local population at large, because the latter perceived me as another specimen of the local hereditary enemy, the Boers. (Ibid., p. 213) As such, sangomahood and its divinatory practices aim for the unity of diverse and often contradictory subjective and psychological resources. Being a Dutch professor, husband, and father, and an adoptive member of the Nkoya royal family with strong affective relationships with people in North and West Africa, extracts many demands and sacrifices. It pushes van Binsbergen to the frontiers of interculturality, to the extremes of multicultural forms of knowledge resources, different cultures, and modes of social organization and the multiple contradictory impulses that they attract. Becoming a sangoma is a crucial way of dealing with a multiplicity of intercultural contexts, forms of communication, and orders of knowledge. Perhaps in having so many orders of knowledge at his disposal, van Binsbergen is likely to be a better sangoma than many of his African co-practitioners. He is knowledgeable about other divinatory systems such as Arabic geomantic divination, the New Age intellectual movement, I Ching, runic divination,

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tarot, the Zulu bones oracle, Native American varieties, Ifa divination, and astrology. Undoubtedly, easy familiarity with this variety of divinatory systems is likely to enrich his practice of sangomahood. Even more important is van Binsbergen’s employment of the Internet and the new information technologies to disseminate knowledge about his practice and the general nature of the divinatory system, which by his adoption he promotes. His exact words: gradually a global practice emerged, where I would no longer meet my patients in person, but they—invariably total strangers to me—would contact me via an electronic intake form on my website, and they would subsequently receive via email the outcome of the session I would conduct in their absence. (Ibid., p. 236) By his cultivation and assiduous application of postmodern information technologies sangomahood has assumed a truly global format. The mix of the biographical and the strictly academic produces quite an interesting architecture of the text. This, I think, pushes the text to the borders of a manageable trangressivity, definitely not the kind you find with compulsive and aggressive postmodernism which, after all is said and done, is almost a requirement in contemporary textuality. The interrogation of the boundaries of autobiographical reflection and academic writing is another quite interesting feature of van Binsbergen’s text. He claims to be an Afrocentrist and on the level of the sheer volume of his productions, this claim ought to be taken seriously (ibid., p. 432). In interrogating the veracity of this claim, the following texts deserve careful study: Black Athena: Ten Years After (van Binsbergen and Bernal, 1997), which has been reissued as Black Athena: Alive (van Binsbergen, 1999), and which is a sustained analysis of Martin Bernal’s work. Other researches in different stages of completion, which demonstrate his ideological leanings on the question of Afrocentricity include: “Global Bee Flight: Sub-Saharan Africa, Ancient Egypt, and the World—Beyond the Black Athena” (2004); “Transregional and Historical Connections of Four-Tablet Divination in Southern Africa” (1996); Cupmarks, Stellar Maps, and Mankala Board Games: An Archaeoastronomical, Africanist Excursion into Palaeolithic World Views (with Jean-Pierre Lacroix, 2000); and finally, “The Continuity of African and Eurasian Mythologies: General Theoretical Models, and Details and Comparative Discussion of the Case of Nkoya Mythology from Zambia, South Central Africa” (2008). Van Binsgbergen’s focus on the issue of integrity raises many personal issues. He defines integrity as “a person’s successful endeavor to create and maintain consistency between his behavior, on the one hand, and the norms and values to which he is publicly committed, on the other” (2003, p. 200). Again one is compelled to return to the question of honesty and its role in

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structuring intellectual and biographical trajectories. Most academics clothe their formulations with a veneer of objectivity which we, the readers, and they themselves, often take for granted. As we know, this easily breeds mediocrity and kills originality. His philosophico-anthropological project and intercultural encounter(s) rediscover the human subject—including author and reader, participant and observer, and priest and patient—and explode the myth of unhistoricized, unproblematized objectivity. They also succeed in producing a highly satisfying order of knowledge. In addition, his project is arguably a liminal, transgressive order of knowledge that is in no way fragmentary. Instead, it is an order that, in the final analysis, blends a form of classical scholarship with some of the more endearing virtues of high modernism. The wide-ranging and ambitious scope of van Binsbergen’s work is likely to invite varying degrees of conflict that academics such as Erin H. Kimmerle and Ineke van Wetering, whose works fall within the European context, had with his earlier work. Perhaps it would not be out place to expect more of this kind of conflict. A central theoretical quest in the text is the Foucauldian thesis and problématique (the art of formulating a problem) of epistemic regimes, orders of knowledge and their modes of constitution, and others. I sympathize with van Binsbergen’s constant reframing of this ever-present problématique, the status of the other and her place in etic anthropological frameworks. Or in crude Foucauldian terms, the hapless subject caught in the inexorable power and knowledge nexus. The typical North Atlantic academic enterprise or industrial orientation tends to appropriate all forms of knowledge, Western and non-Western, for instant and constant commodification. As a North Atlantic subject and author, van Binsbergen can hardly avoid the implications of this reality. But again, being an African by choice, and a diviner-priest as well, he is more aware in this particular context of the violences of ethnographic, epistemological and anthropological projects pursued by the privileged North Atlantic subject on the subaltern other. Van Binsbergen has emerged from a complex of elemental conflicts— position and subjectivity, and academic and textual, including the tensions between modernism and postmodernism and different orders of knowledge— a subject as conflictual as ever but one who has not chosen the path of superficial or uncritical reconciliation. Instead he has established a hard-won region of resolution. Reconciliation, which is a significant theme for him, can be interpreted in several ways. Reconciliation, within the psychological field, definitely has many upheavals. Reconciliation in a more explicit sense by which I refer to the more mundane manifestations of subjectivity, or in van Binsbergen’s terms, as a North Atlantic academic on the one hand, and a sangoma on the other. He graphically depicts the fields of conflict to which both vocations give rise and the frustrations through which they mark him. It is not surprising then that reconciliation for him is such a vital theme. In this way,

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he enables us to remember not only how we choose our themes, but more importantly in this case, how our themes choose us. The analysis of reconciliation is quite interesting for generally avoiding the dead end of developmentalism and functionalist social science. In many ways, van Binsbergen argues that reconciliation in many African contexts is a social technology of conflict management and good private and public relations. He returns to the realm of religion and other forms of theological humanism and this approach undoubtedly creates a welter of unexpected nuances. He explains: reconciliation is an essential aspect of all human relationships, both in primary human relations based on face-to-face interaction, and on group relationships of a political, religious, ethnic nature that encompass a large number of people. (2003, p. 350) Because of the severe limitations of the paradigm of structural functionalism in dealing with some of the more fundamental problems of conflict resolution, van Binsbergen calls for a new “anthropology of reconciliation” (van Binsbergen, 2003, p. 351). There exists a paralyzing disconnect between social scientific discourses and approaches to reconciliation and established theological paradigms. A reproblematization of this conceptual space, van Binsbergen argues, is necessary. Reconciliation, we are informed, “is a creative social act of rearrangement and reinterpretation.” In addition, it is “the transformation of conflict” (2003, p. 352). This realization is often ignored by the paradigm of structural functionalism. One of the excesses of the paradigm is that it does not recognize, “social systems do not work in the same way as the axiomatic systems of symbolic logic and mathematics: it is common for social systems, as it is for biological systems, to arrive at more or less the same point from different starting points, along different routes, and to invest that point with the conflicting tendencies specific to the various points of departure” (ibid., p. 357). As events in post-apartheid South Africa demonstrate, both within and outside the deliberations of the Truth and Reconcilation Commission, the collective task to discover a consensual archive that addresses in a balanced way the horrors of apartheid has proved to be exceedingly problematic. As such, reconciliation has become a fervid site for competing ideologies and meanings. The current paradigm of reconciliation does not take into full cognizance the diverse complexities of social life. On the ethical and political complexities of reconciliation, Jacques Derrida explains: An authentic reconciliation, from, let’s say, a practical compromise, then, this authentic reconciliation would be closer to justice than the compromise. In the same way, if you want to distinguish between— that’s a classical distinction—between peace and amnesty or armistice

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POSTETHNOPHILOSOPHY or cease-fire. And the amnesty is not simply an act of justice. It’s something else. Now, as you know, when you make peace—and it is difficult to dissociate peace from authentic reconciliation—when you make peace, you simply imply the promise of eternal peace. And you can’t make this point too strongly—in the very concept of peace you imply that the war will never start again. So, what you call the eternal peace is not simply a peace to which you add the predicate eternal. No, eternity is included in the very concept of peace, because if you make peace without promising you will never resume war, it’s not a peace, it’s a ceasefire. It’s an act of war. It’s just a suspension of aggressivity. So, the same would be true for reconciliation. If you reconcile just in order to go on doing business and surviving and so on, it has nothing to do with the promise of perpetual peace, then this could require something closer to justice. So, it depends on the way you interpret reconciliation. And as you know, in the common language, some people, when they say reconciliation, they mean something very practical, easy, empirical, provisional, and others think precisely of the promise of indefinite friendship and peace. And justice would be on that side. Now again, once you have distinguished these two poles of concept, these two concepts, you have also to articulate them. They are absolutely heterogeneous to one another, and nevertheless our responsibility is to make justice more effective. That’s the ethical and political responsibility (2002, p. 76).

Derrida raises a noteworthy point about how reconciliation is often understood within the Western context and he also concedes that there would be some non-Western conceptions—in this case, African—of reconciliation, forgiveness, and justice that need to be addressed. An important conceptual linkage is made when van Binsbergen rereads the South African concept of ubuntu as a consciousness of reconciliation. In general terms, ubuntu means “being human, humanity, the act of being human” (van Binsbergen, 2003, p. 370). Within the post-apartheid dispensation, ubuntu is being reconfigured as an ideology of conflict management and reconciliation. The lingering cartographies of racism are seen and felt in the different forms of inequalities that the event and trauma of apartheid created. Disaffection in post-apartheid South Africa is high because of huge unemployment rates which compound the problem of crime and urban terror, the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, and what may be termed the general zombification of the underclass. This scenario of social discontent should be juxtaposed with the impact of the rise of new Black elites, ideologies of cosmopolitanism, and images of postmodern consumption. Given the complex nature of the sociopolitical problems, ubuntu—in spite of the common misinterpretations of its history—is being reconceptualized as an ideology of conflict resolution and social healing.

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We must be aware that the concept of ubuntu is not quite different from other ideologies of Blackness such as Négritude, Zambian humanism, or ujaama which are all reactions of Black agency to different forms of structural and epochal oppression. Employing Valentin Yves Mudimbe’s terms, ubuntu can be regarded as the liberation of difference within the uneasy and problematic context of de-apartheidization. Mudimbe’s term for such an epistemological maneuver, the liberation of Black difference by a revisitation and a romanticization of the past, is “retrodiction.” But the concept of ubuntu can also become over celebrated. There is already an ubuntu industry in existence that has led to its unfortunate industrialization. The major drawback of the concept is its lack of “explicit and systematic methodological and empirical procedures” and it is being “driven by academic philosophers’ and management consultants’ intuitive linguistic analyses and childhood reminiscences” (ibid., p. 447). To be sure, a philosophy of sociopolitical healing is necessary in a context such as South Africa, but the search to discover and institute such a philosophy of consciousness must also include the struggle against its possible industrialization. The greatest theoretical danger facing the concept of ubuntu is explained: Use of this term tempts us to deny all other possibilities of identification between South African actors (fellow citizens of the same state, fellow inhabitants of the same local space) except at the most abstract, most comprehensive level of humankind as a whole: as fellow human beings, (Ibid., p. 450) So in addition to the real danger of industrialization, there are also the dangers and excesses of abstraction with which to contend. The critique of globalization has also been one of van Binsbergen’s preoccupations. He argues that the concept remains problematic and inadequately theorized and, “the silly cliches of globalization, such as jeans, Coca Cola and the McDonald hamburger . . . have gained an absolutely metalocal distribution” (ibid., p. 405). Part of the weakness of its conceptualization may derive from the idea that philosophers until quite recently paid scant attention to it. Even Richard Rorty’s categorization appears both lame and problematic. According to van Binsbergen, globalization is better conceptualized under the following aspects: proto-globalization, the panic of space, the panic of time, the panic of language, rebellion against older inequalities, the new object, the virtualization of experience, the new inequality, and finally the new body (ibid., p. 377). In relation to Africa, van Binsbergen poses several crucial questions about the new information order:

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POSTETHNOPHILOSOPHY Does ICT in Africa lead to creative and liberating cultural appropriation by Africans? Does it lead to the annihilation of the African cultural heritage? Or do both propositions apply somehow? Is the computer in Africa to be taken for granted or does it remain an alien element? (Ibid., p. 398).

Ultimately, van Binsbergen argues that the new information technologies may prove to be beneficial for projects of liberation in Africa. He makes an intriguing claim that the text, the book, due to its rigid formalism, is antithetical to social life in Africa, which on the contrary, is marked by a considerable degree of informalization of different levels of social, political, and cultural life, and by an apparently unstructured inventiveness. The age of computer technology, on the other hand, is characterized by the emergence of the network which in its rapidities and virtualities undermine the slower formalisms of the age of the book: for as long as the book remained the norm, and for as long as the forms of communication associated with the book predominated, Africa with its un-booklike response self-evidently lagged behind in ways that it would never be able to make up for. It is not the computer in itself which constitutes an assault on the formal and the linear in information, and puts an end to the book as the gold standard. Rather, such a revolution is being prompted by the ramifying, rhizomatic forms in which information is being presented and may be managed. (Ibid., p. 424) This is undoubtedly a quite useful insight. On a different level, I would claim that van Binsbergen has lived through his vulnerabilities, insecurities, and disappointments with astounding honesty—for me a key quality of his work. His lot as an outsider—construed in a variety of contexts including class, professional, and racial—has been transformed into a personal and professional struggle of immense value, and a struggle in the broadest sense of the word. The analysis of the leopard as a cosmological and existential motif and reality is quite convincing and well researched. In a way, the leopard becomes doubly endearing in representing the Sacred Outsider and all the personas associated with it: diviner-priests, traditional leaders, and all kinds of solitary spiritual travelers. The Nkoya of Zambia know the leopard as Mwendanjangula: a hunter on his solitary journey through the deep and dense savannah forest may meet him, and if he is the first to greet, may receive great material and healing powers, but if Mwendanjangula greets the hunter first, then the latter may be stricken with madness. (Ibid., p. 197) The figure of the leopard is eternally transgressive and controversial. In van Binsbergen’s handling, divination, mystery, and the underworld become in-

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explicably attractive. Even an unadventurous academic cannot fail to be impressed by the scholastic atmosphere that surrounds van Binsbergen’s discussion of these esoteric themes; references to Asia, Europe, and ancient Egypt are made within an extensive discursive space. At this point, the text reassembles itself on another discursive register, one that broadens its already impressive history and marks the rest of the complexion of the text with other possibilities. Those possibilities need to be discussed seriously. However, this is not the place to do so. In the same manner, in structural terms, there are several levels of tension in the text. For instance, the entire textual architecture has a Kantian solemnity, a well-deserved authority that would tend to undermine postmodern notions of play, difference, enjoyment [jouissance], and others. However, it incorporates other fields of tension—the continuous problematization of the status of the knowing and observing subject, the unabashed unmasking of the author-function and its hidden motives, and the analyses of apparently contradictory orders of knowledge or canons of rationality, such as esoteric against conventional academic discourse—within the same conceptual environs, thereby creating a multiplicity of discursive registers. The architecture of the text and the industry of discourse to which it might give rise is an issue one has to examine in much greater depth and with a great many details. Let us turn to more concrete if more mundane issues. Van Binsbergen’s treatment of reconciliation is essential for centers of conflict resolution in Africa and approaches to conflict management in the continent. To be precise, his general treatment of reconciliation has a broad visceral appeal, which is absent in positivist social science approaches. For instance, one is aware of the work being done by some conflict resolution centers in Nigeria and this work mostly appears to be unrealistically technicist, a dry impractical assortment of jargon meant only for the developmentalist industry that van Binsbergen quite rightly criticizes in a dissimilar, if not totally unconnected, context. In this instance, one refers to his discussion of the Kazanga Association in rural Zambia, which illustrates how the global developmentalist industry contributes to the milking of the rural poor through a combination of the activities of bureaucrats of the industry itself and local elites. On another level, I find van Binsbergen’s approach to ethnicity especially interesting in relation to the contributions of many other Africanist scholars and their obsolete views on culture, made so by his unmasking. But more importantly, many political scientists have a quite mutilated and sterile notion of ethnicity. Van Binsbergen’s approach, with its avoidance of disconnected jargon—which in many ways parallels and complements his analyses of some ideologies of reconciliation—has immense potential for fertilizing the field. Also, his analyses of power structures, the political elites, and political institutions in postcolonial Africa are convincing and plausible. These analyses are quite responsive to the historical transformations governing the trajec-

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tories of power. In addition, van Binsbergen’s explanation of informalization and its influence on social life in Africa makes much sense. On the whole, the chapters of the text are an apt and comprehensive survey of van Binsbergen’s quite eventful, challenging, and productive intellectual itinerary to date. His intellectual itinerary on the whole has been one that involved the discovery of the intercultural path without his knowing so until he had become established in his career. An admirable case is made for intercultural philosophy using a mode of discourse that involves anthropology, ethnography, philosophy, and history. Unquestionably, this is the beginning of an uneasy but extremely challenging sub-discipline. The critique of Africa and African ethnicities, anthropological canons, and philosophical methods provides the basis for another phase of African intellectual reflection. This is not a work informed by flashes of youthful insight. It is the kind of work that can only be produced by many years of immersion in different fields of intellection and this is demonstrated at several levels. Its robust multidisciplinarity is also at all times evident. Through the text, it is possible to locate different tendencies in contemporary anthropology, postmodernist anthropology a la the Comaroffs, anthropology generally, and its slow interpeneration by other cutting-edge discourses, the genius of Mudimbe, the lapses of African political theory, the inadequacies of theoretical paradigms of conflict resolution and theories of ethnicity, the isolation and possible demise of each discipline, and the rebirth of the disciplines, such as anthropology, philosophy, and sociology, at the combustible crossroads of globalization to which we are ineluctably drawn and by which either we pursue our destruction or our redemption. Both attempts would seem to be the case at most times. Just as van Binsbergen’s intellectual itinerary is for the most part an excruciating quest for diverse truths, place, and belonging, it is also a relentless critique and an undermining of the assumed subjectivities of being and the received unities of identity. The work is in part a reflection on the traumatisms of inadequacy, incompleteness, alienation, and insecurity, and how they are overcome by the sheer force of identification, and by the power of sacrifice, which in turn gain cultural syncretisms as a means to sociocultural healing. The act of approaching and conquering the intercultural frontier has entailed a tremendous amount of personal and professional sacrifice and different kinds of effort. Ironically, the establishment of a rigorous practice of intercultural hermeneutics in contemporary times was largely accomplished through the efforts of a German Indian-born philosopher, Mall, who eventually abandoned the rich Indian philosophical heritage to learn and reinforce the German tradition. He spurned the spirit of interculturality for a reversed ethnocentricism which by a Fanonian mode of psychoanalysis would make quite interesting reading. Van Binsbergen, on the other hand, discovers that a philosophy of interculturality is only possible through sacrificial acts of continual cultural transgression and a ceaseless respect for the divisions within and amongst cultures.

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Interculturality is perhaps better served by an immersion in diverse cultures, different disciplines, and modes of activity as van Binsbergen’s professional affiliations demonstrate: poet, positivist anthropological researcher, Marxist, sangoma, distinguished professor, and finally theorist of interculturality.

Five AN ETHIC OF CULTURE AND MEMORY After having distinguished himself as a formidable literary artist, Wole Soyinka, over a considerable period, has applied himself—although not exclusively—to political commentary. Consequently, he has become one of Africa’s most visible public intellectuals. Commitment a la Jean-Paul Sartre is often deemed a necessity within the African continent because of the continuing entrenchment of underdevelopment, or the development of underdevelopment, the crises of different modes of politics, and the structural disequilibria in the economic field which the continent suffers. As Nadine Gordimer avers, the artist in Africa must not only be committed, but must make an art and if possible a science of commitment. Soyinka’s personal and intellectual trajectory is finely attuned to this postulate. Critics of Soyinka, such as Chinweizu Ibekwe, Jamie Onwuchekwa, and Ihechukwu Madubuike in Towards the Decolonization of African Literature, give an extremely parochial reading of Soyinka’s political value and relevance. Their charge that Soyinka practices art for art’s sake, in retrospect and in the final analysis, turns out to be an exercise in conceptual banalization and ill-intentioned journalism. Instead, I argue that Soyinka’s art, in addition to being enduring, has transformed the art and act of commitment into something akin to a pseudoscience. One of his recent brushes with Nigerian authorities occurred on 15 May 2004, when he, along with other pro-democracy activists such Beko Ransome-Kuti, Gani Fawehinmi (both now deceased), and Femi Falana, were sprayed with tear gas, molested, and arrested for organizing a rally to canvas for good democratic governance, federalism, and a sovereign national conference. In terms of lived experience, in terms of consistently engaging the public sphere, and then in terms of his value as a creative agent, we continually have to discover new parameters by which to evaluate his work. By extension, we must constantly reexamine his formulations—theoretical and pseudo-theoretical—on the nature of contemporary politics in Nigeria in particular and Africa in general. For enterprising scholars, this should prove to be a worthwhile engagement because of the consistency and resilience by which he articulates his views on the apparently unending dimensions of the African political crises. There has been a growing strand of Pan-Africanism in Soyinka’s thought lately. Perhaps this point requires some clarification. Pan-Africanism has always been present in his thought. Before the emergence of the technologically-driven information revolution, the Pan-Africanist ideology inherent in his worldviews appeared to be splintered by the realities and setbacks of undertechnologization, by the expansiveness of space, the invincibility of time, and the lack of projection all these factors, engendered by the pre-digital age, gen-

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erate. Soyinka battled with these adverse forces, but his successes in those battles only became glaringly evident with his commodification as a public intellectual, his skillful cultivation of diverse publics, his understanding of the contemporary dynamics of postmodern iconization, and the global impact of his intellectual labor. His unremitting critique of the local through the lens of globality mocks conventional assumptions of both the local and the global. It is all about knowing the fluidities and ruptures within and around the local and the global. It is all about a new way of reading locale, context, and content. It is about a new awareness of the politics of identity, representation, place, and belonging in a world buffeted by a bewildering welter of fundamentalisms on the one hand, and the alluring promises of multiculturalism on the other. Soyinka’s unquestionably indefatigable critique of the African continent in general and Nigerian society in particular, is increasingly becoming a critique of whatever is left or possible for universal human values. At the limits of history, he has become a rare kind of humanist who bypasses conventional traditions and approaches; instead, he employs an eclectic blend of vocabularies. A way of examining how he universalizes his critique of humanity is to address the manner in which he appropriates the contemporary discourse on truth and reconciliation, not as mere political metaphors, but as fundamental concepts for global sociopolitical engineering. Within a global frame of reference, Soyinka addresses the imperatives of truth and reconciliation in South Africa, which he calls a: “zone of state engendered anomie” just as they apply to Argentina, Chile, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Somalia, Liberia, and Nigeria. Soyinka’s thesis in this regard is, “one of the pillars on which a durable society must be founded—Responsibility—and ultimately—Justice” (1999a, pp. 26–27). He reiterates his famous maxim, “justice constitutes the first condition of humanity” (ibid., p. 31). History remains central to Soyinka’s concerns, just as were the travails of the late Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, the Nigerian businessman who died struggling for the recognition of his presidential mandate in 1998. On the historic import of the Atlantic slave trade, Soyinka argues: The Atlantic slave trade remains an inescapable critique of European humanism. In a different context, I have railed against the thesis that it was the Jewish Holocaust that placed the first question mark on all claims of European humanism—from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment to the present-day multicultural orientation. Insistence on that thesis, we must continue to maintain, merely provides further proof that the European mind has yet to come into full cognition of the African world as an equal sector of a universal humanity, for, if it had, its historic recollection would have placed the failure of European humanism centuries earlier—and that would be at the very inception of the Atlantic slave trade. (Ibid., pp. 38–39)

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Soyinka goes on to remind us, “much of the division of Africa owed much more to a case of brandy and a box of cigars than to any intrinsic claims of what the boundaries enclosed” (ibid., p. 40). He is not merely being dismissive here. Instead, he is drawing attention to colonial forms of arbitrary territoriality and the destructiveness they have caused in post-coloniality. The Organization of African Unity is blamed because it “formally consecrated this act of arrogant aggression” (ibid.). Undoubtedly, the Atlantic slave trade and the subsequent colonization of Africa further entrenched the master and slave relationship between the continent and the West. In formulating a conception of humanism, Soyinka evokes the trauma caused by this relationship. However, he constantly draws attention to the generalized mismanagement of the continent by despots of all shades. In isolating the origins of the Atlantic slave trade and the dialectic of enslavement that transcends the moment of political liberation, he writes: There are slaves in gilded cages and the world knows of others dangling on the gibbet, rotting on the magnolia tree. There are slaves as studs and slaves as victims of castration. There are married slaves and merely breeding slaves. And there are trusted slaves, keepers of the master’s purse, commercial representatives who travel long distances on their master’s business and return to give dutiful account. There are the virtual spouses, the signares of Senegal, whose status was no less than that of the mattress of the house. We have known slaves who, after manumission, aspire to inherit the kingdom of their erstwhile masters, sometimes even acquiring slaves in turn. But they have never been masters of their existence, nor have they plotted their destiny. (Ibid., pp. 71–72) This quote encourages a Marxist and Hegelian rereading of the realities of slavery within the postcolony and a rethinking of the dialectic of enslavement beyond analyses at the macrolevel. Instead, we require microlevel studies whereas feminists have demonstrated the politics to be arguably more poignant. Unquestionably, Soyinka broaches vital issues that relate to Africa’s survival. However, his conceptual architecture is something that deserves a great deal of scrutiny. What are his major conceptual and cosmological referents? A bit of W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Kwame Nkrumah, and large doses of African (Yoruba) spirituality constitute this eclectic conceptual scheme. Where does this fascinating grid lead? It is quite difficult to tell. Soyinka correctly criticizes the European scramble and Balkanization, such as by the 1884 Congress of Berlin, of the African continent. He derides the complicity of the Organization of African Unity in legitimating the European-drawn boundaries of the African continent. However, what must be thought through is how to cope with the existing geographical structure. It is not enough to offer such a virulent critique and not be able to transcend the limitations of the present structure. Here, Soyinka raises an important issue,

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but he does not bring his considerable knowledge of African sociopolitical realities to bear on how to construct more acceptable forms of territoriality. Here we return to Soyinka’s eclectic assortment of conceptual referents, which is a curious analytical blueprint. For instance, how does one inscribe intimations of Martin Luther King, Jr. within the current formation of global capitalism and within the context of a post-theological universe? This is not to undermine the seriousness of the issues that Soyinka raises, but to question some of his basic methodological assumptions. The phenomenon of global oppression has transcended the binarisms of the particular structure of his critique. Soyinka, in many ways, is a product of the new global political economy and continues to indicate new possibilities of the globalized public intellectual and the new forms of posturing that go with that status. But along with this status and the power and visibility it confers, we have to determine what is possible and truly transformative and what is merely a stylized gesture meant for global media appropriation. If the current manifestations of global oppression are fluid and digitalized, then how does one construct a counter-discourse that is equally global and virtual in its fluidity, and is one that does not succumb so easily to hegemonic articulations? At this juncture, what needs to be studied is how the global media vitiates Soyinka’s commitment to political activism and how global fame creates its own disconnections to that commitment. The demands of being a public intellectual of global stature are quite enormous. Being able to address an audience from a global pedestal has shortcomings of its own. Soyinka frequently intervenes in issues of local politics that are ostensibly reconfigured as moral questions of universal significance. For example, when Jacob Zuma, the then former deputy president of the Republic of South Africa, and the current president of the country, was forced out of office over allegations of corruption, Soyinka promptly let it be known that we should welcome the era without “sacred cows” in power. This intervention is quite problematic judging by its timing. Zuma’s trial for corruption had only begun and was far from being resolved. The matter was transformed into a loaded moral affair that had been relayed and linked by the popular consciousness to the violence of apartheid. What appeared to be an issue of transparent and universal moral dimensions was reduced to an ontological level by the imperatives of the local. The exigencies of South African history, political struggles, and lives—not the wisdom of a public intellectual of global renown—became the benchmark by which the fate of Zuma was to be decided. Not even if the intellectual happened to be Soyinka. The complexity of South African politics is informed by its uniquely dehumanizing racial past and the problems of coming to terms with the legacies of that past. Soyinka’s intervention in the Zuma affair is an uncustomary simplification of the process of de-racialization. Soyinka’s critique of the widespread dehumanization of the human race requires more conceptual refinement. Soyinka’s first major public articulation of his conception of humanism can be found in his prison memoirs, The Man

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Died (1972). In discussing concepts such as human rights he does not draw systemically on Yoruba mythology or culture, nor does he enunciate the particular traditions of Western humanism he espouses. Such a methodological approach introduces the daunting tradition and modernity aporia. Soyinka never quite unpacks the concept of humanism within the context of this ever-present aporia. In the absence of sustained analytical engagement with the concept, we can assume that when he refers to European humanism, in both direct and oblique ways, we must also remember that he refers to the Europe of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault, who, in The Order of Things (1970), following the example of Nietzsche and André Malraux, proclaims the death of man. How does Soyinka’s assessment of European humanism stand within the Foucauldian thesis of death of the Western man? How does it stand in relation to fascism and modern totalitarianism? We must remember that these modern political evils are central to the project of Western moderntity and the idea and cult of humanity. Presently, Soyinka’s understanding of European humanism is framed by the event of the Enlightenment and not by postmodernity, even if his appeal, range, and effects are decidedly postmodern. In another vein, he is promoting the cult of Ogun—who, in the Yoruba Pantheon, is the god of war and iron— in ways that a pre-modern traditionalist would applaud. This is just one of the identitarian contradictions that his status, work, and posturing can sometimes reveal. The ways in which Soyinka employs the concept of humanism are quite problematic and are never quite comprehensible. In a way, an understanding of humanism is linked to startling forms of political terror. After the indignities and suffering of the Holocaust, it became necessary to reexamine the condition of the human being, to restate its relevance, even when the state deems it necessary to carry out elaborate schemes of extermination. A significant conception of humanism confronts the need to engage the terror that is always latent at the heart of the state. At the level of raciology as understood by Paul Gilroy, humanism is stretched to mean cosmopolitan democracy that, from Gilroy’s perspective, entails the de-ghettoization and de-particularization of the Black experience and subjectivity in the face of constant exceptionalism. Soyinka has repeatedly employed a universal understanding of humanism and at the same time he has also relentlessly promoted the values of African culture. However he has not evolved a rigorous mode of analysis that links these separate domains of discourse in ways that synthesize their discordant elements—modernity and pre-modernity, individualism and communalism, globality and locality, and others. Not having done so often turns out to be quite problematic. To overcome the limits that Soyinka’s invaluable work forces us to confront, not only is a critique of global capitalism essential, but also, we must carry political activism into the realm of virtuality. As Martin Thomas argues,

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it has become necessary to struggle against global capitalism within processes of globalization, and for processes of working-class globalization (2000). Deepening globalization has resulted in ever more divisive forms of polarization. For Samir Amin (1997), the real challenge facing humanity is to construct a global civil society upon principles which allow the disastrous effects of such polarization to be gradually erased. Soyinka addresses a broad range of regional crises around the globe. What is required is a structural exegesis of these crises within a rigorous conceptual framework since he has consistently demonstrated that these are issues that genuinely concern him. If he is able to accomplish this, he would succeed where many African social scientists fail and where other literary artists would rather avoid. In The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness (Soyinka, 1999), we find a significant discussion of culture, a turf one has reason to believe Soyinka has neglected because of his many political concerns. The cultural epoch he dwells upon is one he knows so well. Leopold Sedar Senghor, the late grand old man of African letters, who was Soyinka’s old intellectual adversary, maintains a central place in Soyinka’s cultural preoccupations. Two chapters in the book on culture, “L. S. Senghor and Négritude” and “Négritude and the Gods of Equity” are definitely necessary reflections on historic moments of colonial and postcolonial cultures, the ideological contexts from which they emerged, and the cultural vanguard that defined them through thought and practice. Even if Soyinka has enduring reservations about Senghor’s cultural universe, that universe has provided a foil for his wide-ranging cultural interventions. Soyinka writes, “Leopold Sedar Senghor is a priest—but a failed one” (ibid., p. 97). He claims part of the reason for the failure is: Senghor appears compelled to query deep into the humanism of the oppressed to escape the undeniable pressure of history, counter its imperatives in the present with an excursion into pristine memory, and forge from within its purity and innocence, an ethos of generosity whose lyrical strength becomes its main justification. (Ibid., p. 105) Senghor’s failings are then juxtaposed against the efforts of his other equally distinguished contemporaries. For example, Léon-Gontran Damas of Guyana, whose response to his return to his native land as part of a research mission by the French Museum of Ethnography was summed up in his report, Retour de Guyane (Back to Guyana) (1938). According to Soyinka: The unwelcome result was a searing sociological indictment of French colonial politics on his native island and its consequences on the populace. France, he claimed, had reduced Guyana to a “cesspool,” for no other purpose but the protection of his own national health. These were

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all artist-intellectuals whose activities closely intertwined: together, they were the midwives of Négritude. (Ibid., pp. 110–111) Soyinka reads Senghor and his contemporaries with uncommon sensitivity and an impressive knowledge of the different cultural ramifications and cadences involved. Some of Soyinka’s contemporaries also come under the same penetrating scrutiny. Of Tchicaya U Tam’si, the Congolese poet, he writes, “an occasional apostle of reconciliation, at least on a preliminary—and implicitly undesired—exercise in self-induced amnesia” (ibid., p. 120). He continues: Tchicaya U Tam’si shares with Aime Cesaire the same temperament that stamps criminalities on their source, and questions the social foundations—in religion or philosophy—of their perpetrators. Tchikaya does not hestitate—albeit in the anguished accents of a lapsed adherent—to apportion blame to a failed deity, accuse him of betrayal or, at least, neglect. (Ibid., p. 122) Another distinctive African poet, Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, is restored to his true stature with the same peceptiveness Soyinka directs at Senghor, U’Tamsi, and Damas. He writes: We point to Rabearivelo—and Surrealism—only as a productive instance of the many tributaries that flowed into, and the branches that sprouted from, a movement that was not quite homogenous as many critics sometimes present it as being. Rabiarivello’s true mentors and models were Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire, with whom he shared, in the words of Ulli Beier, “disgust of reality.” (Ibid., p. 173) However, it is the ideology of Négritude that receives Soyinka’s most enduring analysis. Due to his descriptions, we are reminded of the different ideological tendencies by which the ideology as a philosophy of consciousness was conceived and concretized. In this regard: Jacques Roumain, Etienne Lero, René Depestre, Tchicaya U Tam’si are not too well known but, without question, this trio—and some of the better known names—represented the non-negotiable sector in the province of Négritude. (Ibid., p. 164) These views more or less form the gist of Soyinka’s interventions on Senghor, the ideology of Négritude, and other related cultural matters. Soyinka’s focus on that moment of African cultural history returns him to a terrain which his more mature reflections illuminate with a discursive vividness few of his contemporaries from the Anglophonic African divide can muster. These often piercing cultural commentaries return us to the worlds evoked by fig-

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ures such as Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, and Carlos Fuentes who have also accomplished similar results with Latin American literary and cultural history. Soyinka’s creative and intellectual itinerary has for decades been marked by an astonishing combination of political and cultural concerns and personas: a leading figure of African letters, an indefatigable champion of African culture, an analyst of the politics of identity, a political commentator, and social activist, among other things. Very few other African writers have this range of gifts. As pointed out at the beginning of this discussion, politics is often made out to be a necessity for artists in Africa. Consequently, Soyinka has had to contemplate the conditions of possibility of the concepts of justice, truth, and reconciliation. These concepts are issues that demand a considerable degree of theoretical systematicity, and perhaps also conceptual distance. Soyinka being such a formidable social activist, he has probably not had the time to cultivate these qualities. His writings on politics are urgent, visceral, vitriolic, and often impatient. In a way, the distinctions between theory and praxis often become blurred. Perhaps this is one of the reasons he has not made an impact in the social sciences even though he addresses concerns that are so central to them. Culture, on the other hand, is a different matter altogether. The expanse Soyinka dwells upon, even though narrow, is covered with great penetration. He recuperates for Anglophonic sensibilities what had hitherto been a boon for mainly Gallic tastes. By rereading figures such as Roumain, Lero, Depestre, Senghor, and U Tam’si within the context of Négritude and the general movement of Black letters, Soyinka makes a courageous attempt to fill in a gap in the Anglophonic perception of traditions of Francophonic forms of literary expression. It can be argued that a difference of tastes is discernible between Francophonic and Anglophonic forms of intellectual production. For instance, in African philosophy, the modes of textuality adopted by Paulin J. Hountondji and Valentin Yves Mudimbe are different from those of Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Gyekye for the simple reason that the French and British forms of colonialism were marked by different accents in their modes of indigenous penetration. While in the first French colonies there were serious attempts to develop and problematize the concept of Négritude, no significant corresponding movement occurred in the Anglophonic world, even though there were attempts made, such as the half-hearted application of the concept of African personality. However, it was not quite the same. As a result, the complexions of the traditions of intellectual production in the British and French colonies differed in subtle but quite significant ways. The twin concerns of Soyinka’s productive life—politics and culture—so exclusively discussed in The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness, illustrate the successes, setbacks, and challenges of African forms of subjectivity. Finally Soyinka’s text is also an impassioned description of necropolitical destruction in the postcolony, which at the same time holds out the inspiring promise of cosmopolitan humanism.

Six AGENCY AND A DETERRITORIALIZED LITERATURE the disciple’s consciousness, when he starts, I would not say to dispute, but to engage in dialogue with the master or, better, to articulate the interminable and silent dialogue which made him into a disciple—this disciple’s consciousness is an unhappy consciousness. Starting to enter, that is starting to answer back, he always feels “caught in the act” like the infant who, by his name indicates, cannot speak and above all must not answer back. (Derrida, 1978, p. 31)

1. The Market of Politics Agency in relation to African letters has become quite topical; for an example of this, see Olakunle George’s Relocating Agency (2003). The birth of African letters in different modern formations and accents has spurned a copious amount of literature and continues to do so. The notion of agency in relation to literary production in any part of Africa must be invariably linked to some crucial historical moments and experiences: slavery, colonization, decolonization, and the current wave of globalization. To understand the emergence and consolidation of African letters, the historical and contextual circumstances surrounding them must be taken into account. The question of agency can be better appreciated within that frame, “discursive agency in particular moments of dialectical reconstruction, cultural formations can most productively be shown by dialectical reconstruction, not theoretical speculation or prescription” (ibid., p. 71). It has been argued that if one is to locate the question of agency in African forms of literary expression, it is necessary to “disentangle the ideological roots of African literary criticism to specify the problem of African letters as a discursive formation” (ibid., p. 101). In relation to African writers, the question of agency is less complicated if we appreciate: acts of will, and acts of language, turn out to be simultaneously productive and limited, purposive and yet uncontainable by the agent’s originating intention. In this way, creative writers turn out to have all along been theorists of agency. (Ibid., p. 104) If George is more concerned with the theoretical underpinnings of agency in African letters, Abiola Irele on the other hand, identifies orality as a crucial yardstick in the formation of African forms of literary expression, es-

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pecially among African authors that emerged from the heart of political decolonization (2001). A particular generation of Nigerian writers is the subject of most of the discussions of this chapter. Modern Nigerian letters can be divided into three broad generational categories: the Soyinka-Achebe-Okigbo troika, the Osofisan-Osundare-Saro-Wiwa generation, and the generation that came after them. However, these classificatory grids are far from comprehensive and are only employed for convenient discursive purposes. The preoccupation of this chapter is with the last generation: I try to identify their peculiar problems, aspirations, challenges, triumphs, and defeats, and how these affect their fates as creative agents. Also, I attempt to portray the environmental, existential, and institutional circumstances which condition their scope of action as agential beings. Undoubtedly, there has been a large exodus of literary talent from the shores of Nigeria due to the adverse institutional structures prevailing in the country. Processes of globalization and internationalization have also contributed to this trend. In what follows, I elaborate on these points. Before then, I will outline some features of modern Nigerian letters. A phenomenon first manifested during the 1960s has suddenly grown to disturbing proportions. The poet as an unrepentant aesthete was compelled to enter in the hitherto strange theater of war to grapple with insistent ideologies of sociopolitical relevance. Christopher Okigbo is the legendary poet who was ensconced in the labyrinth of unalloyed aestheticism until the Nigerian civil war destroyed all his old artistic illusions. But that radical transgression of roles—from aesthete to man of war—suddenly forced him, together with his artistic and existential dilemma, into national reckoning. For those who continue to be seduced by the poetic muse, and most especially, those who prefer to confine art within the limits of pure aestheticism long after his death, Okigbo not unexpectedly has acquired a mythoepoeic significance. Around the same period, Wole Soyinka, then an extremely promising and energetic playwright, novelist, and poet was unable to bear the dissolution of sociopolitical order of the day and so decided to intervene, or to engage the public realm in a more concrete manner. In this case, to intervene means to learn the politics of politicians, and is a radical subversion of some aesthetic assumptions and ideals. This is an extremely dangerous undertaking in which death is never too far from the picture, as the destinies of Okigbo and Ken Saro-Wiwa have demonstrated. For artists, the politics of politicians is not an easy game to play. Soyinka barely escaped death in the early 1960s. Instead, he was incarcerated for twenty-seven months and then compelled to self-exile. His exilic state most probably secured his health and his life. For decades afterward, he learned to operate from periphery of conventional politics until he was further radicalized by the presidential crisis of 12 June 1993. He has discovered how to speak as a committed intellectual while adopting the accepted attitudinal post-

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ures of the establishment. Conventional politicians were in essence targets for indictment while the distance engendered by critical reflection was scrupulously maintained. Nonetheless, Soyinka has managed to remain relevant within his primary domain, the intellectual constituency. However, in the Nigerian postcolony, gaining a hold over the intellectual constituency is usually a limited victory due to the machinations and mechanisms of exclusion and marginalization fostered by state power, institutions, and conventional politicians. The writer in such a postcolony must sometimes be prepared to speak the corrupting language of mainstream politicians, a language that remains ultimately destructive of the language of art. There are two battles to be fought here. First, there is the need to gain adequate mastery of a language of art to create art itself. Second, the necessity to subvert that language in a way that bypasses the often over simplistic colonizer and colonized dichotomy to make sense of far more complex unities and contradictions such as were accomplished by Chinua Achebe, Amadou Kourouma, and to some extent, Soyinka. Within the context of the first battle, another struggle ensues. The artist’s linguistic victory is basically an individual affair, an exercise in elitism, so to speak. Her primary audience is barely literate and even more disturbingly, among the educated class, the reading culture has not gained widespread appeal. This dilemma is often crushing, to say the least. The battle with the printed word has been just one aspect of an immense project. It is also a project in which the ruling class wants no part, since it is more convenient for the power to tolerate mediocrity. So the artist has to come down from the high horse of art and commence another sort of struggle, one for which she has not prepared herself, otherwise she remains within the realms and safe irrelevance, in the eyes of the establishment, of aesthetic purity. To do so, to be confined to pure aestheticism, an artist of Soyinka or Okigbo’s ilk would consider it as death. Most Nigerian writers would often choose the path of social commitment because to do otherwise would mean to uphold the unacceptable ethic of silence and eventual social death. Consequently, the poets, after the generation of Okigbo, from Niyi Osundare to Ogaga Ifowodo, have had to adopt a posture of struggle for the collective good. However, to date, the most successful Nigerian writer in the sense we are discussing is Saro-Wiwa, who was hanged along with eight other Ogoni activists in 1995, by the General Sani Abacha military regime. Saro-Wiwa could never have properly estimated the impact of the victory or victories contained in his death. More than anyone else, he radicalized the language and the procedures of alternative and anti-establishmentarian politics in which he (re)discovered, developed, and disseminated an organic mode of social mobilization for a variety of causes ranging from agitations for minority rights, environmental consciousness, equitable federalism, internal decolonization, and human rights generally. It is instructive to note that Saro-Wiwa did not set out to master the politics of conventional politicians. It is also appropriate to recognize that he was

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not out to gain power by traditional means. The two factors of economic injustice and environmental degradation were responsible for the deep-rooted impulses that were to earn him death and ultimately a moral victory. The regression of culture, fostered by a significant part of the ruling elite, and which is destroying the Nigerian polity, has unexpectedly made a martyr of SaroWiwa. Power, in its acute lack of vision, had not perceived the cultural dimension of the Ogoni crisis. Culture is better repressed and silenced because it questions, criticizes, and creates. Authoritarianism, especially in its virulent postcolonial manifestation, on the other hand, stifles and destroys to nurture and maintain itself. Their characteristics are diametrically opposed to each other. Consequently, the Nigerian writer, and by extension the African writer, has no choice but to transform the parameters of his artistic and social struggle, not just by words, but also through concrete acts against the violence of the state—which is usually tyranny incarnate—because contained in those acts of transgression, there are sometimes to be located seeds of moral victory, greater enlightenment, and political empowerment. This is not to underestimate the arduousness and arbitrariness of the struggle. However, to allow state power to operate in total disregard for culture and enlightenment is to abort the birth of a necessary species of the Nigerian writer and to annul the possibilities for the inauguration of a society that asks serious questions, offers remedial criticisms, and produces products of enduring value. Before the death of Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian writer was preoccupied with a frantic search for relevance. Soyinka’s 1986 Nobel Prize for literature only temporarily doused the desire for relevance. To a significant extent, the award was largely ceremonial to the Nigerian public mind. After the apparently endless backslapping and the social events to celebrate the historic moment, the customary complacency returned. Soyinka must have sensed the deceptiveness of the superficial euphoria as he intensified his quest for general visibility within the public sphere. The newspapers became for him sites for elaborate intellectual discourse. To the generality, his extensive corpus was just one fossilized scribal relic meant for archival attention and no other Nigerian writer has struggled as hard against this kind of uncharitable complacency on the part of society. To be relevant, then, would be to impose one’s self upon a cynical public with an almost dogmatic repetitiveness. Another Nigerian poet who picked up the hint is Osundare. At the outset of his mature creative years, he became perhaps the most published poet in the newspapers, notably, the Nigerian Tribune. In what other medium could one explore sociopolitical concerns? In postcolonial Nigeria, as in many other parts of Africa, the newspaper is one of the most powerful sites for the transformation of both social and artistic consciousness. The purpose is to reach as large an audience as possible instead of being constrained within the staid confines of academia.

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Public concerns, or rather people-oriented intentions, and when possible programs, have become the only way by which relevance can be attained. In effect, one becomes a figure, such as Nnimmo Bassey, who champions the cause of human and environmental rights and throws in some poetry for good measure. Writers then become political analysts first and artists afterward. Otherwise they become human rights activists and artists next. This sort of progression evinces a predictable determinism. After they master the roles society compels them to undertake, they might then be worthy of public attention or perhaps even debate. Their creative credentials are nothing by themselves unless they endure the crucible of social activism and the attendant struggle for political acceptability. I find this determinism disconcerting, as it is a reflection of the lack of choice that confronts Nigerian writers. First, they must contend with a monocultural political situation and then this unquestioned dogmatism is carried over to the artistic sphere. It is quite troubling as it is that the political sphere leaves them no choices or challenging alternatives. Perhaps even more distressing is that their range of artistic responses is decidedly limited. There is nothing wrong when artists attempt to transform their political culture to operate better. It is the apparently unavoidable tendency to do so that is worrisome. From this perspective, a deep-rooted ideological limitation faces Nigerian writers. That they decide to venture into the public sphere is laudable, but as we should have noticed, they can easily become a ready tool for the sociopolitical order they attempt to subvert. If pure aestheticism becomes the cornerstone of ideological irrelevance, then social activism becomes an enervating form of political determinism. To be sure, Saro-Wiwa carried social activism to uncommon heights within the Nigerian literary firmament. It is also true that this kind of victory is extremely rare even beyond the shores of Nigeria. But we cannot always count on that sort of triumph. Therefore, the task before the Nigerian writer should not merely be the transformation of her moribund political culture, but the more difficult task of creating a refreshing range of artistic responses that her moncultural milieu strives to exclude. 2. A Prayer for Death It is said that the apprentice must kill the master to find his true voice, to live up to his true calling, and to discover the meaning of his true vocation. But this act of professional annihilation can only occur in the most favorable of circumstances. Gods never die of their accord; they can only be lured into the abyss of oblivion by guile or outright force. (For a third world account of the problems of creating alternative intellectual traditions, see Ranajit Guha,ed., 1997.) Let us be frank and polemical in the extreme: the literature after the generation of Femi Osofisan, Osundare, Festus Iyayi, Tanure Ojaide, and Odia Ofeimun is still undergoing the throes of a painful birth. Arguably, it has re-

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peatedly betrayed its promise and mission. So, if Soyinka calls his generation a wasted one, then the one that followed immediately afterward that the likes of Osofisan and Osundare represent, can be regarded as having suffered a more disappointing fate. Osofisan, Osundare, Ojaide, and Ofeimun came after the AchebeSoyinka-Okigbo troika. Theirs was an apparently radical identification with popular causes and struggles. Also, their general aesthetic comportment marked a distinctive shift from what may be regarded as “high culture” to a more direct involvement with sociopolitical processes. After them came the likes of Uche Nduka, the late Izzia Ahmad, Ifowodo, Promise Okekwe, Maik Nwosu, Obi Nwakanma, Helon Habila, E. C. Osondu, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sola Osofisan, Omowunmi Segun, Nduka Otiono, Lola Shoneyin and a few others. This unwholesome development can be linked to the larger sociopolitical sphere where promise after promise, hope after hope, intention after intention and action after action have been violated by the most brutal kind of political cynicism and violence imaginable. The generation of Soyinka, Achebe, and Okigbo, in spite of the searing critiques of Chinweizu Ibekwe, Jamie Onwuchekwa, and Ihechukwu Madubuike in Towards the Decolonization of African Literature (1980), sought constantly to blend the commitment to art with a robust form of social activism. (For representative texts of this trend, among other works by literary artists who try to grapple with the different sociopolitical dilemmas of the Nigerian nation, see Achebe, 1983; Soyinka, 1972; 1996; 1999.) This long-standing marriage of art and social criticism is a direct offshoot of the multiple challenges of decolonization and the tasks of nationbuilding after centuries of imperial assault and denigration. (For an analysis of this pervasive trend in African letters, see Nadine Gordimer, 1994; Irele, 2001.) The post-liberation era brought the first euphoric whiff of collective expectation fueled by the rhetoric of nationalist freedom fighters. Political liberation was equated with other forms of emancipation—economic, social, and cultural. However, those different hopes were dashed by a variety of impediments that involved a morally bankrupted political class, an opportunistic military establishment, and a less than politically astute citizenry. Out of this discouraging and considerably destructive context, a generation that had been thoroughly brutalized by these adverse factors and that had been formed in part by an ethos of Hobbesianization emerged. In addition, this brutalized generation upheld an ethic that even an unscrupulous political class did not completely recognize. Hordes of unemployed youth, in the absence of adequate institutions of normalization become street urchins and contribute to the ever-increasing incidence of gangsterization of everyday life, especially in the urban and periurban centers. This development, in a direct way, affects the political and sociocultural fortunes of the country through, for instance, its impact on collective and personal security. In creative literature, authors such as Ahmadou

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Hampate Bâ, in works such as The Fortunes of Wangrin (1987), have competently depicted how political decolonization brought in its wake what, in a not too dissimilar context, Soyinka has termed the “season of anomie.” Instead of “killing” the old, corrupt political gods who first sowed the seeds of degeneracy, this aborted generation, floundering in the midst of a load of collective destruct, not unexpectedly, proceeds to feed upon itself and virtually everything else. (For an interesting presentation of disorientating sociopolitical conditions in the African postcolony, see Achille Mbembe, 2001a.) An undeniable political component is inherent in this analysis, but it also veers into the field of literary creativity. The old political gods have refused to die but we might as well recast the problématique: When will the old literary gods die? To employ an appropriate political lingo, when will the old literary gods be made to step aside? From the strictly political realm, we move on to the literary field. To “annihilate” the old ubiquitous literary masters, to create space for fresh creative voices, several conditions must be met. We must publish more books of the required international standard and more than a few literary masterpieces. True, books are being published, but how many have gotten into the canon? Reuben Abati is one of the more visible Nigerian columnists with a bias for the literary arts. In the late 1980s, he had published a polemical piece, in the The Guardian newspapers of Lagos, calling for new Nigerian literary masterpieces. The question he posed some years back is still pertinent today: where are the masterpieces? We cannot be too sure that masterpieces are not being written, but what is certain, on the other hand, is that they are not receiving the appropriate kind of reception and the critical appraisal they deserve. They are not bestowed with required critical impetus to pave the way for adequate institutionalization. They are in turn left to remain in the interminable borderlands of oblivion and left to suffer the realities of an unfashionable alienation. Writers in the generation after the likes of Osofisan and Osundare are more or less condemned to expire with few heroes of their accomplishments such as the likes of Adichie. The problem of lack of adequate heroes to emulate is quite real. Bola Ige, former Attorney General of the nation, who was murdered under quite mysterious circumstances in his home in December 2001, was a well-known patron of the arts. Before his ghastly murder, he had frequent literary soirees in his home. On one of those occasions, he bemoaned the lack of nerve of the present generation of Nigerian writers. He found the prevailing moral cowardice unbearable. Who among the present generation of Nigerian writers would hold up a radio station like Soyinka did in the height of the political crises of the 1960s? Who among them would travel the length and breadth of the country, under glaring conditions of danger, to garner ideological soul mates and bulwarks against the ever-impending tide of sociopolitical and moral corruption? Even after he turned seventy, Soyinka continued to be the sole pillar of support for a largely ineffectual and disorganized civil socie-

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ty or what was left of it. For Soyinka’s recent exertions in social activism, see “Descent of Barbarism and the End of the Collegial,” ThisDay (Nigeria), 29 February 2004. He has also been pivotal in setting up the Citizen’s Forum to mobilize against civilian dictatorship. Not surprisingly, Soyinka’s continuing struggle against governmental arbitrariness, injustice, and incompetence is one he shares with his late friend, Ige. Due to Soyinka’s persistence in unraveling the circumstances behind Ige’s death, he has courted governmental disfavor. For example, a newspaper report at one point claimed that his life was in danger: “Within this sad and disempowering milieu, a powerful temptation not to fight the literary gods arises, not to destroy their enduring canons, because one suspects a condition far worse that nihilism, a condition akin to extreme necropolitical violence and death might arise” (“Help! My life in danger, Soyinka cries out,” Sunday Sun, 7 March 2004). Soyinka’s stature and position as a public intellectual is quite complicated. He possesses an institutional range and power that have multiple bases of influence that are both effectively local and global. (For an account of the symbolic powers and capital of the public intellectual, see Pierre Bourdieu, 1999.) Soyinka is an incredibly sought-after media figure whose impact on strengthening the ever-weakening foundations of civil society cannot be overemphasized. So, arguably, an assault on the Soyinka body of work may also entail an attack on his virtues, contributions, and experience as a public intellectual and social activist. This crucial angle of perception would invariably complicate any canon-bursting intention or exercise in relation to Soyinka. At several crucial discursive moments and critical confluences, the social and the aesthetic overlap in Soyinka’s corpus, and his aesthetic architecture is founded on the constant intertwining of the artistic and the social, such that it is never quite certain where a particular domain ends and the other begins (1976). Soyinka’s importance to democratic struggles in Africa in general, and Nigeria in particular, necessitates a reappraisal of his worth and contributions as a public intellectual. (For more on this point, see Chapter Five.) In many instances, he would be deemed invaluable to social processes involving the much-needed strengthening of civil society, efforts at democratic consolidation, and checks against governmental recklessness. A central part of Soyinka’s project is to effect genuine social transformation in African publics and communities and this effort not only entails the mere publication of apparently interminable political commentary, but critical and often dangerous interventions in the public sphere. Such that in the second part of his career, his value and exertions as a public intellectual seem to take precedence over his aesthetic contributions. Perhaps with Soyinka, it is not useful to employ merely aesthetic critical yardsticks, since, as Gordimer once pointed out, the artist in Africa has an enormous social responsibility that cannot be overlooked and which forms a central part of her aesthetic project. Undoubtedly, Soyinka has constantly

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lived up to the demands of this credo and this complicates analyses of notions of the political in relation to his work. Canon-bursting is overtly political work. In addition, because of the welter of social disarticulations in the African postcolony one the one hand, and the efforts of the artist at redressing them on the other, conundrums arise in relation to definitions of the political and the aesthetic in the continent (Appiah,1992). So any operation pertaining to canon-bursting in relation to Soyinka, due to his invaluable political work, invariably entails a redefinition of the political and its different ramifications within the African postcolony. The late Ige knew creative activity was political work; he always enjoined artists to “support themselves.” In addition, Soyinka’s aesthetic orientations are no less problematic and often have apparent political reverberations. Soyinka’s multiple professional preoccupations are well known: a public intellectual with many local and global commitments, a poet of national importance, an irrepressible prodemocracy activist, a university professor within the North Atlantic hemisphere, and finally, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1986). All these attributes add to his persona as a cosmopolitan humanist. But he is also a long-standing advocate of the cult of Ogun. In fabricating his aesthetic cosmos, he amalgamates the local and the global, tradition and modernity, animism and postmodern chic, and other ideas. Consequently, his involvement with the Yoruba author Daniel O. Fagunwa becomes simultaneously interesting and frustrating. This particular aesthetic matrix has telling agential repercussions. At this juncture, let us return to another vital matter. Literature flourishes best when the accompanying critical activity is also vigorous. The generation of Soyinka, Achebe, Okigbo and John Pepper Clark benefited immensely from the robust critical interventions of Sunday Anozie, Irele, Ben Obumselu, Michael Echeruo and the rest of those critics who provided the much-needed critical and theoretical bulwark to the making of modern Nigerian letters. Similarly, the generation of Osofisan, Bode Sowande, Osundare, and Ofeimun gained immensely from the critical work of Biodun Jeyifo, Molara OgundipeLeslie, Chidi Amuta, G. G. Darah, and Yemi Ogunbiyi. During the late 1980s, it was expected that Afam Akeh, the late Sesan Ajayi, an active poet, university teacher, literary journalist, and cultural facilitator who died in 1994, and a few other gifted critics would do the same for their beleaguered generation. Akeh, after demonstrating himself to be such a motivating factor in the sphere of culture critique, became “born again” in the Christian fold and left the shores of Nigeria to become a church minister in England. Ajayi, on the other hand, continued his critical interventions until his untimely demise. It can be argued that since then much of the available critical activity has been sporadic, lacking in self-confidence, and most often ill-directed and illconceived. Those who manage to publish criticism in newspapers do not often display the lofty commitment of Akeh or Ajayi, while the so-called real critics who are located within the precincts of academia continue to consolidate the gains of the old canon without new critical insights, and as such are unable to

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create anything resembling a paradigmatic shift. Consequently, in many respects, critical activity and reflection have reached an impasse. This observation concerns the post-Osofisan-Osundare-Ofeimum generation of writers and it is imperative to note this distinction. In this light, it would appear as if the fight against the literary gods of the old canon cannot be won, and that the present generation of Nigerian authors cannot live up to its true mission and potentials, not only because the literature it produces is disadvantageously positioned, but also because literary criticism that is genuine and sincere has failed. The advantage of institutional positioning in relation to the aesthetic and intellectual field is a topic that has attracted a flurry of commentary (Bourdieu, 1999). (For a Nigerian assessment of this area of discourse, see Olakunle George, 2003.) For the continued growth and diversification of Nigerian letters, the old gods of the established canon must be made to step aside, in Nigerian political parlance, within the pantheon of the expanding national literature, to make room for other voices and other heroes. In the drive for re-canonization in Nigerian letters, a few salient points need to be noted. A great proportion of Nigerian literary talent no longer resides only within Nigerian shores. There has been a massive flight of creative talent abroad, including Uche Nduka, Olu Oguibe, the late Isabia Irobi, Ike Okonta, Nwakanma, E. C. Osondu, Godwin Ede, Funmi Adewole, Akinwumi Adesokan, Nwosu, Denrele Ogunwa, Harry Garuba, Onookome Okome, Biyi Bandele-Thomas, Ben Okri, Helon Habila, Pius Adesanmi, Sefi Atta, and several others (Osha, 1998.). It appears that, since the struggle to find creative and intellectual meaning in the postcolony faces several impossible odds, the metropole, even with all its peculiar difficulties, is more attractive. After all, it is easy to assume that once the center has been conquered, the entire world becomes home. A relevant recent philosophical analysis of the African intellectual’s struggle for meaning can be found in Hountondji’s work (2002). How does one begin the canonization of these different literary figures, these globally positioned aspiring artists, in several cases, from the locus of peripheralization that the postcolony exemplifies? A crucial part of the present struggle would be to reconstitute the periphery as the center. To be sure, this is easier said than done. First, who are those ready to do battle? Second, by what new means are we to identify local difficulties? For example, which artists merit attention and recognition? What journals, newspapers, and magazines are available and would be amenable to such a project? What institutional agglomerations of influence need to be wooed? Who are the eminent and established critics that would prove sympathetic to such an undertaking? How do we identify and demarcate the global dimensions of the project? Does one begin the quest within the confines of Euro-American academic establishments or does one launch the onslaught at the continental and subregional level? Launching the struggle within North Atlantic academic loci would ap-

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pear to be more attractive judging from the ongoing exodus of literary talent. Whatever the available options, these questions are vital to reconfiguration of the canon of contemporary Nigerian literature. However, some of the efforts of the exiled Nigerian writers to create and sustain some modicum of writerly activity are commendable. Sola Osofisan started a website in the United States, krazitivity (http://www.nigeriansinamerica.com/authors/65/Krazitivity, accessed 09 September 2010), which, until quite recently, became a prominent outlet for writers of his generation and which, in spite of the many problems of the site, has continued to initiate and sustain dialogue between local and global concerns, especially in matters of a literary coloration. More graphically, the demoralizing material conditions within the Nigerian postcolony would discourage any strategic initiative or any sustained onslaught on the moribundity that currently assails contemporary Nigerian letters. Both in academia and in journalism, the best hands continue to leave and those who are unfortunate to remain in the postcolony consume their energies in time-sapping schemes of survival. Established writers and critics rant to aspiring ones, “write, write, write!” For what purpose, one might ask? For the dust heap or for an enfeebled samizdat tradition that has all but become extinct? Several Nigerian writers are also academics. But these twin positionalities are not always immediately advantageous. Being a poet and a university teacher does not mean one becomes accepted or read. To be accepted as a successful author, writers need to win international literary prizes as buttressed by the experiences of Okri, Bandele-Thomas, Osundare, Habila— even Soyinka and Achebe. In the case of Soyinka, the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature transformed, in a quite drastic manner, the public’s perception of him in Nigeria. The weight of tradition and the burden of the canon have to be confronted, often with quite feeble instruments and strategies. In essence, regarding the reconfiguration of the Nigerian literary canon, global and local scenarios alike remain exceedingly bleak, yet one recognizes the need to undertake the sort of interrogations of “White” classical American literature that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and his fellow intellectual and cultural allies undertook to subvert the pervasive power and dominance of the “White” canon. Gates’ primary importance lies in constantly condemning the institutional power of traditional canon forming mechanisms and systems in the United States (1992, p. 18). He begins his critique of the Western canon by pointing out the racial biases of classical Western philosophy: [Immanuel] Kant, basing his observations on the absence of published writing among Blacks, noted as if simply obvious that ‘American (Indians) and Blacks are lower in their mental capacities than all other races.’ Again, [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel, echoing Hume and Kant, noted the absence of history among Black people and derided them for failing to

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develop indigenous African scripts, or even to master the art of writing in modern languages. (Ibid., p. 61) Gates argues: literary criticism likes to think of itself as “war by other means.” But it should start to wonder: Have its victories come too easily? The recent move toward politics and history in literary studies has turned the analysis of texts into a marionette theater of the political, to which we bring all the passions of our real-world commitments. (Ibid., p. 19) Canon formation is a political act and as such the transformation of existing canons is akin to political struggle. Gates’ work is testimony of this observation. Paul Gilroy’s formulations on race thinking, and what he calls raciology, are even more elaborate than Gates’ on similar issues. Gilroy has been consistent in his concerns for the “struggle for recognition as human rather than chattel, agent and person rather than object” (2000, p. 14). He avers “the historic associations of Blackness with infrahumanity, brutality, crime, idleness, excessive threatening fertility, and so on remain unperturbed” (ibid., p. 22). The institutional powers of the anthropological gaze have expanded with the emergence of new technologies of policing. As such, visual and visualizing technologies have given rise to a new semiotics of the body. These developments, in Gilroy’s view, have a powerful impact on raciology and the possibilities for a postracial humanism. There are new voices in contemporary Nigerian literature that stand to benefit immensely from such similar subversions. Unfortunately, the syllabi of secondary schools and tertiary institutions in Nigeria feature the same old names. However, in the United Kingdom, William Shakespeare is taught alongside Ben Jonson, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Tom Stoppard. There is apparently room for all within its rich literary pantheon and heritage. In the Nigerian educational syllabi, highly promising authors such as Okri and Bandele-Thomas feature as minor distractions to the dominance of the preexisting canon. At several instances, systematic analyses of their literary creations are not consistently encouraged. A truly gifted poet such as Nduka, who resides in the United States after more than a decade in Germany, is not being seriously studied and no serious attempts are being made to change the situation. Nduka has published several poetry collections, which include Flower Child (1988), Second Act (1994), The Bremen Poems (1995), Chiaroscuro (1997), Belltime Letters (2000), If Only the Night (2002), and Heart’s Field (2005). He has also edited some other anthologies that include several poets of his generation. Yet, why he deserves more fastidious critical evaluation is not only because his poetic sensibilities are unique within the entire Nigerian literary archive, but also in recognition of his laborious efforts to remain connected to the Nigerian literary scene. It is necessary to

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appreciate his strenuous quest to distill universal essence in the local literary imagination on the one hand, and to infuse the local with a global and cosmopolitan sensibility, on the other. (For a more extended commentary on Nduka’s work, see Sanya Osha, 1997.) It would not be totally dismissive to assert that the critical vanguard that took over the likes of Dan Izevbaye, Irele, Isidore Okpewho, and Jeyifo have not been able to live up fully to the challenges of rigorously critiquing the available works of contemporary Nigerian literature. The critical vanguard that presided over the birth and nurturing of modern Nigerian letters has not moved beyond its old preoccupations in terms of the authors and literary works that are its primary concern. Perhaps at this juncture, one ought to provide a fuller background on the conditions of literary production in Nigeria. Some distressing developments give any aspiring writer an enormous cause for concern. It is not too large to claim that much of African literature is threatened with extinction after only a few decades of interaction with the modern world. Arguably, this is no mere endist or alarmist generalization, as contemporary African literature continues to suffer considerable marginalization in the global cultural marketplace. In the July–September 1996 edition of the ANA Review, the seasonal publication of the Association of Nigerian Authors, Peter Ripken revealed in an interview that writers like Soyinka and Achebe, as a rule, do not sell well in Germany and that they personally had to promote the sale of their books. Also, in a paper he had delivered at the annual National Book Week titled, “Literature and the New Censors,” he speaks about how the continent of Africa is filled with eager writers waiting for their major publishing breaks. In a similar fashion, Stewart Brown of the Centre for West African Studies, University of Birmingham, in the same edition of the ANA Review, narrates the same old story. Through him we learn that Longman, the publishing house where he had been engaged with editorial work, had been taken over by an American publishing conglomerate. Brown also revealed that Longman had not been making any money from its African and Caribbean Writers Series and the same also goes for Heinemann publishers. In 2003, Heinemann announced that it had scrapped its famous African Writers Series, which had served as perhaps the most important forum for the birth of modern Nigerian letters. Publishing in Nigeria, and much of Africa, is akin to charity work. Unfavorable economic conditions, coupled with the dormant state of the Nigerian publishing industry, have pushed scores of writers into exile. But exilic existence has it own peculiar problems and traumas. The African Center in London is famous for providing a haven for many aspiring and unsuccessful writers. Undoubtedly, in London, the competition to secure a publishing break is cutthroat and this would become worse with the developments in both Longman and Heinemann. In Nigeria, conventional publishing for creative writers is virtually nonexistent and, as established pub-

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lishing houses are unable to issue new books, many aspiring writers have taken to self-publishing. Self-publication has become quite entrenched with the attendant problems of poor editorial standards, weak and inconsistent distribution strategies, and low reader and critical reception. The death of the author, in Barthesian terms, could also mean the democratization of culture and the demise of the form of textual authoritarianism that has parallels in Western social history. The death of the author within an understanding of postmodernism, signals the (re)awakening and empowerment of the reader and the de-exclusivization of meaning and signification. But within the application of the postcolonial we are currently employing, the death of the author signifies cultural regression. However, perhaps the cultural regression to which I allude should further be clarified. If the material infrastructure for the production of creative literature has become emasculated, we cannot always say the same of the quality of the imagination of those individuals who continue to write and engage, when possible, in self-publication. The quality and range of literary gatherings within Nigeria is something worthy of special study. Last century, in the early to the mid-sixties, the Mbari Club of Ibadan had a variety of literary and artistic talents, notably Achebe, Ulli Beier, Okigbo, Clark, Soyinka, Duro Ladipo, Ralph Opara, and Aigboje Higo, as members who were crucial to the emergence of modern cultural sensibilities and forms of life in Nigeria and beyond. After this cultural club became defunct, other similar gatherings patterned after it sprang up in Ibadan in the decades that followed. During the mid-1980s, a vibrant cultural group, the Poetry Club, was formed at the University of Ibadan. It had renowned writers and scholars such as Dapo Adelugba, Okpewho, Izevbaye, Osofisan, Osundare, Emewho Biakolo, and Garuba as patrons. Some of the coordinators who ran the club from day-to-day included Akeh, Chiedu Ezeanah, Adewole, and Simone Berete and a wide array of talented members. The highlight of the cultural calendar was the staging of the Okigbo Night, which was held annually in memory of the great Nigerian poet. The club also attracted poets and writers who did not reside in Ibadan or have any formal affiliation with the university. In this category were to be found Nduka, the late Ahmad and Ifowodo. In time, the club went on to hold elaborate dramatic productions to mark international academic events and political dates such as the occasion on which Nelson Mandela was freed in South Africa in 1990. As the structural adjustment programs designed and encouraged by the Bretton Woods institutional order became more unbearable several of the club’s patrons and members left the shores of the country. The Poetry Club, which was never an elaborate or formal gathering, soon lost its former vibrancy, inventiveness, and cultural relevance. Creative minds then had to find other ways to assemble and fraternize. A significant number of the members of the club continued to meet at a bar in Abadina, a neighborhood reserved for nonacademic staff of the university.

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With the appointment of George Herault as the director of the French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA) in the mid-1990s, literary artists found a more congenial home in Herault’s Crowther Lane residence at the University of Ibadan. Poets and writers such as Shoneyin, Nwakanma, Segun, and Otiono met regularly at Herault’s abode. Cultural life within the university acquired renewed vigor. However, the general atmosphere that prevailed in Herault’s home was even less formal than the ambience of the Poetry Club. By then, many of the members of the club had graduated from the university to become journalists, and in some cases, academics. Literary creativity, as opposed to being the sole preoccupation, became just one of the pursuits of the writers, journalists, and scholars who gathered there. Increasingly, the pursuit of theory became overwhelming. In a way, a schism arose. Published literary productions of international standard were hard to come by; the same can be said for works of critical practice. This claim has been qualified with the accomplishments of the PELS Literary Series started by Otiono at the Post Express newspapers in the mid 1990s. Yet the attempts to build theoretical traditions within and outside literary circles went almost unhindered. One thing can be said of groups that made up the Poetry Club and Crowther Lane: they strove to rewrite the canon of Nigerian literature. They sought to recreate the spirit of Mbari of the 1960s, but they ended up being distinct cultural formations by themselves with their different moments of triumphs and defeat. The achievements of the Mbari gathering loomed large and unquestionably impressed and inspired both the Poetry Club and Crowther Lane groups. But those achievements could not be exactly recreated. Perhaps it is too early to determine the full impact of the later Ibadan based groups as most of the literary artists who were associated with them and continue to write are yet to reach the height of their powers. Those groups not only celebrated artistic production but also seriously contemplated the possibilities for the canonization of their artistic generation. This struggle for recognition and possible canonization has been carried abroad and is being waged in totally different cultural contexts. However, the movement of a sizeable crop of literary talents to the West and the subsequent deterritorialization of the literature cannot be regarded as a simple instance of alienation. These exilic writers are constantly engaging with the local literary scene at a variety of levels—practical, theoretical, and institutional. The Internet has brought about its own forms of global integration in which elements of locality and globality mark and restructure the trajectories of contemporary Nigerian letters in unexpected ways. At the institutional level, an exilic condition does not necessarily entail an uncomplicated material severance from the local scene. The United Statesbased Adesokan got his Association of Nigerian Authors’ prize-winning novel, Roots in the Sky (2004), published in Nigeria after several unsuccessful attempts to have it published in the West. Similarly, Ede, who was then based in Germany, published a collection of poetry in the same country which went

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on to win the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) prize for poetry. Pius Adesanmi, in his base in North America, had a poetry collection issued in Nigeria that went on to win the ANA prize. These three examples compel us to rethink how the global and the local play, negate, and reinforce one another in the current constitution of Nigerian literature. We are also encouraged to contemplate how the politics of identity, belonging, and ethnicity influence the production of prescriptive discourse on literature and the production of forms of literary expression. Let us examine another institutional structure that ought to foster the development of new Nigerian literary talent: the ANA, established in 1981 with the immense support of the doyen of the modern African novel, Achebe, has come a long way. Not unexpectedly, it has also had a checkered history in which there have been both dispiriting reversals and stunning triumphs. One of such triumphs was the celebration of Soyinka’s sixtieth birthday anniversary in 1994, in the midst of a national political crisis created by an inflexible military dictator, the late General Sani Abacha. Mass discontent was widespread and the country experienced chronic debilitating petroleum shortages. Yet, ANA managed to mark the event and even had distinguished foreign guests flown into the country. However, the association has suffered from periods of gross underfunding and disappointing instances of financial recklessness. The association awards prizes for literary categories such as poetry, prose, and drama, but in real terms these recognitions amount to quite little. An unpublished manuscript that wins an award does not necessarily stand to gain the benefit of publication. For instance, Akin Adesokan wrote a critically acclaimed novel, which won an ANA award, but remained unpublished for several years. Publishing in the old fashioned understanding of the process is sporadic. Even published award-winning authors such as Sola Osofisan, Femi Olugbile, and Adebayo Williams remain more or less unknown except within active literary circles. Adebayo Williams was a respected newspaper columnist and university lecturer before his involvement with NADECO, a prodemocracy organization, led to his being hounded into exile by the regime of General Sani Abacha. He eventually became a university professor in the U.S. and is better known in Nigeria as a political commentator. This is another crucial angle to the problem. All the authors just mentioned deserve sustained and genuine critical assessments that they hardly ever receive. Increasingly, the political crises of the larger society have begun to filter into the association, as the crisis that engulfed the Lagos State chapter of the association during the first quarter of 2004 demonstrates. Having examined the socius of literary creativity and its private and public dimensions together with an analysis of the institutional formations, within which literary labor is supposed to flourish, it should be evident that, far from dying, the old literary gods and canons are alive and thriving. More disturbingly, those who are supposed to plot the necessary subversive challenges against the old literary order are disadvantageously positioned in geo-

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graphical location or in the occupational sense. The Internet may lead to the creation of an alternative tradition, but how effective this tradition will be remains to be seen. All these factors and conditions have a strong bearing on the appreciation of agential dynamics and the ongoing drama of recent Nigerian letters.

Seven FIGURES OF THE AFRICAN FEMALE 1. Alienating Discourse and Alienated Beings The birth of the mode of discourse known as African philosophy is quite interesting. A version of this species of discourse has its origins in a mix of racism and a form of its counter-discourse which is termed decolonization. Western philosophy is a product of a civilization and a disciplinary quest that is almost three thousand years old. In the course of this long cultural and disciplinary development, textual inscription has been a crucial factor. African philosophy, on the other hand, has no such history unless the arguments and conclusions of Afrocentricism are accepted in totality. Given the problematic ruptures and discontinuities between contemporary African realities and the undoubtedly impressive cultural and intellectual achievements of ancient Egypt, sustaining a continuous conceptual relationship between the two disparate contexts is difficult. However, for the sake of argument and for a manageable discursive structure, let us begin the quest for the origins of African philosophy with its encounter with post-Enlightenment modernity, which in the case of Africa and much of the third world entails the realities and the histories of the following events: slavery, apartheid, colonization, and decolonization. It is from this painful existential matrix that one locates the birth of African philosophy in its modern and its contemporary formation. Unquestionably, the birth of African philosophy was wrought from highly political circumstances that continued to have profound implications. The discipline first had to confront the need for liberation and, as such, was based on a discourse that emerged from polemic and overt political rhetoric. It next strived for the discursive detachment and theoreticism of Western academic philosophy. (For a more sustained account of this discursive history see Kwasi Wiredu, 1995; 1996.) For our purposes, such are the circumstances from which African philosophy in its contemporary formation evolved. However, the origins of African philosophy are not our primary concern. Instead, in this chapter, the aim is: (1) to trace the figure of woman within the specificity of African forms of discourse and to examine how she has been articulated and disarticulated and the ways through which she has reacted to these external mechanisms of power in both textual and existential terms; (2) to interrogate the contours of African feminist discourse in relation to patriarchal culture on the one hand, and forms of Western feminist theory on the other; (3)to give an indication of how terms such as sexuality, gender, and the body can be rethought in light of contemporary feminist theory and practice;

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and (4)to indicate a new direction for African philosophy from the advances made by feminist discourse in general. At this juncture, it can be claimed that modern African philosophy is a product of a patriarchal culture and a sexist one. To affirm that colonial and postcolonial African societies are sexist might not be saying much. Perhaps it might be more appropriate to say that African philosophy inherited a heavy load of sexism in its encounter with Western philosophy. So the female African subject has to contend with layers of subjugation: first, at the stark existential level and then at the metadiscursive level. Other layers of oppression exist and are to be found in different ramifications. It is perhaps not too much to claim that African philosophy had to undergo an abortion before its painful eventual birth. A series of paralyzing questions dogged the birth of the discipline: “What is African philosophy?” “Does it exist?” “What ought to be its foundational methodology?” and other questions. Rather than doing philosophy, these quite paralyzing questions that foray into unproductive ontology prevailed in the initial attempts to define the parameters of the discipline. Paulin J. Hountondji’s view is, “philosophy is not a system but a history, an open process, a restless, unfinished quest, not closed knowledge” did not appear to have helped matters (1996, p. 71). The “fear of birth” was an abiding problem in the construction of African philosophy. Freudian and Lacanian readings of this fear of the symbolic, of the Law are instructive here. Judith Butler’s psychoanalytical explanations of gender and subjectivities in general are undoubtedly useful (1997). The entry into the pantheon of White Male philosophical gods was not smooth for the fathers of African philosophy. Instead of acquiring the muchvalued “secret” knowledge of the White Male Father, the African philosopher emitted—at first—a wail of resistance. His adoption of the canon of an alienated literature was marked by violence and trauma. His adoption of an alienating discourse signified the beginning of his production of a discourse of alienation (Hountondji, 1996). The Heideggerian notion of alienation is also applicable here. So it is possible to think in terms of “temptation” and “contentment” as states that would eventually lead to alienation, a notion Heidegger himself borrowed from Søren Kierkegaard (Heidegger, 1996). The literature on the birth of African philosophy is vast and quite remarkable. In addition to Hountondji (1996), other pertinent texts include Peter O. Bodunrin (1984), Kwame Gyekye (1997), D. A. Masolo (1994), Valentin Yves Mudimbe (1988; 1994), Oyekan Owomoyela (1987), and Olabiyi Yai (1977). Although these texts and articles on the nature and foundations of African philosophy are by no means exhaustive, they give an idea of the range of the spirited debates that have attended its gestation. It can be argued that due to the “crises of delivery” that marred the progress of African philosophical discourse from the beginning, its true emancipatory potential has always been limited. African philosophy was produced within the context of an alienating canon and from that structural dis-

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location, from that unassimilated locus, it went on to produce, in some respects, an alienated literature. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has produced a large body of work contesting the assumed primacy and universality of the Western canon (1987; 1992). A large part of his intellectual exertions has been to unearth and create a literary and theoretical canon that is more representative of the AfricanAmerican experience. One of his more recent academic efforts falls within the tradition of his established academic pattern (Crafts, 2002). Speech and inscription were overriding in African philosophy, the laborious quest to articulate presence in the infinite void of nothingness. The humiliating experiences of slavery, colonization, and imperialism had eroded the self-worth of the African subject. Consequently, the articulation of presence through philosophical discourse and speech, no matter how rudimentary, was a way of reclaiming a lost humanity. It was a way of initiating a conversation with modernity. In constructing this rudimentary mode of discourse and speech, the African philosopher could only grapple with a limited set of discursive concerns, most of which were derived from the Western canon. Sex, gender, and sexuality were the least of his concerns. From a dehumanizing existential and epistemic void, he had to construct a modern mode of subjecthood, and he had to undertake a process of autogenesis after which all other things could follow. The creation of a philosophical practice was also an effort at self-invention, the creation of masculine self-straining against an abyss of nothingness. Impatience has marked the evolution of African philosophical discourse. Mudimbe suggests that patience is a cardinal virtue of philosophy. This strain and impatience are not as prominent in the Indian philosophical tradition for instance. Acharya NƗgƗrjuna’s apparently unending appeal within the context of Western philosophy speaks volumes (Hayes, 1994; Garfield, 2002). Buddhist thought and Brahmanical intellectualism has a 2500 year history, while African philosophical discourse had to [re]discover its being and its many concepts and discourses within the ethos of modernity, amid often violent processes of reterritorialization and deterritorialization. 2. Bodies of Writing and the Uses of Ambiguity it is not an oeuvre but a desoeuvre. (Botting and Wilson, 1997, p. 4) The notion of alienation at the beginning of African philosophical writing—of any kind of writing that attempts to transcend the masculinist and dominant canon and text—is vital to the future of that writing and text because, through it, we can trace the system of exclusions, continuities, and ruptures within a given text. This notion of alienation, also connected with the ordeal of birth, provides a crucial point of departure for understanding an abiding problem of African philosophy. How does the text or philosophical utterance find its historical and contextual moorings without a body of preceding texts and without a preexisting library? This engrossing problem confronted a particular African

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philosopher, Anton-Wilhelm Amo, who lived and worked in eighteenthcentury Germany. Amo, who originally came from the Gold Coast, wrote most of his works in Latin. Some of these works include: Dissertatio inauguralis de jure Maurorum in Europa (The Rights of Africans Living in Europe) (1729), Dissertatio de humanae mentis apatheia (On the Impassitivity of the Human Mind) (1734), and Tractatus de arte sobrie et accurate philosophandi (On the Art of Philosophizing with Sobriety and Accuracy) (1738). These different philosophical texts were produced within the context of the European academy and for a Western audience. Hountondji comments on the status of the texts, “what does this work contain that can be called African? Disappointingly though it may be, the answer must be: nothing” (1996, p.128). He makes the suggestion that African philosophers ought to be capable “of freely seizing the whole existing philosophical and scientific heritage, assimilating and mastering it in order to transcend it” (ibid., p.129). This is necessary to avoid what he terms “intellectual asphyxia.” Hountondji’s commentary isolates two complementary and yet separate futures for the African philosophical text. First, it ought to strive to be “African.” Second, it ought to be free to avail itself of universal scientific and philosophical traditions. As for the second injunction, Amo meets all the necessary criteria and for the first, as his text, Dissertatio inauguralis de jure Maurorum in Europa, in a way, is concerned with an African issue. It is an attempt to formulate a discourse to deal with a transcontinental and transnational dimension of African identities of the time. It has an Africa-centered problem as its focus. In this sense, we are left with the problem of degree or scale. Nonetheless, Amo, despite his mastery of Western philosophical traditions, experienced a profound sense of alienation within that canon. He eventually returned to the Gold Coast where he died as a hermit. Also worthy of note is the idea that his pioneering work could not have been appreciated in his colonized milieu in the Gold Coast for the reason that an enabling discursive context had not been created. His experience of alienation was multiple. To be precise, it had three major dimensions. First, he encountered alienation within the Western philosophical canon; second, within the existential context of Germany itself, and finally within the transitory space of the Gold Coast. Amo’s life and work inaugurated the problem of alienation that would attend the birth of African philosophy. In embracing the logos of the Western philosophical text as an essential gesture of birth and in learning an alien mode of philosophical utterance, Amo received the embrace of death. The quest of African philosophy in its contemporary formulation has been to break away from this embrace of death, and fear of birth, to discover its true Father. However, it can be argued that African philosophy never discovered its true Father. Instead, it has to make do with a simulacrum of the real thing. It has had to create a concatenation of images, of false fathers, to lay claim to an origin. In a sense, the African philosophical text is still saddled with a problem that the feminist text, with its espousal of play [le jeu] and

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polysemy (ability for a sign to have multiple meanings), has been able to transcend. Perhaps a clarification regarding the African philosophical text is required. In availing itself of a multiplicity of false fathers and a series of simulated births, the African philosophical text has a semblance of authenticity. But what conjoins the feminine text and the African philosophical text is a problem which can be termed the “crises of delivery.” That is, the problem of creating authentic speech and discourse from within the embrace of death, before the false figure of a tyrannical Father. In my view, the feminine text has been able to overcome this problem admirably and the history by which it accomplishes this is quite interesting. In Heideggerian terms, the key to authentic thinking lies at the root of language. In his view, the German language is closest to the spirit of the European civilization because it is the least corrupted of European languages and because it has the most unfettered access to the Greek ethos. But to create a genuine mode of signification, a self-sufficient text, the origins from which the text in question evolves must be taken into account. The feminist text recognizes this crucial problem and has been able to transcend it. The patriarchal text has several immediately recognizable attributes. Its preoccupations include “representation, the unitary subject, stable meaning, linear narrative, paternal authority, Truth with a capital T” (Suleiman, 1990, p. 13). Arguably, the African philosophical text inherited most of these attributes from the Western Library without a sufficient series of problematizations regarding their ultimate usefulness and the masculinist feature of its epistemic foundations. To be sure, there are moments within the history of the Western canon when elements that genuinely seek to undermine its sexist or its hegemonic basis are tolerated and accommodated. Movements in Western art such as Expressionism, Dadaism, Constructivism, New Objectivism, and Brechtian Realism fall into this category. The Western text has movements and moments that entertain ingredients that have much to do with “hetereogeneity, play, marginality, transgression, the unconscious, eroticism, excess” (ibid.). These are quite interesting moments in which the emancipatory potential of the Western text gets to be more boldly explored. We must not be deceived for long by these ruptures within the text. This is because “like modern capitalism, modern patriarchy has a way of assimilating any number of potentially subversive gestures into the mainstream, where whatever potentially subversive energy they may have possessed becomes neutralized” (ibid., p. 123). However, there are moments and movements of which this could be said: The hallmark of these movements was a collective project [explicitly defined and often shifting over time] that linked artistic experimentation and a critique of outmoded artistic practices with an ideological critique of bourgeois thought and a desire for social change, so that the activity of writing could also be seen as a genuine intervention in the social, cultural, and the political arena. (ibid., p. 13)

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Given these transgressive cultural conditions, it was up to the feminine text to discover a language that was in agreement with its ideological objectives and its being. There are similarities between the histories of the feminist movement and African struggles against colonial domination. Essentially, these two historical trajectories, in which body and mind were forcefully appropriated, are often entangled with violent processes of naming, breaking, sculpting, and building [bauen] as effected by White Male Reason. In the same vein, we ought to note as well, “woman has been the name of the hole that threatens the constructions of reason, the dark continent that threatens the regions of light” (ibid., p. 14). Similarly, Western academic discourse denigrated the colonial African subject employing more or less the same classificatory parameters. Africa was associated with “darkness,” “the dark continent” filled with “dim minds.” (For a wide-ranging account of how colonialism was not only a potent force of aggression but also of widespread change and transformation, see John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, 1991; 1997.) By this singular classificatory grid, the White female and the African subject are united under the burden of White Male Oppression; in speaking against that singular oppression, they are saddled with a language that remains in itself problematic since it carries within its history and modes of circulation instruments for marginalization and exclusion. Even within the annals of a largely phallocentric Western philosophical tradition, the question of language remains vital. At moments of exhaustion, original Western thinkers have frequently turned to the being of language and the question of being to generate new philosophical questions and as a means of discovering a new philosophical course. For Heidegger, the concept of “clearing” [Lichtung] is only one of his strategies for undermining Western metaphysics and reconstructing the entire problem of Western philosophical discourse. His quest for the nature of being took him to diverse fields of knowledge—Pre-Socratic thought (Thales of Miletus, Anaximenes, and Anaximander), Eastern thought (Buddhism and Taoism), and literature (Homer, Sophocles, Dante Alighieri, Virgil, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Stefan George) (1949; 1971). Philosophy had to discover, recover, and unveil new gods to attend to the question of being. Feminist theory realized this crucial conceptual need, the vital connections between language, identity, authenticity, and freedom. For the female theorist, “to innovate, she has to invent her own position as subject and elaborate her own set of images—different from the image of the exposed female body” (Suleiman, 1990, p. 26). To be sure, some male theorists were useful in this project. For instance, Roland Barthes (1975) conceptualizes the distinction between the readable and unreadable [lisible/illisible] text: The readable is serious, fixed, closed, structured, constrained, authoritarian, and unitary; the writable is playful, fluid, open, triumphantly plural,

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and in its plurality impervious to the repressive rule of structure, grammar, or logic. (Suleiman, 1990, p. 37; see also Barthes, 1975) The writable is therefore representative of the feminine text. The eroticization of the text and metaphor entailed what has been termed a “disfiguration of language.” Suleiman has noted: [the] homology between the modern text and the woman’s body was one of the bases on which French feminist theorists in the 1970s, notably Luce Irigaray, elaborated their notion of écriture féminine (women’s writing). (1990, p. 39) Also, while the male text is “unitary, phallic, telelogically moving toward a single meaning, a single story, the feminine text, by constrast, was synonymous with the plural, the erotic, the experimental, the new” (ibid., p. 40). (For other theorizations, see Susan Sellers, ed., 1994; Kelly Oliver, ed., 1997; and Toril Moi, 1985). In addition, the feminine text availed itself of elements pertaining to bricolage (to make something creative or useful from whatever is at hand), jouissance (enjoyment), and glissement (slippage), and all these tools of transgression paved the way for autonomy. How has the African philosophical text fared? Arguably, there has not been a vigorous interrogation of the limits of transgressivity or liminality. The reign of the symbolic, the Law of the Father, is mostly evident and mostly unquestioned. To leave the discursive foundations of African philosophy unquestioned is to shy away from the responsibility of its creation and the demands of philosophizing, thereby legitimating paradigms whose histories are mostly hidden from us. Jacques Derrida argues: the transgression of rules of discourse implies the transgression of law in general, since discourse exists only positing the norm and value of meaning, and meaning in turn is the founding element of legality. (Suleiman, 1990, pp. 74–75) Major African philosophical texts, especially from the Anglophonic divide, in spite of the tendency to Africanize philosophical topics, merely reinscribe the inherited hegemonies of Western textuality that the feminine text has done much to contest and undermine. (See for instance Gyekye (1997) and Wiredu (1996), which are much influenced by the analytic tradition and which indicate virtually no concern for Heidegger’s essential critique of it. This observation regarding Gyekye and Wiredu also applies to Masolo (1994). However, Mudimbe’s texts sometimes espouse quite remarkable elements of transgressivity. Let us attempt to read Mudimbe in a way that he is usually not read. Mudimbe has consistently focused on the constitution of the African subject by dominant Eurocentric discourses of which anthropology remains a

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prime example, or on traces of the African subject as articulated by secondary discourses which are products of power. This discussion of Mudimbe does not focus on his text, Tales of Faith (1997) for two main reasons. First, it does not deal with issues of gender and African subjectivities as comprehensively as the other texts, and second, it has been convincingly argued that it is a less fully-realized work (van Binsbergen, 2001). Though his preoccupation with discourses of power, in relation to the idea of Africa, has been an overriding concern and is decidedly marked by a discourse of mastery, an equally consistent, and at the same time paradoxical, tendency toward rupture, discontinuity, and transgression complicates, in a favorable sense, the nature of his texts and the ways by which they might be read. His texts not only depict multivalent portrayals of African subjectivities, but also address the multiplicity of secondary discourses that mark these subjectivities. By employing elements that are akin to bricolage, jouissance, and glissement, Mudimbe’s enterprise at that level resembles the projects of Western avant-garde movements that strike out at bourgeois culture. The values of heterogeneity, transgression, eroticism, and excess are often evident in Mudimbe’s texts. Yet, of his major texts, The Invention of Africa (1988) appears most unrepresentative of those values. The text attempts: a sort of archaeology of African gnosis as a system of knowledge in which major philosophical questions recently have arisen: first, concerning the form, the content, and the style of “Africanizing” knowledge; second, concerning the status of systems of thought and their possible relation to the normative genre of knowledge. (Ibid., p. x) All the elements that give his other major texts their distinctive character are not granted unfettered reign here. What he does instead is to keep in sharp focus the construction, deconstruction, and marginalization of the African subject within the context of a vast discursive anthropological structure. Within that oppressive structure the African subject had not acquired the distinction of gender as the question of her humanity had not yet been resolved. Also lacking is the power of agency since the articulation of subjectivity was not conducted at the primary level but at the secondary level—the discursive. In short, the text is an excursion into the Western anthropological library to discover, and recover, the archaeological remains of the African subject. It is not concerned with the birth of speech in the African consciousness, but the corpse of the African subject in the morgue of the Western anthropological library. It is about immense rites of death in equally immense catacombs. But even the dark solemnity of these preoccupations indicates the eventual directions of Mudimbe’s larger project. The quest for lost and hidden mysteries may be construed as the furtive strike of darkness against the light of enlightenment reason, and as feline, feminine interventions from a lost underground. Even with the absence of urgent living speech, The Invention of

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Africa reveals its ultimate discomfort with an unproblematized patriarchal culture and its sympathies for the rites of the dead, the dark, and the feminine, where dirges are orchestrated as lifeless symphonies. Mudimbe’s Parables and Fables, in a way, is a more evolved and a more transgressive text, even though it may not be as widely read as the previous book. In strictly discursive terms, it definitely covers more ground. Here, the text, gender, and the body are problematized at loci where they become instruments of creation, agents of catharsis, and spaces of dissolution. As heterogeneity and excess demand, the text keeps redefining the boundaries of its own limits which include: a rigorous contemplation of the aims, legitimacies, and deceptions of anthropology; the status of deterritorialized, external academic discourse on the condition of the Other, and other intimations of heterology; a metaphilosophical critique of African philosophy; a sustained poetics on gender and the body; and finally, an extended meditation on Marxist anthropology. Mudimbe accomplishes this and more within the space of a single text. In describing his existential and academic trajectory, he writes, “my experience would define itself somewhere between the practice of philosophy with its possible intercultural applications and the sociocultural and intersubjective space which made me possible” (1991, pp. 124–125). However, the essential transgressivity of the text and its disciplinary hybridity are announced unambiguously: What does this have to do with Africa? All or nothing. Or, to refer to my Invention of Africa (1988), it relates to the fact that poiesis is, generally, mimesis; and, specifically, to the tension between I and the other, the same and its negation, which belongs to metaphysics. In fact, in this book, one can read my own passion and doubts about such concepts as identity, sameness and otherness. (Ibid., p. xxi) Consequently, the strictures of linearity and systematization are not a feature of his text and this development can be read in two distinct ways. First, by employing mimesis and poesis, he ends up disfiguring and displacing the authority of the patriarchal text in unexpected ways. Second, in splintering the unity of the patriarchal text, Mudimbe inaugurates a mode of silent androgyny. So in many ways, his text, or rather his technology of textuality, offers many margins of freedom that are yet to be fully explored. One of these margins of freedom is conceptual. Mudimbe employs the most fashionable and most convincing, methodological grids of his time: [Jean-Paul] Sartre and [Claude] Levi-Strauss bear witness to the grandeur of the I thinking about itself vis-à-vis the other. And it is from the least phenomenological of existentialists, who happens to be also the most tolerant of existentialists, Simone de Beauvoir, that I draw the frame within which Sartre and Levi-Strauss can fit with their irreconcil-

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De Beauvoir is enlisted in resolving a major conceptual aporia, which is quite novel for discourses on the African subject in relation to difference and the question of the other. (For another reading of de Beauvoir, see Nancy Bauer, 2001.) This interesting methodological strategy, within the context of Mudimbe’s discourse, repositions the figure of woman in discursive terms, and centralizes her trace—even though the locus is still a delimiting one—in a locus where the quest for greater freedom can begin. To be sure, this disciplined pursuit of the trace, this fidelity to its mark, both invests his text with remarkable qualities, on a purely morphological level, and an almost limitless range of theoretical possibilities. In his discourse, the boundaries of the subject assume more possibilities than are often found in most texts of contemporary African critical theory. As always, the mummified figure of the African subject within the morgue of Western anthropology is for him an important theoretical starting point. At one point he focuses not only on the figure of African subject itself but on the institution of her practices: They were part of a language [langue] whose arbitrariness seemed absurd and, consequently, pagan in both meanings of the word paganus: as marginal, someone living on the edges of “civilization” and cut off from the culture of the cities; as someone whose beliefs, opinions, and behavior are unsound from the viewpoint of the dominant language. (Ibid., p. 11) The project of colonialism [mission civilisatrice] sought to transform the consciousness of the African subject and to upgrade [oikodome] the institutional basis of its sociocultural practices. In this respect, Christianity was a central instrument. For Mudimbe, the attempt to indigenize Christianity can be read as “a political generalization of the sign of the other” (ibid., p. 14). From this charged political and discursive site, Mudimbe also traces the origins of modern African philosophy, its different ideological orientations— ethnophilosophy for instance—and its articulations by means of geography. He concludes by stating, “African philosophy [which is thought, sought, defined, and affirmed by itself] is diverse and multiple” (ibid., p. 51). On the question of the multiplicity, Mudimbe may well have been speaking of his texts since the ingredients of heterogeneity, play, excess, and heterology are central to his textual practices. His texts articulate the theory and practice by which African philosophy can continually interrogate and redefine its own boundaries. Just as he explores the boundaries of the subject in discourse, he also traces the appearance of the body in some of its more organic forms, such as

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in the ways in which it assumes its own peculiar gift of agency even within the parameters of the text. An appearance of the body: The body of king incarnates the paradoxical encounter of endogamy and exogamy. It denounces itself as the symbolic locus in which nature espouses culture, the disorder of forests faces the conventional norms of a social order, the primacy of laws overflows in its own negation. . . . the ambiguous body of the king encompasses these two poles. One, the negative, is linked to the memory of beginnings and incestuous unions. In the royal ritual, its activity [bulopwe, or the sacred blood of royalty] takes place outside the inhabited space, on the margins of the society, in “the house of unhappiness”; it is “a suffocating environment, without communication with the external world in the sociological sense, and without any opening in a formal sense.” The second [the bufumu, or political authority] and human survival. (Ibid., p. 75) This passage accomplishes several things. First, it reinscribes the private and public distinction within the framework of a tribal culture and the different ways by which it can be problematized. Second, it suggests the ways in which the reality of gender mediates between these separate realms. Finally, it suggests that the mediations between private and public, nature and culture, dark and light, and male and female can only be conceived in terms of flows, continuities, and problematic ruptures, and not by a mandate of rigid dualisms. In this way, we are encouraged to think of the body in terms of a diverse range of variables that loom beyond its physical limits, employed as a mobile metaphor to include land and perhaps culture, or the ways in which it continuously reassembles itself within and beyond the limits of ideology. We are also compelled to rethink the multiple ways in which the body recuperates its organicity even under hideous conditions that ordinarily would discourage it. The body, Mudimbe’s text suggests, is always on a perpetual quest to transcend its physical limits and this stance is transgressive. Before we examine how the figure of woman is articulated in his text, it is necessary to note how Mudimbe points out that the phenomenon of gender pervades the cosmological sphere. In his chapter, “Creation, History and the Sex of Beings,” Mudimbe demonstrates how the elements—air, wind, water, and earth—are all mediated by dynamics of gender. This includes the forests, birds, trees, and animals. Beyond woman or man, gender exists giving the universe its myriad forms and investing the rhythms of life with its flows, transformations [metanoia], and its pulse. Maweja—the name of the Supreme Being—”is simultaneously father and mother” (ibid., p. 111). What this means is that the Luba cosmological scheme is marked by an elemental hermaphroditism, an existential and cosmological condition that Mudimbe’s texts are often able to draw from as signs depicting excess, heterogeneity, and

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transgressivity. The articulation of these issues creates a resonance within his discourse that we hardly find in other African philosophical texts. Under the Luba cosmological scheme: A female always includes a junior male side, and a male possesses in itself a discreeter female aspect. In sum, the body of Maweja’s creatures is always hermaphroditic, or simultaneously male and female. Yet the male has precedence over the female by virtue of its intrinsic qualities. These are, in the tradition rendered in three categories: aggressiveness and imperiousness; fullness, toughness, and sharpness; violence and strength. The tradition opposes them to the order of the female’s qualities: passivity and fecundity; roundness, hollowness, and welcoming; and mildness and beneficence. (Ibid., p. 112) Later, Mudimbe writes: man needs the woman in order to evolve from primitiveness to an agriculturalist culture. The woman, on the other hand, is from the outset depicted as dependent on the man, who appears as the master of a history in the making. She says to the man: Vidye sent me and told me, “Go and give birth” summing up an essential vocation which is the condition of human survival. (Ibid., p. 131) Finally, Mudimbe comments on the usual fate of a newly married woman that is a poignant depiction of gender relations among the Luba: She might be fourteen or fifteen years old, but with the consent of the two families, she will become automatically an adult and fully responsible for a husband, his home, his tradition, and the families hope, his children. Nobody invites her to become a subject of a possible history in the making. On the contrary, she has to promote the respectability of her original family by practicing an ordinary life which fits into a discourse of obedience. A master charter is given to her as bride; it specifies and individualizes her major duties and his family in so doing maintains the configuration of a patrilineal tradition. (Ibid., p. 139) This marks an end to Mudimbe’s discussion of the place and destiny of women among the Luba. Once situated within the patrilineal signifying economy, she is cast as the junior partner and the discourse of cosmological hermaphroditism becomes muted, if not completely silenced. As he appears to suggest, the banality of ordinary life disrupts the cosmic unity of the Supreme Being and inscribes an economy of gender based on a monologic form of binarization: male and female. Parables and Fables, ends with an analysis of Peter Rigby’s Persistent Pastoralists: Nomadic Societies in Transition (1985)

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which has little to do with Mudimbe’s previous preoccupations, as some might be tempted to believe. But this incursion, in a way, sits well with the understanding of writing as an engagement with rupture and transgression. Mudimbe introduces a quite novel issue; hermaphroditism and its reconfiguration of gender within the African context. Hermaphroditism, in this case, is a central motif in the myth of creation and the beings and organisms that are generated through it. In tending to the trace of woman, he ruptures a profound silence after which the figure of woman acquires a distinctive kind of circulatory power. This circulatory mobility submerges the subject, body, and the text within a mode of signification that evolves in serial and continuous forms, in terms of eddies and flows. The Idea of Africa (1994), Mudimbe’s other major text, interrogates other borders of liminality using the techniques he had established in his two previous texts. In a sense, this text reads like a contemplation of the tracks explored by the two other texts as a means of attaining a kind of synthesis. This particular discursive trajectory includes the pursuit of the discourse of mastery on the one hand, and the celebration and accommodation of its deconstructive negative, on the other. These two divergent tendencies are part of what give Mudimbe’s texts their exceedingly plural character. In the concluding segment of the text, he writes: To sum up the essentials of the book, two things appear clear. The first is the complexity of the idea of Africa and the multiple and contradictory discursive practices it has suscitated and which, I am afraid, are not all well and explicitly described, or even suggested, in this contribution. I would like to believe that my focus on perfectly unrepresentative texts [such as the fable on Hercules, and Burton’s treatise on melancholy] and on theoretical issues [as in the case of cultural relativism and that of primitive art], despite its limitations, shows at least one possible way of filtering out an idea of Africa from an immense literature and complex debates. (Ibid., pp. 212–213) But the initial tone of the text is far from the concluding sense of modesty. It begins as a text consumed by a quest for mastery: In this work, I proceed from a French translation by Blaise de Vigenere (1614) of the Greek Philostratus’s Icones and from the Englishman Robert Burton’s treatise on melancholy (1621) to a synthetic survey of the Greek contacts with the continent, to issues of relativism, to the Greek paradigm and its power, and finally to the politics of memory. I also consider the present-day reactivation of Greek texts by Black scholars and discussions of “ethnological reason,” primitivism, and colonial “domestication.” Finally, I face a contemporary predicament: which idea of Africa does today’s social science offer? (Ibid., p. xii)

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128 Then he states:

The Idea of Africa is both the product and the continuation of The Invention of Africa insofar as it asserts that there are natural features, cultural characteristics, and probably, values that contribute to the reality of Africa as a continent and its civilizations as constituting a totality different from those of, say, Asia and Europe. (Ibid., p. xv) These passages reveal the sympathies that influence the text: formed by the trajectories that mark the divergent paths of both The Invention of Africa and Parables and Fables. The discursive concerns and constitution of The Idea of Africa are in turn shaped by these two different trajectories. In this way, the texts inaugurate varying degrees of hermaphroditism as a recurrent theme, but The Idea of Africa exceeds the bounds of its singularity by inviting readings in relation to the two other texts and in so doing establishes a doubling of its hermaphroditism, and a marked intensification of its celebration of excess. In all of Mudimbe’s anthropological and philosophical readings a preoccupation remains central; the figure, condition, and fate of the savage, the colonized, and the native. This figure is usually exhumed by an archeological operation which involves a deep immersion in the colonial library. In The Idea of Africa, this excavatory mode of scholarship reaches its limits. For instance, the dark Africanized figure of the Pygmie is represented: the Pygmies, who are qualified as “children of the earth,” that is, those who live according to the passions of the body, completely subservient to its pleasures and passions, and who are “at the bottom of the human scale just before the apes.” (Ibid., p. 4) We are constantly reminded of the entrenched Western intellectual tradition that promoted: the theme and the insistent image of the African continent as a “refused place” . . . a hot piece of land on which pathetic beings live on roots, herbs, and camel’s milk; a monstrous place and, therefore, . . . a place where madness and melancholia reign supreme. (Ibid., p. 9) For Mudimbe, these intellectual and historical moorings are always the essential starting point to begin the recovery of the figure of the African subject even for an analysis of contemporary epochs and phenomena. The entire construction of the African subject in relation to the post-Enlightenment project of modernity has taken shape under a looming shadow, the figure of the savage:

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The “savage” [Silvaticus] is the one living in the bush, in the forest, indeed away from the polis, the urbs; and by extension, “savage” can designate any marginal being, foreigner, the unknown, whoever is different and who as such becomes the unthinkable, whose symbolic or real presence in the polis, or the urbs appears in itself as a cultural event. (Ibid., p. 15) But darkness connotes not only barbarity; it also has profound reverberations in the fields of gender and sexuality: In Crete, young men were called skotioi because, by age-status, they belonged to the world of women, living “inside” their quarters, and were thus defined as members of an “inside” world as opposed to the “open” world of adult citizens. The basic meaning of skotioi is “dark” and the word is often found in expressions qualifying persons who are “in the dark,” living “in secret,” in sum, “in the margin” of the politeia or condition and rights of a full citizen. (Ibid., p. 80) By focusing on the theme of sexual inversion, Mudimbe reconfigures the race and sex dynamic thereby introducing an interesting dimension, and by employing references from classical scholarship, he broadens the concept of darkness. The colonial body was a vulnerable site for colonial power and in this regard, it is useful to note, “not only was colonial toponymy a radical reorganization of an ancient site and of its political makeup, but, more important, generally, it indicated the invention of a new site and body whose routes and movements reflected a new political economy” (ibid., p. 134). Also, a crippling phobia lurks within the always problematic configuration of race and sex, as expressed in the eighteenth century by a French Count, Arthur de Gobineau, in which “(a) there is a connection between the degeneration of a race and the decay of a civilization; (b) in all mixed races, the lower race becomes dominant; (c) the race of ‘princes’ of ‘Aryans’ is biologically in danger of extinction” (ibid., p. 100). Mudimbe mentions the important race and sex configuration without fully developing it by exploring how it might relate to the constitution of the African subject and this is an issue I intend to dwell upon during the later stages of this chapter. But let us restate briefly his contributions to questions of gender, and perhaps of sexuality. Mudimbe’s texts establish an interesting tradition away from a dominant analytic tendency within the anglophonic divide of Africa which never fully interrogates the Law of the White Male Philosophical Father in ways that put the issue of gender into focus. Within this dominant anglophonic tradition, several of its characteristics—the unitary subject, linear narrative, paternal authority, eidos (form), arche (origin), telos (end), and aletheia (truth)—often lead to the exclusion of a rigorous interrogation of topics on gender and sexuality. They are more flawed than Western texts that espouse the same characteristics since they are left uncritiqued by

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alternative and oppositional cultural traditions and movements. For instance, the language and consciousness relationship which was powerfully rearticulated by Heidegger, and which is persuasively addressed by feminist theory and contemporary African literature, is not examined comprehensively by analytic traditions of African philosophical discourse. For instance, a publication by Olusegun Oladipo (2002), not only celebrates the work of the prominent figure of the school of logical positivism in Africa, but also does not succeed in moving beyond the founding problematics of modern African philosophy. In short, new directions and issues are basically lacking in a text that claims to identify a “third way” in contemporary African thought. However, Mudimbe’s corpus signifies a break in mainstream African thought by: (1) espousing an entirely different notion of, and relationship with, language and textuality, which rupture the authority of the phallocentric text; (2) interrogating the figure of woman, most especially in Parables and Fables, and how it contributes to processes of subjectivation in Africa in everyday life; (3) providing an analysis of hermaphroditism not only as a cosmological principle but by contributing to its doubling and its conceptual possibilities; and finally, (4) suggesting a historical framework by which the race and sex dynamic can be rearticulated. These qualities endow Mudimbe’s texts with a truly revolutionary aspect that is often ignored. Mudimbe’s text, Parables and Fables, not only avails itself of elements of non-linearity, but also positions itself by upsetting the structure of the classic patriarchal text. However, this mode of subversion is not exactly continuous, as his equally unusual reading of a book of Marxist anthropology ought to demonstrate. We can extend Mudimbe’s analyses of the sex and race couplet even further. Several arguments demonstrate, “the tropics provided a site for European pornographic fantasies long before conquest was on the way, with lurid descriptions of sexual license, promiscuity, gynecological aberrations, and general perversion marking the Otherness of the colonized for metropolitan consumption” (Stoler, 2002, p. 43). Colonized spaces in Western lore were both feminized and eroticized, “Africa and the Americas had become what can be called a porno-tropics for the European imagination—a fantastic magic lantern of the mind onto which Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears” (McClintock, 1995, p. 22). With the colonial conquest, these fears and fantasies were explored on the land and body of the colonized. For instance, on getting to the New World, “[Amerigo] Vespucci and his crew simply indulged native women’s desires by providing as much opportunity of copulating as they could muster” (Nagel, 2003, p. 66). Colonial domination was not just political and economic in its multiple dimensions, but the political economy of sex and its management was also quite crucial to the colonial quest and its functioning. Next, I will explore the race and sex nexus in more detail, expanding the themes of Blackness, feminization and femininity, and heterology.

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3. Anxious Moons: The Mesh of Race and Sex Matriarchy [thelukrates] and darkness share a sort of metaphoricity, and so do race and sex. In the Greek polis, the Amazons existed away from the more dominant forms of public culture and so their mode of existence was associated with “darkness” and “barbarity” and this conceptual relationship can be traced to the Black subject using a similar assortment of tropes. The metaphoricity between matriarchy and darkness becomes stronger when it is claimed that the Amazons originated in Africa (Mudimbe, 1994, p. 87). In Africa, precolonial forms of matriarchy were said to be dominant until Judeo-Christian and Anglo-Saxon forms of marriage on the one hand, and Islamic culture on the other, undermined those forms. (For a recent exploration on this theme, see Nzegwu,1996; Diop, 1974a; b). As demonstrated by Gobineau in his treatise, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1884), a profound anxiety marks the relationship between race and sex. For instance, the Jewish progroms in the mid-twentieth century is just another horrendous reflection of this historic anxiety and phobia. This anxiety and phobia continues to be reflected in a wide range of ways. (For Afrocentric reflections of these attitudes, see Richard Poe, 1997. For an even more specific and recent account, see Randall Kennedy, 2003. Also, racial phobia dates back to ancient Greece as demonstrated in Herodotus, 1954). To return to the ancient fear that matriarchy breeds, it has been said: The rule of women constitutes a problem. It can only exist on the margins of the Greek and Roman politikon, as could a city with Douloi [slaves] in power. There is a well-known statement by Aristotle in his Poetics: “Both a woman and a slave can also be good; but a woman is perhaps an inferior being—and a slave is utterly worthless.” (Mudimbe, 1994, p. 90) The patriarchal order of the period sought to undermine matriarchy by subterfuge: The young men have been asked by their elders to encamp on the margins of the Amazons’ area and to imitate carefully whatever the Amazons did. “If the women pursued them, then not to fight, but to flee; and when the pursuit ceased, to come and encamp near them.” The young men have been asked to “feminize” themselves, and the Amazons symbolize what in the polis is a normative ‘masculinity’ and here is a thelukrates or a women’s rule and dominion. (Ibid., p. 84) Regarding the classical coupling of sex, gender, and race: the young men [neotatoi] are in a situation which is structurally similar to that of skoitioi (young men not yet adult, seen as still of the dark), the

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Classical patriarchal culture devised elaborate schemes to subvert the rule of women [thelukrates], which it viewed as an unacceptable form of sociopolitical organization. Young men enlisted to undermine the culture of matriarchy were relatively powerless within the context of the public culture of the Greek polis. Finally, matriarchy connoted “darkness” and “barbarity” and the young men who are enlisted to subvert it were equally devalued because they had not yet been initiated into the rituals of a masculine public culture. A devalued class of people was deployed to undermine a feared and devalued subculture. This classical coupling of sex, gender, and race has been carried over into contemporary times with virulence, beginning with the enlightenment project of modernity which marked some peoples of the globe, especially in Africa, Asia and the Americas, as unfit for citizenship and modern existence. The denigration of the Black subject became a vast, systematic project within the Western intellectual context; figures such as Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and David Hume were great racists (Gates, Jr., 1992; wa Thiong’o, 1981). Arjun Appadurai (1996) also shares interesting accounts of how the Indian subject was refashioned through the coercive instrumentality of colonialism and modernity. At this juncture, I will make some conceptual linkages; to trace the quite interesting relationships between colonialism and imperialism, race, sexuality, and gender, and to suggest some of the ways in which they are patterned after varying social mosaics and historical conditions. I offer the suggestion that this triadic structure of sex, gender, and race is built into powerful conceptions or narratives of sociohistorical processes that only transform the complexion of those processes without disrupting their essential dynamics. As social processes become more complex, so does the triadic structure that has remained in place. While there are interesting accounts of this structure, such as McClintock (1995), still we must continue to refine our interpretations of this lingering structure. The evolution of the figure of the African woman from the epistemologies of nativism and barbarity, epochs and processes of colonialism, through the enlightenment project, and into processes of internal colonialism is quite an amazing one. Also, this evolution can be linked to the construction of a global and general sexual economy. This interesting history is what I will trace. The figure, or rather, the shadow of Sarah Baartman is a potent source to establish different kinds of conceptual relationships between the figure of the female African subject, race, and sexuality for the understanding of a particular kind of sexual economy: Sara Bartman was a Khoisan woman, born in the Cape of present-day South Africa in the early 1790s. In 1810, she was brought to London,

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England, and there exhibited to the general public. The reason she was exhibited, that is, the primary object of interest to the general public, was what was perceived to be the abnormal size of her buttocks. (Abrahams, 1998, p. 220) By her figure, the feature known as steatopygia (possessing protuberant buttocks) becomes instrumental in constructing a general economy of sexuality as Baartman’s unusual steatopygic attributes, situate before the Western gaze, a site upon which to formulate a series of discourses pertaining to Black sexuality and to institute a binary model between the Black subject and the White subject in terms of a human and animal dichotomy. It may be argued that racism and Black sexuality developed jointly (ibid., p. 223). Similarly, imperialism gained tremendous momentum within the context of this human and animal dichotomy and renewed the urge to civilize a “savage” people who were further bestialized by an unrestrained sexuality. Even when Black men had gained a degree of assimilation into English society in the nineteenth century, the Eurocentric discourse that coupled race and sexuality assumed a more potent dimension as: Black men became the embodiment of the sexualized beast, which White, and particularly working-class, women could not resist. Black women, however, were more savage than the men, so bestial that their men would choose a White woman in preference to them. This was the genesis of a process that culminated in the ideal of White womanhood. (Ibid., p. 229) More poignantly, “the only alternative to the desexualized, domesticated gender role dictated for White women was to become the sexual savage made physical in the exhibition of Baartman and the many ‘Venuses’ of color who succeeded her” (ibid., p. 230). The settler colonization that formed the basis of the American continental empire also featured the combustible tropes of race and sex and this conjuncture had a defining impact on its sexual economy. The colonizers engaged in a form of cultural mediation by dealing with “indigenous women whose knowledge, prestige, skills, and sexual services benefited the men” (Janiewski, 1998, p. 58). But the social structure and the sexual economy were also constructed by class, which eventually led to the social construction of gender roles: Defined ideologically as the opposite of the “gentle tamer” image of the settler woman, White prostitutes were featured as the “public” woman, the “sexualized” female in a sort of sexual market that valued women according to a “combination of race, ethnicity, education, sociability, sexual skill, and age” and gave the greatest rewards to “attractive” women, usually White, who dressed well, acted like ladies, and

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Within this general sociosexual economy, the patriarchal mode of signification allocated the issues of domesticity and nurture to women, while men dominated the spheres of politics and the intellect. Also: propertyless men, African Americans of both sexes, and Native Americans were excluded from the masculine prerogatives of power and often from the “respect” accorded White women as segregation, antimiscegenation laws, and discriminatory land-owning patterns “institutionalized racial-sexual frontiers.” (ibid., p. 60) In this manner, the social, racial, and sexual economy was constructed in the American continental empire. However, there are other nations and continents that experienced a similar pattern of racial and sexual economy with equally far-reaching consequences. In colonial Africa, the cruelty of the phallic economy operated beyond the bounds of all forms of constitutional rationality, and it was especially distinctive for its arbitrariness, grotesqueness, and excessive violence: It is through the phallus that the colonizer is able to link up with the surrounding world. The lieutenant selects, among the virgin girls, the ones who have the lightest skin and the straightest nose. The interpreter orders that they be taken to the flood plain and thoroughly cleaned all over, especially beneath the cache-sexe. For are they not too dirty to be eaten raw? Without a phallus, the colonizer is nothing, has no fixed identity. Thanks to the phallus, the colonizer’s cruelty can stand quite naked: erect. A sliver of flesh that dribbles endlessly, the colonizer’s phallus can hardly hold back its spasms, even if alleging concern about tints and odors. Taut as a bow, it sniffs everywhere, uncovers itself, strikes out, grates, knocks, and moans. It never wilts until it has left its stream of milk, the ejaculation. To colonize is, then to, accomplish a sort of sparkly clean act of coitus, with the characteristic feature of making pleasure and horror coincide. (Mbembe, 2001a, p. 175) It is remarkable that the postcolonial state in Africa inherited the violences of the colonial regime and “the poscolony is, par excellence, a hollow pretense, a regime of unreality [regime du simulacra]” (ibid., p. 108). But this

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total appropriation of the violence of the colonial structure by the postcolonial state is also reflected within the sexual field in which the phallic economy becomes even more lawless, mixing its forms of brutalization with strands from the precolonial world and developments from modernity. The demonization of Africa in discourse has most certainly not abated; for example, Paul Theroux (2003) makes an attempt to outdo Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In more precise terms: The male ruler’s pride in possessing an active penis has to be dramatized, through sexual rights over subordinates, the keeping of concubines, and so on. The unconditional subordination of women to the principle of male pleasure remains one pillar upholding the reproduction of the phallocratic system. (Mbembe, 2001a, p. 110) In other words, “pumping grease into the backsides of young girls” (ibid., p. 110). However, the violences of the postcolony do not appropriate modern forms of rationality in any systematic manner; these account for its excessive theatricality, grotesqueness, and Hobbesian brutality. In many respects, technologies of domination and abjection, even in their crude forms, pervade the sexual field, and are a legacy of the colonial modes of brutal subjectification. There are other ways of exploring the race and sex dichotomy, for instance, the nation, in its recent formation as a project of twentieth-century modernity, and within the context of its supposed rationality, employed a form of sexual politics that legitimated the oppression of women during the Second World War. The case of Korean women under Japanese oppression comes to mind. These women, who were called “comfort” women, were forcefully conscripted by the Japanese military to provide sexual services to soldiers. In 1991, they brought a suit against the government seeking apologies and compensation for their ordeal during the war. This exploitative sexual economy was not a purely foreign affair as it was also encouraged at the domestic level as well so “while all non-Japanese were treated as ethnic/racial inferiors, Japanese women themselves were discriminated against and sexually abused” (Yoneda, 1998, p. 239). Today, Japanese men often go on “sex tours” in Southeast Asian countries in order to buy sex from prostitutes. There have been reported cases of Japanese men who have gone to the Philippines, impregnated the women and then simply left. In addition, there are many cases where Thai and Filipina women have been brought to Japan and forced into prostitution. (Ibid.) Presently, the plight of the Korean women broaches a significant contemporary issue; the discourse of reparations which increasingly is framed in universalistic terms. The discourse on reparations and related matters is be-

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coming more sophisticated with the passage of time. See for instance, Spelman (2002) where she explores the question of wo/man as Homo reparans (the species that fixes). African women have had to confront all kinds of oppression as well. In both traditional and modern settings, there are formidable structures of repression in place. There is, to begin with, the general demonization of the female: “Vagabond,” “prostitute,” “wayward,” “unruly,” “indecent, “ and “immoral” are just a few of the terms used to label and stigmatize women whose behavior in some way threatens other peoples’ expectations of the way things ought to be. (Hodgson and McCurdy, 2001, p. 4) So the levels of oppression are what ought to be demarcated next. The crisis of global capitalism has, in some ways, resulted in what has been termed the “crisis of masculinity,” which assumes quite interesting dimensions within the African continent (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2000b, p. 31). Sheer economic necessity is changing the arrangements within the domestic space, which in some cases has resulted in far greater economic power for women. For instance, in Gambia, many women have become gardeners to confront harsh economic conditions: some men, when they are asked about their wives, they will say, “She is no longer my wife; she has a new husband.” The phrase, “She has gone to her husband” [Mandika a taata a ke ya], used by men to indicate that their wives were not at home, but working in their gardens became a shorthand expression marking women’s neglect of marital responsibilities; it demonized gardeners as bad wives. (Schroeder, 2001, p. 88) So in Gambia, in the semi-rural and traditional sector, women still confront serious discrimination in spite of their solid wealth-gaining activities. In more traditional and colonial contexts, such as colonial Asante, women were forced to marry, often against their wishes, to stem all kinds of moral panics, including venereal disease and the shifting of the traditional bases of social and economic power (Allman, 2001). (For further information on this scenario, see Lovett, 2001). In contemporary times, the challenge of global capitalism not only transformed the character of the domestic space but also granted women far greater mobility in terms of seeking better means of survival. Nowhere is this situation more evident than in Lesotho, where labor migration severely ruptured the domestic space, thereby forcing women to leave for the shanties, towns, and mines of the Free State and Transvaal. This increased mobility also extended to the sexual domain and led to “the virtual institutionalization of not only male but also female adulterous relationships” (Coplan, 2001, p. 191).

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Africa exhibits a variety of sexist oppression that is defined by terms of geography, culture, economics, history and religion. But perhaps the most graphic, and the most disturbing, of these are related to the stereotypes of the postcolony where one is forced to think in terms of: the Ministers who explore virgins on hotels beds, and the priests who turn somersaults over the “deep behinds” of young girls and, while digging a “delicious void in their bellies, make them cry out the final ho-hihi.” This not to mention the real “kings of the bush”—the prefects and sub-prefects, police officers and gendarmes—who have practically unlimited rights over those in their charge (droits de cuissage). (Mbembe, 2001a, p. 126) In regions of the continent plagued by war, genocide, and poverty, a most brutal economy of violence informs and perpetuates the phallocentric regime which reigns with an equally brutal randomness. However, this disturbing situation must also be read against the practical and intellectual efforts of women to subvert different kinds of sexist oppression. 4. Gynocritical Musings As for gynocritical work, it began with the necessary task of gathering information . . . . (Suleiman, 1990, p. 19) The development of feminist thought and practice in Africa has been quite problematic and interesting. To be sure, its history is marked by the usual antagonisms from patriarchal culture, including all sorts of institutional and organizational problems and the problem, within the African feminist movement itself, of relating theory to practice. This set of problems is the focus of this section, or how to create a vibrant feminist discourse within a context of contradictory development. In my view, Molara Ogundipe-Leslie’s work is symptomatic of this problem. The second approach relates to the problem of constructing a feminist discourse at the purely theoretical level. For this approach, a provocative essay by Nkiru Nzegwu will serve our purposes. There are several texts by feminists and different authors dealing with the questions of female empowerment in Africa, at the practical and theoretical level; these include works by Ifi Amaduime (1987a; b); Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi (1996); Madonna Owusuah Larbi (2000); Nzegwu (1994; 1997; 1998; 1999; 2000); Susan E. Babbitt and Sue Campbell, eds. (1999); L. Amede Obiora (1994); Oyeronke Oyewumi (1997a, 1997b, 1997c, 1997d); Robert O. Collins, ed. (1993); Fatou Sow, Ayesha Iman, and Amina Mama, eds. (1997); Margaret Strobel (1998); and Aili Tripp (2000). While this is not an exhaustive bibliography, it gives an idea of the issues, debates, and orienta-

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tions that motivate feminist discourse and practice in Africa and some of the figures central in this regard. Ogundipe-Leslie states that her text is much-needed in the context of “African literature, women’s studies, literary studies in general, culture, politics, critical thought, social action” (1994, p. xiv). In many respects, it recounts the issues involved in constructing an active women’s movement as part of the drive toward modernization in a postcolonial setting. These issues and problems are present in entrenched phallocentric practices and structures on the one hand, and the women’s movement itself on the other. Oftentimes, this situation creates a backlash against African feminisms. Sometimes, some African women feel they have to apologize for being feminists. For instance, what is one to make of this view: I have since advocated the word “Stigwanism,” instead of feminism, to bypass these concerns and to bypass the combative discourses that ensue whenever one raises the issue of feminism in Africa” (ibid., p. 229). The term is an acronymn for Social Transformation Including Women in Africa. This particular effort attempts to do many things, of which two especially stand out. First, at the intellectual level, which is broader than it appears, an effort of decolonization is required which will entail: (1) a rigorous questioning of the different phallocentric regimes within the continent; and (2) an equally spirited advocacy of counter-phallocentric alternatives, together with a demonstration of why they can turn out to be viable programs. This approach is necessarily multifaceted. Perhaps its multidimensionality vitiates its overall impact as an intellectual discourse. This effort has to be made in relation to urgent practical concerns. The challenges of the African woman have been put in this manner: “One might say that the African woman has six mountains on her back: one is oppression from outside (colonialism and neocolonialism?), the second is from traditional structures, feudal, slave-based, communal etc., the third is her backwardness (neo-colonialism?); the fourth is man, the fifth is her color, her race; and the sixth is herself.” (Ibid., p. 28) This demanding multidimensionality is reflected; the conflation of theoretical matters together with the demands of praxis marks Ogundipe-Leslie’s text and it is never completely resolved. The intellectual is required for unrelenting efforts of social activism and the activist must find a suitable intellectual frame from which to act. Ogundipe-Leslie recognizes the key problems. But then, finding solutions for them is also a major problem. She recognizes, “the need to ‘humanize the language of discourse,’ to ‘de-masculinize’ it and find androgynous and generic terms to discuss what concerns and affects both men and women in society” (ibid., p. 24). However, no sustained attempt to do this is demonstrated in the text. As feminist theory and all kinds of decolonization and deconstruc-

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tive projects have shown, language is an imperative site for the constitution of identity and a locus of hegemonic power. The whole concept of écriture féminine is a bold and inventive response to this conception of language. Ogundipe-Leslie recognizes this but does not deal with it in any convincing and sustained way. She also writes: sexual orientation is certainly one area that has not been opened for research or discussion. In some countries of Africa, the death penalty awaits gay people; in others, the state does not persecute them. The experiences of sexual orientation in traditional arrangements require discovery still. (Ibid., p. 15) Here she identifies a major problem that until the present times lingers. Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe (2001) may be the first major collection devoted to African sexualities. It points out that there is still much to find out about female eroticism and same-sex relationships generally. Also, it argues that sexuality among African females is still viewed in terms of the presence of the penis, which delimits the scope of sexuality generally. However, across the transatlantic divide, studies on same-sex erotic dynamics are becoming more visible and the trend is often related to significant cultural moments in the West where the counterculture was able to make an impact on mainstream culture (Reid-Pharr, 2001). Ogundipe-Leslie’s text identifies many problems women face in Africa, but the level of conceptualization in relation to them is a different matter altogether. These problems are mentioned in a casual manner and left at that level instead of theorizing them or addressing them in a sustained way. We have noted how the issue of sexuality in Africa, although identified as a crucial area of inquiry, is left largely unaddressed. Another important site of inquiry that is unexplored, but mentioned, is the female body. She writes: it is not misogyny that causes African men especially, to fear women’s menses, but a conceptualization of the female reproductive system and excretions and body parts as powerful and potent. Menstrual blood is believed to have the power to disrupt, interfere with, or cause to happen. Thus women’s monthly blood is also considered very effective in making potions.” (1994, p. 214) However, female bodies have to be discussed in relation to so many of the concerns of Ogundipe-Leslie’s text: the patriarchal order, and feminist theory and cultural practices—and they are receiving all kinds of discursive attention. (For instance, see Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco, eds., 2001, which discusses the trend of discursive appropriation of the body and its different manifestations and possibilities.) In the final analysis, some of the crucial ingredients needed for a vibrant feminist discourse—a grounding in

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theory, a discourse on language and its possible reconfigurations, the boundaries of sexuality, the sites of the body and its different appropriations, and finally a consistent interrogation of the relationships between theory and practice—are not utilized in a developed or strategic way. The text displays the different difficulties and challenges of evolving a feminist practice not only by mentioning them but also by its own shortcomings. Nzegwu’s essay, “Questions of Identity and Inheritance: A Critical Review of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s House” needs to be read in a more theoretical way. Appiah’s text (1992) has had a profound influence on African philosophical discourse, cultural studies, and African studies generally. Nzegwu’s essay can be regarded as a feminist critique of Appiah’s text. She makes some general remarks about the overall intent of the book: “one of the principal aims of the project is to articualate by means of various literary strategies a transnational, transracial, new identity, which is comfortable in the social and economic structures of dominance of the Western cultural and intellectual traditions” (1996, p. 175). This is perhaps a fairer starting point for a critique of what is generally a wide-ranging text but instead, a matrilineal critique is directed at the book: The central problem of its preferred conception of family ignores the matrilineal implications of his father’s Asante culture and the damaging consequences of that mode of family structure and organization for his assumed Asante culture. (Ibid., p. 176) This point of entry serves as the basis of her critique of the text. Appiah is primarily concerned with the questions of race, transnational identity, postcolonialism, postmodernism, and several other cultural and literary concerns. These are the central concerns of the text. Instead, the details of the afterword are made to be the pivot of an extensive critique of the entire text. An epilogue serves as the basis for an extended discourse on matrilineality, which was never a preoccupation in the main text. But the operation by which what can, in some respects, be termed marginal gets centralized as a method of reading the entire text is quite intriguing. She writes, “in the epilogue, the most interesting and revealing part of the book.” Nzegwu makes several accusations regarding Appiah’s text. For instance: the crack in his façade provides valuable clues to Appiah’s less than intimate knowledge of Asante culture, of his uneasy stance to the Akan world-sense, and his determined aim to recast Asante culture in the name of “progress” (Ibid., p. 178) She writes, “epistemologically, the value of his description lies in its disclosure of Appiah’s imperialist attitude toward Asante culture and his limited knowledge of Asante family dynamics” (ibid., pp. 178–179). Finally, “I hope

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to expose some of Appiah’s errors of misrepresentation of matriliny and show that these derive from a conceptual bias, and an imperialist construction of knowledge of which he seems unaware” (ibid., p. 179). In view of these misrepresentations, it is Nzegwu’s aim to demonstrate how Appiah not only has a hidden agenda, but also a plan to replace Asante forms of kinship with foreign ones. On that basis, she proceeds on an extended explanation of matriliny within the Asante context. When she finally refers to Appiah’s text, it is to fault its title: “In choosing the title In My Father’s House, as if it were unproblematic, as if patriliny is the norm in Akan culture, Appiah overwrites the explosive issue of patrinealization in Asante society” (ibid., p. 184). Perhaps this is open to legitimate debate. But she does not go on to demonstrate how this accusation works within the body of the text. However, the accusations continue: “Playing the patrineal card to global readers through the title had enabled Appiah to succeed” (ibid., p. 185). Nzegwu’s discussion of nativism is also quite baffling. She writes: “Appiah’s disregard for Akan matrilineal ethos comes from deep-seated reservation of nativism” (ibid., p. 187). However, she does not quite indicate the notion of nativism she is applying and this limits the scope of her critique. Conceptions of nativism vary, not only in terms of definition, but also across academic disciplines. Hountondji offers a searing critique of it, known as ethnophilosophy in African philosophy, in his book, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1996). Recently, Achille Mbembe has been in the forefront of the debates against nativism (2001b). In the first page of Nzegwu essay, she claims that one of the aims of Appiah’s project is to fabricate “a transnational, transracial new Africanist identity.” But then she writes, “twentieth-century hybridity of Africans is problematic for Appiah” (Nzegwu, 1996, p. 188). Finally, she ends the essay by stating: “American, European, African, African-American, and other readers of In My Father’s House need to gain a deeper appreciation of the subtle myriad ways in which neocolonialism and neoimperialism currently thrive in Africa to surplant its traditions with ‘europhonic’ ones” (ibid., p. 199). Just as our reading of Ogundipe-Leslie revealed, Nzegwu’s text demonstrates the problem of constructing a theory and the problematic nature of some theoretical terms: transnational, transracial identities, nativism, and hybridity. These are terms that that are pivotal in Nzegwu’s essay. The consistent theorization of these terms may have resulted in what may have been an engaging theoretical profile which many African texts of a similar intent lack. The technology that reading Nzegwu adopts deserves some attention (see Derrida, 1985 on the politics of reading). She makes the margins, an incident in the epilogue of Appiah’s text, her central concern but there are hardly any references to the essays that make up the collection. She also faults the implications of the text’s title. She is at liberty to carry out such a reading but it is the operation, the techne, by which she reinscribes the margins of the text, a

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wide-ranging one at that, as the entire structure of the text itself that deserves greater explanation. Hers is what one might call an isogetical reading. She takes the question of matriliny as her main focus and point of departure. She also offers a traditional, or perhaps even a nativist, interpretation of matriliny in the Asante context. To explore the different meanings and limits of the concept, we require interpretations that take into account the transfigurative processes of colonialism and deocolonization as part of the greater project of modernity. If she were able to do so, she might have ended up closer to Appiah’s position than she might have imagined. However, this is a problem (theoria) that is common with decolonizing regions and continents. In a not too dissimilar context, part of this problem was framed: There was one version of this argument in Edmund Husserl’s Vienna lecture of 1935, in which he proposed that the fundamental difference between “oriental philosophies” (more specifically, Indian and Chinese) and “Greek-European science” (or as he added, “universally speaking: philosophy”) was the capacity of the latter to produce “absolute theoretical insights,” that is, “theoria” (universal science), while the former retained a “practical universal” and hence “mythical-religious,” character. This practical-universal, philosophy was directed to the world in a “naïve” and “straightforward” manner, while the world presented as a “thematic” to theoria, making possible a praxis “whose aim is to elevate mankind through universal scientific reason.” (Chakrabarty, 1996, p. 226) Despite these kinds of intellectual prejudices, third world and decolonizing regions have been able to crack the problem of theoria and the theorizations of the same. Arguably, there is not an absence of theoria in the Indian intellectual context. For one, “the Indian Buddhist tradition was for the most part insistent on sound argumentation” (Hayes, 1994). Also, many philosophically interesting concepts abound within the annals of classical Buddhist thought, including: all things exist [sarvam asti], nothing exists [sarvam nasti], true [sat], false [asat], good [punya], evil [papa], virtue [dharma], vice [adharma], discontent [duhkha], contentment [sukha], and others. Classical Indian metaphysics and epistemology have consistently been found to be thoroughly developed by several Western scholars, including: Richard P. Hayes (1994), Jay Garfield (1995; 2002), and Richard H. Robinson (1957). Let us examine how the Indian nation handled the woman’s question at the theoretical level. The “women’s question” in India was crafted into the discourse of nationalism as part of the counter-discourse to the colonialist project which sought to recast the Indian subject as “degenerate and barbaric.” The patriarchal order that controlled the nationalist discourse encouraged a system of binarisms not only to restore Indian dignity but also to facilitate the process of decolonization. These dichotomies include inner and outer, spiritual and material, home and world, and feminine and masculine distinctions, and the figure of

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woman played an essential role within this schema. Woman was the repository of virtues, for instance, modesty, and godlike qualities, which are not traits associated with animal nature. It was believed: women cultivate and cherish these godlike qualities far more than men do. Protected to a certain extent from the purely material pursuits of securing a livelihood in the external world, women express in their appearance and behavior the spiritual qualities which are characteristic of civilized and refined society. (Chatterjee, 1996, p. 250) In opposition to this image of idealized woman was the figure of woman in a fallen or undeveloped state: “the ‘common’ woman, who was coarse, vulgar, loud, quarrelsome, devoid of superior moral sense, sexually promiscuous, and subjected to brutal physical oppression by males” (ibid., p. 253). This patriarchal apportioning, defining, and constructing of roles for women are similar to other patriarchal regimes in the West (Abrahams, 1998; Janiewski,1998). Africa had regimes for the construction of gender roles, but what needs to be studied is how the discourse of modernity, nation-building, or decolonization constituted the figure of woman as counter-discourse. Such a configuration must be rare. It has been argued that the patriarchal order in a large part of Africa has no time for the women’s question. Since the patriarchal order has endured all kinds of assaults—slavery, colonialism, and imperialism—all its energies must be directed at fighting these ills (Ogundipe-Leslie, 1994, p. 71). bell hooks writes: Often brilliant thinkers have had such blind spots. Men like Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Paulo Freire, and Aime Cesaire, whose works teach us much about the nature of colonization, racism, classism, and revolutionary struggle, often ignore issues of sexist oppression in their own writing. (2000, p. 41) This is not to suggest that patriarchal regimes that configured the women’s question into different projects of nation-building or decolonizing were less oppressive. However, the framing of the question within the public sphere also meant concepts such as democracy and civil rights had to be enlarged and reframed. The move from the purely domestic realm into the public domain was a significant gain for the feminist movement. It is difficult to think of a nation-building project in Africa that consistently framed the woman question as part of collective rejuvenation on the one hand, and as a central feature of the counter-discourse to colonialism on the other, as is the case with India. However, there are other ways to read the genealogy of feminism in India. “India,” we are told “is sometimes a lid on an immense and equally unacknowledged subaltern heterogeneity” (Spivak, 1993, p. 73). This heterogeneity would affect any reading of the woman question in India. There are readings of

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the issue which reflect several crises and which are in turn influenced by them; the breakdown of the family and its affective symbolizations, and the spectralization of global capital (Appadurai, 2002). Under these circumstances: in modern “India,” there is a “society” of bonded labor where the only means of repaying a loan at extortionate rates of interest is hereditary bond-slavery. Family life is still possible here, the affects taking the entire burden of survival. Below this is bonded prostitution, where the girls and women abducted from bonded labor or kamiya households are thrust as bodies for absolute sexual and economic exploitation. (Spivak, 1993, p. 82) This sociosexual economy not only appropriates the female body and wrecks upon it untold violence, but also deflects the meaning of democracy. A situation arises “where everything works by the ruthless and visible calculus of superexploitation by caste-class domination, the logic of democracy is thoroughly counterintuitive, its rituals absurd” (ibid., p. 87). This angle undoubtedly presents a picture of woman far removed from the noble aspirations of the discourse of Indian nationalism in its heyday, in favor of one more attuned with millennial capitalism. Despite the realities of Indian heterogeneity, class-caste superexploitation, and the spectralization of the logic of capital, “the scramble for legitimacy in the house of theory” continues (ibid., p. 137). The Indian experience demonstrates the different ways in which we can reconfigure the woman question in Africa, or to relate it to the discourses of nationalism and decolonization. This gesture is supposed to enlarge our notion of the public domain, not only in terms of civic participation, but also in terms of its conditions of conceptuality. Second, we must begin to rethink the ways in which the figure of the African female is being deflected and reconstituted by global capitalism on the one hand, and the emerging scenarios of “abnormal” territoriality, state collapse, and different forms of informalization in Africa on the other (see Mbembe, 2000b; Young and Beissenger, 2001). There would be much work in the house of theory in this regard. 5. Renegotiations What forms do the figure of the African female assume in contemporary times? There are very few studies dealing with sexuality and eroticism in Africa, but perhaps this may change with the publication of issues such as Volume 3–4 of CODESRIA Bulletin (1999), which has an extended segment on sexual transformations in contemporary Africa. One can assert the situation is changing for the better. Perhaps T. K. Biaya’s essay, “Crushing the Pistachio: Eroticism in Senegal and the Art of Ousmane Ndiaye Dago” (2002) is a good point to begin and end this discussion since it attempts to locate the constructions of the female figure within the context of discourses of Islamization and modernity, both of which are also structured by an entrenched pa-

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triarchal order. Also, these constructions occur in multimedia: text and image that offer multiple ways of reading the figure. The female figure under late capitalism continues to generate debate and interest: The American artist, Robert Crumb, has made a career of drawing full-bodied female figures which also serve as some sort of commentary on postindustrial culture and therapies of desire. In an interview, he says “all the magazines show those bony, anorexic women. They’re bulimic. They vomit up their food. They all feel bad about their bodies.” He says, “I wonder when the idea of American beauty changed and women got skinny.” Finally, he says “they want to keep women in a state of discontent—constantly going out and buying more shoes and never being fully satisfied with the shoes they buy” (The New York Times Magazine, 30 March 2003). These remarks reveal much about the power structures that control the female figure, not only in the United States alone, but also in a quite large part of the world as a whole. We begin by pondering the implications of this contradictory remark: the body is erotically valued in African societies on the condition that it is not naked but accessorized, properly prepared. The body’s beauty and erotic value are achieved not when it is stripped bare but when it is worked or denatured—for example, by excision, scarification, elongation of the clitoris, and so on. (Biaya, 2002, p. 138) On the basis of this remark, the female body is still imprisoned by the rigidities of African tribal cultures that are more or less unmarked by the intrusions of modernity and technology. To be sure, it is increasingly difficult to conceptualize the female African body’s physicality. The definition of eroticism employed is imprecise. It draws heavily from Western conceptions without quite adopting their preoccupation with the sacred, the profane, and excess. We must bear in mind that eroticism “connotes a tearing, an opening on to something entirely other, the abjection of being before an experience which appears sovereign” (Botting and Wilson, 1997, p. 13). Ousmane Ndiaye Dago takes photographs of nude African women as part of an effort to create a tradition of eroticism in Senegal, following in the footsteps of a Western photographer, Uwe Ommer. But this kind of project is quite problematic on several levels. What informs the morality of the regarding eye? Whose tastes are being served by this activity? By which technologies of power are those sexual objects created? What is the relationship of these images to pornography? (For more on the ambiguities of the photographic image, see Sontag, 2003.) This set of problems is not addressed, but beneath a veneer of clinical evasion, the silenced figure of the African female is glaringly evident. In the African postcolony, we are reminded, “sex, belly, mouth, and violence remain the ingredients of the episteme of command” (Biaya, 2002, p. 140).

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Power exercises its dominance, its barbaric orgy of excess without a self-critical mechanism while its victims wallow as the hapless fodder of a grotesque ecological mishap. The brutal economy of sexuality, which he discusses at length, also works effectively within the modern context where even the colonial urban woman is supposed to exhibit qualities of “submission, good housekeeping, acceptance of the husband’s polygamy or infidelity, and motherhood” (ibid., p. 151). In Dago’s photographs and Biaya’s commentary, the female voice is silenced. Her figure does not participate in the creative process; she cannot interfere in her representation [hypotyposis]. She is rendered powerless. Image and text enforce their technologies of exclusion through processes of silencing. She is never quite allowed to evolve a mode of sexuality outside the phallic structure. Associated with eroticism is sovereignty. In this context, the regarding male eye assumes it is sovereign, but, in truth, is disabled by its narrow limits: Sovereignty involves the ‘unknowing’ that leaves behind, in contempt, the system of value and all its commodified riches, an unknowing linked to laughter as it detaches consciousness and the loss of itself in excess” (Botting and Wilson, 1997, p. 27) Even the regarding eye is impoverished because it loses all metaphoricity and becomes frozen within its own immobile discourse. Its desire imprisons the eroticized female figure but also delimits and devalues the possibilities of desire itself. The oppression begins and ends with sex. Neither Dago nor Biaya is especially concerned with the condition of woman even though she is at the center of their concerns. The battles for freedom are many and “sexual freedom can only exist when individuals are no longer oppressed by a socially constructed sexuality based on biologically determined definitions of sexuality: repression, guilt, shame, dominance, conquest, and exploitation” (hooks, 2000, p. 151). What is the meaning of all this? “Men have a tremendous contribution to make to the feminist struggle in the area of exposing, confronting, opposing, and transforming the sexism of their male peers” (hooks, 2000, p. 83). The crises of traditional structures of power should be apparent enough. We require new definitions of power to enhance mutuality, cooperation, and alternative conceptions and invocations of power itself.

Eight THE POETICS OF CORRUPTION IN A GLOBAL AGE Insofar as it is “philosophical” or “theoretical,” the Greek corpus stretches—for Arendt—from Parmenides to Plato and Aristotle, and then to [Martin]Heidegger. It is characterized by the primacy of truth, theoria and the vita contemplative. Heidegger’s Presocratics, including Anaximander, are modern in Arendt’s eyes. The only genuine Presocratic experience is political experience (an echo of which can still be heard in Aristotle), where the focus is not truth but freedom. For freedom, by definition, is not a philosophical concept: it is an exclusively political concept, indeed the quintessence of the city-state and of citizenship. Our philosophical tradition of political thought, beginning with Parmenides and Plato, was founded explicitly in opposition to this polis, and its citizenship. (Cassin, 1990, p. 39)

1. The Garb of Immanuel Kant The extract above, in theoretical terms, is at the center of my subsequent discussion: the irreconcilable tensions between the philosophical and the realm of politics. Since philosophy prides itself on having rigorous methods of inquiry, since its innate sense of wonder compels it to articulate discourse at its margins and beyond its frontiers (metaphysics), since as Jacques Derrida states, it poses questions to itself that it cannot answer and then it sometimes shows itself in a bad light (1978). In short, my subsequent discussion will highlight the limits of a particular kind of philosophizing, the exhaustion of theoria, of categorical imperatives in the face of overwhelming social dynamics. Evidently, in a context of rapid social flux, gestures of philosophical formalism and aloofness never fully describe transgressive social landscapes. Instead, they tend to reify the abstract in social processes to the detriment of the “real” dynamics that motivate those processes. Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye devotes an entire chapter in his text, Tradition and Modernity, to the issue of corruption. For him, as a philosopher, philosophy serves as a guiding light, the cognitive apparatus by which to get to the epicenter of the matter. A central part of my purpose is to indicate the limits of his approach and demonstrate how some disciplinary markers, instead of fostering understanding, may engender even more confusion. One of the grave shortcomings of philosophy as a discipline in Africa, as I have repeatedly stressed, lies in framing inappropriate questions, “Does African philosophy exist?” “What constitutes the being of African philosophy?” and others. Otherwise, it adopts counter-productive methodologies such as ethnophilosophy that has encountered severe criticisms (Mbembe, 2001b). The disciplinary conflicts between history and anthropology, and between

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philosophy and anthropology, have become even more pronounced under conditions of contemporary globalization. In his essay, “The End of geography,” Arvind N. Das writes: idea of “nation,” which historians institutionalized over the last few centuries, is also seen to be outdated, like history itself. Instead, the anthropologists seem to prevail over the historians, asserting that it is the a-temporal cross-sectional division of humanity into various ethnicities that is more relevant than the historically evolved nationalities and nations that have hegemonized political-ideological discourse till recently. (2002, p. 34) Lately, in my opinion, philosophy in its extreme pseudo-theoretical form, in its anti-sophistical gestures and its overestimation of its powers, sometimes attempts to describe social processes using the wrong tools. Gyekye states, “political corruption, despite its name, is essentially or fundamentally a moral problem.” He also writes, “political corruption is thus an act of corruption perpetrated against the state or its agencies by persons holding an official position in pursuit of his private or personal profit.” Thereafter, he lists a whole variety of corrupt political practices that do shed light on the broad range of the issues surrounding this topic. For instance, he writes, “graft, fraud, nepotism, kickbacks, favoritism, and misappropriation of public funds are all acts of political corruption” (Gyekye, 1997, p. 193). Gyekye does not limit the scope of his definition to political corruption alone. Business executives, public officials, clerks of all sectors and immigration officials perpetrate corruption: Political corruption can flourish under weak political leadership. For political leaders or top public officials who are weak and can hardly be expected to control subordinate officers tempted by bribes and forms of political corruption, either because, being weak leaders, they do not have the nerve or courage to exert control, or, perhaps, being honest themselves, they have compromised their integrity and moral authority and so cannot discipline others. (ibid., p. 194) Here, he is attempting to maintain the stance of a philosopher, and a committed one at that, who can make insightful comments on the workings of the polity. That is to be expected in philosophy, but philosophers must be cautious about holding boundless expectations in relation to philosophy since an element in the nature of the discipline perhaps prevents it from a humble demarcation of its own limits. Gyekye, in addressing himself to the problem of corruption not only defines it as a philosopher should but also proposes solutions. In the space between the definition of the problématique and the articulation of the solutions we find an entire conceptual region that invites a series of interesting analys-

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es. Has he exhaustively defined corruption? From what context or concatenation of contexts do his definitions emerge? The last question is crucial because the African postcolony that constitutes the primary site of inquiry is a most interesting, if perplexing, site. In addressing ourselves to this particular site, not only do we have to interrogate the different configurations of the social processes taking place therein, we also have to debate the nature of the state and its different problematic trajectories, the forms of life and death that predominate on the continent, and how these forms invite fresh methodological categories to describe these new developments and social processes, and finally, the nature and status of moral philosophy itself. In relation to the last point, not only do we need to situate instruments of abstraction in their most viable context but we also need to address the political economy of moral philosophy in contemporary Africa to be more keenly aware of the appropriateness of our conceptual implements, or the multiple and problematic relationships between theory and society and how they might conceptualize the dynamics of the new. This brings us back to the issue raised in the first quotation in this chapter; that is, the apparent irreconciability of philosophy and political practice. Arendt’s corpus has a sustained focus on the divide between philosophy and political science, such as thinking or philosophy, and conditions of activity in the public sphere or politics; this dichotomy is never quite resolved (1973). Not merely one of theory and practice, this problem also relates to an evident disciplinary impasse, or the running against limits. When a discipline poses to itself questions for which it has no answers, what does it then do? In addressing this important question, Gyekye ransacks the inventory of philosophical tools and comes up with a set of established disciplinary responses. Philosophy, being the mother of all other disciplines, ought to have an appropriate response. In putting the final nail into the coffin, Gyekye states “political corruption is a moral problem and should be grappled with from that standpoint” (ibid., p. 201). For him, “it is a moral pollution of officialdom as well as of the wider society” (ibid., p. 203). According to Gyekye, “the next question is to determine a satisfactory approach to dealing with it” (ibid., p. 205). He does not define precisely what he means by “moral” but we can assume that his stance on the issue is inflected and overdetermined by classical Western thought. Let us examine several interesting points he makes along the way. First, he addresses the nature of political corruption in the politics of traditional Africa. Granted that the institutions of governance and the sophistication of official bureaucracies in traditional Africa were quite limited, Gyekye agrees: it cannot at all be denied that political corruption in the form of receiving and giving bribes or misusing or misappropriating public or communal or lineage goods and resources does exist in the traditional politics and administration in Africa. (Ibid., pp. 201–203)

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In making this assertion, Gyekye has ventured into the historical anthropology of corruption in Africa, a multidisciplinary space, which one would have expected that he would expand. Second, he incorporates a sociological perspective when he writes: I was once told by a fairly senior public official who was seeking an election to a parliament in a country in Africa: “If I get elected, I would seek an appointment as secretary of trade. If I get it, ‘man will I live well.” (Ibid., p. 204) Gyekye makes half-hearted forays into history and sociology in coming to grips with the problem of corruption in Africa. In addition, he discusses the nature of the state, which, from an African perspective is a highly contentious issue. On this he writes: governments are generally perceived as distant or objective entities whose activities have little bearing on the welfare and the daily lives of the citizens, and to whose activities the citizens, in consequence, have very little ideological and emotional attachment. (Ibid., p. 195) This point has a direct bearing on the question of ownership. Figures of authority in Africa are commonly known to privatize the instruments and powers of public office (Ake, 1996). This phenomenon forces us to consider the genealogy of ownership. In times of corporate capitalism, “long-distance nationalism,” as formulated by Benedict Anderson, reprolematizes the notion of the homeland. Writers such as Pico Iyer (2002) have proffered even more radical accounts of what constitutes a home. Gyekye’s comment opens up a large discursive space that we cannot afford to miss because it links the superstructure of the state to the moral economy of corruption in intriguing ways, especially within the African context. My view here is that again, philosophy comes up against its own limits, and there will be more on this later. This question of philosophy colliding against its own boundaries is especially evident when Gyekye addresses the solutions of corruption: “One of the central problems of moral life is the problem of moral weakness, the problem of knowing the right thing and yet doing the wrong thing, of acting against our better judgement (ibid., p. 210). In classical philosophy, Gyekye tells us, “the ancient Greek philosophers called this problem of moral conflict akrasia: moral weakness, weakness of will, incontinence” (ibid.). Gyekye’s primary discursive impulse owes much to the ancient Greek tradition, as is evident in the considerable faith he places on classical canons of rationality. He deduces that rational human beings would always behave in morally just ways. This opinion commendably tries to break the bonds of exceptionalism, to speak of a problem in Africa in the

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broadest possible universalistic terms. But this commendable thrust brings us before another problem that lies at the heart of universalism itself. As noted, one of the well-known shortcomings of philosophy in Africa is its project of ethnophilosophy. Some conceptual breakaways from this dead end have been robust espousals of universalism. Valentin Yves Mudimbe, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Achille Mbembe, to varying degrees and in different ways, have all posited forms of universalism in their conceptualizations of Africa and African topics. For Mbembe, this project encapsulates seeing “the world as a category of thought” (2001b). It also includes a rigorous critique of what he terms “the prose of nativism” (2002). Philosophically speaking, not all terms of universalism are universal. The universal is always mediated by factors that stem from the particular. By extension, the particular invariably creates the conditions of possibility for the universal and vice-versa. These complimentary and contradictory logics are always in motion, defining both the universal and the particular in a field of dialogics. In Gyekye’s particular case, his brand of universalism, in a way, does a disservice to the particular. To be sure, the way in which it does this might be no particular shortcoming of his. Instead it could be argued that philosophy as a discipline has much for which to answer. The next part of this chapter deals with particular local conditions that Gyekye’s mode of philosophizing (mis)represents. Again, I stress that in attempting to get to the roots of this shortcoming, it might be more useful to interrogate the limits of philosophy itself, to call it to order for transgressing its boundaries and for not discovering new conceptual instruments or annexing better-suited disciplinary boundaries. Perhaps the fact of the matter is that philosophy has much to answer for by failing to carry out processes of remapping upon itself and its territories. 2. Freefall Interestingly, corruption in Africa can be read and described in other ways. In relation to Gyekye’s reading of corruption, Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan’s essay, “African Corruption in the Context of Globalization,” is quite instructive from both a theoretical and an empirical angle. First, he reminds us “that anthropology is a discipline concerned with empirical researches and grounded theories” (1999, p. 247). This disciplinary signal, is vital and he agrees with Gyekye: corruption complex includes nepotism, abuse of power, embezzlement, and various forms of misappropriation, traffic in influence, prevarication, délit d'initié [insider trading], abuse of the public purse, etc. (Ibid.) There are no definitional disagreements between Gyekye and de Sardan, but as we will observe, their conceptual trajectories and methods of discursive

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articulation are markedly different, and this difference becomes quite fundamental when viewed from the disciplinary perspective. Before we move on to the differences in approaches, let us note that Gyekye says, “corruption is common to all human societies, even though the frequency and prevalence of its incidence may differ among societies” (1997, p. 195). Similarly, de Sardan points out: corruption is a worldwide phenomenon, but it is not only modern; it has existed from the Roman and Byzantine Empires through to communist and postcommunist eastern Europe, and from the political machinery of nineteenth-century American towns to Mediterranean societies. (1999, p. 248). Perhaps this is why Gyekye disagrees that there is a “culture of corruption” particular to Africa. However, the similarities end there. First, de Sardan informs us that corruption is related to monetarization and commodification. So theoretically, “corruption in Africa today is embedded in collective norms, collective logics and collective identities, and that is the reason for its pervasiveness on a continental level” (ibid.). For de Sardan, it makes sense to discuss corruption in Africa on the basis of regionalization and globalization. These conceptual paradigms are absent in Gyekye’s discussions. In addition, de Sardan demonstrates why North Atlantic forms of corruption differ from African forms. Even within African forms of corruption there are essential differences. “Botswana or Burkina Faso were once said to have very little corruption, while the pervasiveness of corruption in Zaire is unparalleled” (ibid., p. 249). He writes, “there are very different spaces and levels of corruption. I shall distinguish international, regional and local corruption” (ibid.). These crucial distinctions are paradigmatic in the way in which they highlight particular disciplinary practices. Let us examine the different types and distinctions in de Sardan’s analysis of corruption. There is a difference, for instance, between big-time corruption and petty corruption. Major corruption is the type that involves presidents, ministers, directors of important offices, or heads of public corporations, while petty corruption is practiced by policemen, clerks, nurses, customs officers, and others. The fact is, “everyone in Africa, man or woman, peasant or townsfolk, young or old, has routine experience of dealing with corruption (and the like), this being a part of the social landscape” (ibid., p. 250). In Achille Mbembe’s corpus, this routinization of corruption, violence, and processes of brutalization assumes even more dramatic characteristics. We are forced to acknowledge the emergence of an entirely new political economy of violence, exploitation, and domination, in addition to the construction of new public and private moralities to which they give rise. Again, theoretically, these configurations reverberate strongly on the ways in which we perceive and reconstruct events in everyday life. Our discursive episte-

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mologies—in relation to some traditions of African philosophical discourse— have to take these developments into account to remain relevant. De Sardan notes that in Africa, there is often a reluctance to report evident cases of corruption to constituted authorities. Such cases are then left to the realm of rumor and speculation, adding to the moral economy of witchcraft. In most parts of postcolonial Africa, many events that cannot be explained are attributed to sorcery, especially in places where literacy levels are low and in the different sites of the continent’s problematic modernities. In his words, “denouncing to the police a relative, a neighbor, the relative of a friend or of a neighbor—anyone with whom one has a personal tie, even a weak one—is unthinkable: the social disapproval would be too great” (ibid., p. 251). This brings us to forms of sociality to be found in Africa. Some forms of these social networks have assumed transnational proportions. Migrant Francophone trading communities in Johannesburg serve as powerful ethnic and national bases for new immigrants from those communities to be integrated into the host city (see Simone, 2000; Coplan, 1994; 1995). The same can be said of Nigerian traders of Ibo extraction based in South Africa. Studies have indicated how these migrant communities are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their modes of integration and activities but this is at the transnational level. At the local level, these forms of sociality are no less complex, and they are at the heart of the social bond. The injunction to be one’s brother’s keeper is only not biblical in its coloration and impulse but is also linked to primordial origins of ethnicity and nationality. As such, even in an age of excessive bureaucratization and technological surveillance, postcolonial subjects are finding ways in which to bypass complex and advanced social systems to reinscribe the “filiative” and the “affiliative” in often intriguing and unexpected ways. The practice of gift giving is, for example, an interesting site to interrogate how African forms of sociality mediate the dynamics of corruption. In this respect, it is pertinent to note that corruption is linked with bargaining: a commodified form of negotiation regulating almost all forms of exchanges current in Africa. . . .The practice of corruption benefits from this logic of negotiation and bargaining. Not only is corruption in the strict sense of the word an object of bargaining— affecting the form of normal, customary commercial transactions—it also takes the shape of a simultaneous negotiation of rules, their pertinence and modes of interpretation. (de Sardan, 1999, pp. 253, 256) There is verbal sparring involved in the bargaining process associated with corruption, just as it is an established practice to employ middlemen in everyday life to protect oneself from aspects of corruption. At this juncture, we have to bear in mind the difference between African forms of sociality and North Atlantic ones. De Sardan points out that European forms of sociality

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“are clearly inferior, diverse factors—including withdrawal of the nuclear family, confinement within limited circles of friends and close acquaintances, absence of relations between neighbors—have resulted in a weaker sociability in the North than in the South” (ibid.). On the other hand, in Africa: One cannot refuse a service, a favor, a bit of string-pulling or compliance to a relative, neighbor, party comrade or friend. No more ought one refuse the same to someone “sent” by any of the above. The circle of individuals to whom one feels obliged to render services is thus astonishingly wide. The other side of the same coin is that one has a great number of people to call upon. The system thus becomes one of a “generalized exchange of services,” big or small, usually in the shape of an officially illicit favor. (Ibid., p. 258) By extension, one of the worst fates that can befall an individual in Africa is to be devoid of social capital as its weak forms of governmentality, bureaucratization, and economic development, which encourage familial forms of sociality, make chronic patrimonialism inevitable. Social capital in Africa has quite distinct forms. A lucrative government appointment is seen as an opportunity not only to enrich oneself, immediate family, and extended families, but also possibly one’s local community. To refuse a position of authority in Africa “would be a simultaneous show of ingratitude, egotism, pride, naviety and even stupidity” (ibid.). Related to this, there is a blurring of the distinctions between the private and public domains. This lack of distinction in Africa is a feature that can be traced to pre-coloniality where traditional chiefs “were obliged to make a general show of largesse and thereby attract public praise for their generosity” (ibid., p. 260) and in Africa, the transitions between the colonial state and the postcolonial state are not always significant because the colonial state was erected on an epistemology and a foundation of violence which the political elites inherited and hardly modified. De Sardan makes two other points that are of significance here. First, he points out: in Europe, everyday forms of consumption oblige constant dipping into one’s pocket. But everyday forms of sociability shy away from the monetary idiom. In Africa, on the contrary, everyday sociability requires quite a lot of cash. (Ibid.) This view is quite accurate. House-warming ceremonies; “freedom parties” for artisans who have completed their training programs; burials; “washing”; and the purchase of new, and in current times secondhand, automobiles are all social events that require much expenditure. The monetarization of everyday life exerts many pressures on all.

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Given this kind of trajectory, de Sardan’s analysis of corruption in Africa is decidedly more nuanced than that which is found in current approaches in African philosophical thought. In his handling, the anthropology of corruption in Africa leads us to a related set of questions. What is the nature of the state in contemporary Africa and how has its colonial antecedents contributed to its present trajectory? I ask this particular question because Gyekye, in his characterization of the state in Africa, casts it in a quite rational light. But is this the case? In addressing this question we would be able to get a more representative picture of the political economy of morality in Africa. Finally, in addressing the general economy of public conduct, it would be useful to note how the crises of the state have given rise to other non-statist technologies of violence and domination and the particular moralities that this development engenders. Gyekye and de Sardan, in their analyses of corruption, do not do this. I am not saying—especially in the case of de Sardan— that they ought to have done this per se. However, I think it is worthwhile to indicate the emergence of social processes, configurations, and developments that will definitely compel us to rethink what we generally mean by the state, law and order, and the common good. If we are able to cast these terms into the vortexes that are currently transforming African social spaces, they might come to acquire the specificity they often lack in African contexts. John L. and Jean Comaroff draw our attention to what they term “the metaphysics of disorder” in post-apartheid South Africa. They observe: Crime, itself ever more global, looms large in the “new world disorder.” Its forms are becoming increasingly flexible,” copying strategies from the legitimate business world as it constitutes an “uncivil society” that flourishes especially where the state withdraws; hence the ubiquitous role of the mafia in Russia and other post-totalitarian polities which perform, for a fee, services that government no longer provides. These criminal “phantom states” are an ever more prevalent feature of our time. They exist in relation to transnational crime of increasing sophistication, shading imperceptibly into networks of terror that are rapidly replacing conventional military forces as the prime challenge to “national” security. (2002, p. 3) This state of affairs is especially evident in the African postcolony and affects the general economy of conduct in startling and fundamental ways. It means we have to find new conceptual frameworks in which to theorize terms such as corruption, the state, and the common good. Gyekye’s discussions of these allied matters show the limits of his disciplinary approach. De Sardan, on the other hand, opens up a space for even more productive discourse. The type of discourse that de Sardan’s example engenders is the focus of my attention here. These spaces that Gyekye’s discussion excludes, and which de Sardan’s draws attention to, only demonstrate with greater urgency the task before the

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human sciences. There is a pressing need for multivocality and multiplicity in (re)presenting the world, in probing the disjunctures and continuities between the abstract and the concrete in modern existence, between the individual and society, and between the citizen and nation, and how these different configurations are being transformed through impersonal neoliberal processes of commodification and monetarization. There is the need for us to retool our rhetorical and conceptual strategies in dealing with them. Let us turn to the general economy of violence in the postcolony. As mentioned already, the origin of the colonial state is based on violence or what Mbembe terms the dictum of the “commendement.” He defines the character of the postcolony in the following terms: The notion “postcolony” identifies specifically a given historical trajectory—that of society recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the violence which the colonial relationship involves. To be sure, the postcolony is chaotically, pluralistic; it has nonetheless an internal coherence. It is a specific system of signs, a particular way of fabricating simulacra or reforming stereotypes. (2001a, p. 102) In most postcolonies, the violence of the colonial state is usually inherited by succeeding political elites who are prone to the privatization of public authority (see Ake, 1996). In this context, it becomes absurd to act and think within either strictly Athenian or modern regimes of rationality. Those alien regimes of rationality must first be established on lopsided and violent foundations. Let us draw in a few concrete examples. The often-mentioned “crisis of the nation,” the “dissolution of the state,” and “the exit of the state” in many parts of Africa have acquired several dramatic forms. There is also talk about “the terror of the state.” This general state collapse has given rise to the spread of illicit organizations and “uncivil” actors that are usurping the spaces vacated by the state. This has led to the near institutionalization of processes that were formerly regarded as informal. Chronic statist disorder and withdrawal have transformed the state in the postcolony under neoliberal conditions into an anomaly or a chimerical phantom overwhelmed by the violence that produced it and the violence it in turn dispels without an apparently rational motive. Given this scenario, we have to devise new ways of viewing and conceptualizing civil publics in Africa. If, for instance, it has been noted, “the South African underworld is peopled not just by the unemployed, but also by the ‘well-heeled and well-educated’ suggesting that, for a growing sector of the population—above all, young Black men—the gangster lifestyle has a seductive appeal”; then we have to rethink the entire constitution of both civil and uncivil society in Africa” (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2002, p. 7). In other parts of Africa, the spread and entrenchment of uncivil publics is more or less a way of life.

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Mbembe describes the instrumentalization of war as a way of life in which lives and bodies are judged on the basis of value; usually monetary, and supposedly valueless lives are destroyed by both statist and non-state formations in the pursuit of gain (see Mbembe, 2000a; 2003). The cases of Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and even Nigeria bear this out. If the functions and aims of the state have changed this much, then we cannot afford to employ unsuited, conceptual paradigms to describe the forms of life and death prevailing in the African postcolony. In relation to a particular phenomenon of corruption, these new moral and sociopolitical geographies have to be taken into account. I began with a discussion of Gyekye’s treatment of corruption. Gyekye approaches the issue by employing established philosophical trajectories, and in a Socratic manner, he concludes that the problem of corruption is basically a moral one. One needs to possess the strength of will to overcome corrupt inclinations and practices. But in arriving at this conclusion, he takes his milieu—Africa—for granted. His discussion and conclusion are, to put it mildly, removed from their essential context. De Sardan, on the other hand, situates his discourse within a considerably more graphic and identifiable context and the social dynamics that activate the construction, perception, and dissemination of corruption are more clearly addressed. This project of regionalizing and localizing corruption for analytical purposes is quite useful. For any discussion of corruption to make sense, the emerging existential conditions in the African continent—the collapse of the state(s), the informalization of productive sectors, and the gangsterization of everyday life—ought to be taken into account. Considering these disturbing parameters, it becomes evident that most of our descriptive and conceptual paradigms for the emerging configurations in the postcolony need to be modified. Just as the routinization of supposedly corrupt practices and processes of brutalization have become entrenched, new moral loyalties and geographies are emerging from them. The task should be to carry out interrogations of these moral geographies in a representative way. The challenge is to examine the logics of morality in the postcolony and the related issues to which they give rise without the usual old vocabularies which do not have the capability to fully describe them. Even a metaphysic of disorder is usually ensconced within a dynamic, and based on a modus operandi that paradoxically allows for the production of life. The production of life secures its own means of preservation even within the Hobbesian jungle and the violence of its apparently irreversible logic. Communities of crime and social disorder have codes of behavior and modes of loyalty, no matter how rudimentary they may be. In spite of the overwhelming chaos, violence, and decay that mark a significant proportion of African lives on the continent, there are still ways and means of bonding that display characteristics of normalcy. The extreme, and in some ways oppositional, condition would be outright war. How can African philosophical

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thought account for the widespread institutional failures in the African postcolony? Evidently, it would to avail itself of rigorous social research, which Gyekye, as we have seen, does not quite succeed in doing. In this case, African philosophy as a disciplinary practice is not adequate until it discovers the usefulness of interdisciplinarity, and interculturality. At that point, its flexibility and potentialities are bound to increase dramatically. Finally, the process of narrativizing these developments brings us back to a theme I broached at the beginning of this chapter—the limits of some disciplinary enclosures. I have a response to that important theme: in coming up against unproductive limits, we not only miss opportunities and the ways in which to describe how the new occurs, we also contribute in no small manner to the closure of discourse, and to the end of disciplinary practice itself. For an elaboration of this idea, see Wim van Binsbergen (2003). In this evidently ground-breaking book, Binsbergen argues for a new disciplinary symbiosis between advocates, which is nothing short of new disciplinary formation. Mudimbe also constantly concerns himself with negotiating the interface between philosophy and anthropology as evident in his 1988 and 1991 texts.

Nine A POSTCOLONIAL TEXT AND THE AGENCY OF THEORY Ato Quayson’s Calibrations: Reading for the Social (2003) marks a critical moment in African theoretical discourse for several reasons. First, there are no undue essentializations of the African subject, subjectivity, and forms of consciousness; second, there is not the barest hint of unproblematized nativism; and finally, there is a subtle appropriation of a “universal” theoretical inheritance without a lapse into reverse racism, or anti-White, Black racism. All these attributes make it a text for the aspiring multicultural self. Quayson explores literary, aesthetic, cultural, and political texts to unearth how structures of meaning and feeling are constituted in ways that are often unexpected. According to him, his project of calibrations involves “a form of close reading of literature with what lies beyond it as a way of understanding structures of transformation, process, and contradiction that inform literature and society” (2003, p. xi). This theoretical stance immediately unsettles the conventional categories of Blackness and Whiteness as raciological constants. It also problematizes traditional postcolonial discourse by its transgression of disciplinary boundaries to include other parameters that complicate both literary and cultural texts. Paul Gilroy has repeatedly called for conceptual paradigms that move beyond the usual us and them, Black and White, colonized and colonizer, and same and other thematizations of the old colonial order. Interdisciplinarity, by virtue of its conceptual transgressions, cross-cultural interminglings, and paratextual problematizations, acquires a paradigm of post-binarity, or what JeanFrançois Lyotard, in another context, would call complexification. Presently, exercises in calibration are bound to be uneven and are most engaging when motivated by a de-totalizing impulse. Quayson’s theoretical stance is underpinned by the knowledge that modernity and post-coloniality are intrinsically uneven in the ways in which they are experienced and conceived. If modernity and post-coloniality are inherently disparate phenomena, then interdisciplinarity becomes a way addressing such tumultuous diversity. Quayson writes: if interdisciplinarity as a mode of reading attracts me, it is because it captures in a more dispersed and discursive way the nature of translational transactions with which I have intellectually negotiated my view of the world. (Ibid., p. xiv)

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Here, Quayson is alerting us to the existential and conceptual configurations that underpin his subjectivity as an intellectual. Some might argue that this particular subjectivity is a narrow one. However, to ignore it may be yet another lapse into self-defeating marginality and what Gilroy has termed as the “tyrannies of unanimism” (Gilroy, 2000, p. 62). In this era of contemporary globalization, difference and diversity are continuously commodified and de-marginalized to reduce their “unfamiliarity.” So, for subaltern and marginalized collectivities to articulate forms of iconizable subjectivity, they must find paradigms that transgress the usual binary mode of articulation and subjectivity. Not surprisingly, Quayson mentions Zizek as a philosophical beacon because of his famous explorations of “the between surfaces and kernels in terms of the dialectical relations between particularisms and thresholds” (Quayson, 2003, p. xx). Addressing diversity and issues of identitarian politics is not the preserve of postcolonial subjects alone. Bastions of conservatism also need to confront contemporary reconfigurations of identity which in turn affect social and political spaces. For instance, Quayson adds that the Conservative Party of Britain has become perplexed by the Labour Party’s adoption and modification of some of its central tenets. Quayson suggests that the Conservative Party’s major undoing is its refusal or its inability to cope with the questions of difference and diversity that dominate the British social realm. The Labour Party, on the other hand, promised to address these questions and it managed to do so by modifying some of the core ideologies of its opponent, the Conservative Party. The Labour Party, in being able to confront difference, diversity, and complex systems, ensured its political relevance at a given political moment. What constitutes Britishness has become problematic due to the postcolonization and recolonization of the British space and “self” by its formerly colonized others. This particular framework of postcolonization and recolonization, as Quayson suggests, marks the beginning of the post-binary moment in relation to the old colonial order. The Labour Party is in control because it accepts: key dimensions of the society (the City, the increasingly Internet-savvy and multiculturally tolerant youth, a new breed of politicians, and cultural activists) have now embraced change within itself as absolutely essential to placing Britain at the forefront of global society and politics. (Ibid., p. xxxvi) The multiculturalism that Quayson depicts here is not the threatening brand that many White supremacists or Black segregationists, of the Garveyite ilk, project. Instead, it concerns formulations about a flexible global civil society that is increasingly defining the shape of the kind of politics to emerge. Quayson’s view on multiculturalism in the present and in the future turns out to be quite appealing and inclusive with its skillful supplanting of

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the deadweight of unanimism with intimations and possibilities of cosmopolitan democracy. However, I should point out the metaphysics of multiculturalism just as modernity and postcolonity are uneven. For instance, the articulation and deployment of multiculturalism as discourse and practice in the United States have perhaps far more complex manifestations due to powerful inflections of capital, the mass media, and due to the prolonged activities of self-professed peddlers of racial and cultural difference. In a world of multicultural subversions, the presuppositions about the “uninformed” Other create far more problems than we would ordinarily expect. Quayson reads Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992) to place in the foreground the problems of alienation and the subject positions and constructions of subjectivity rendered by genres of writing such as the novel, autobiography, travelogue, and ethnographic discourse. He argues that Ghosh makes a poor ethnographer, but does well in the field of historiography. Accordingly, Ghosh’s text “raises doubt about its status and oscillates between anthropology and other genres of writing in such a way as to make it a constitutively ambiguous text” (Quayson, 2003, pp. 10–11). What Quayson calls “inversion of the ethnographic gaze” occurs when Ghosh makes an attempt to become an anthropologist (ibid., p. 12). Hitherto, the colonial status of anthropologists made them figures of undemocratic power in ethnographic exercises of knowledge construction, retrieval, and dissemination. But Ghosh, by his ethnographic inexperience or inadequacies coupled with the self-knowledge and awareness of those he intends to study, fails ultimately as an ethnographer. This shortcoming can be observed when the different genres of writing are discerned and separated within the text, a process that is encouraged by reading as an exercise in calibrations. We cannot read modernity as a homogeneous project. Quayson reminds us that Charles Taylor’s “notion of multiple and alternative modernities is part of a growing body of work that recognizes that modernity is by no means the same across the world” (ibid., pp. 30–31). If that is the case, then the “modern figure” of politics and culture can only be intrinsically, contextually, and regionally diverse. To prove this point, Quayson analyzes the notion of “culture heroism.” Through this notion, he demonstrates how some cultural and political figures are reconfigured within postcolonial social imaginary through ways by which myth and orality become the central components of such reconfigurations. Modernity as a singular derivative of Enlightenment rationality becomes highly problematic. Accordingly: it was common in the 1960s to hear apocryphal stories about how the WHO had attempted to buy Nnamdi Azikiwe’s brains for preservation . . . and the stories about him served to strengthen their claim to his being the most intelligent politician to emerge out of post-independence Nigeria. (Ibid., p. 38)

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Similarly, “in the 1970s, Jeremiah Obafemi Awolowo of western Nigeria also had his share of legends, one of which suggested that he had been spotted on the moon with his wife prior to the 1979 elections” (ibid.). Quayson points out that both examples: hint at the desire to raise the profile of political leaders and to project them as larger than life, in a part extension and part transformation of the ways in which legendary figures are treated in oral narratives and proverbs that circulate in the indigenous domain. (Ibid.) In addition, this reading of the social demonstrates the fundamentally syncretic nature of modernity and its many variants in ways that necessitate counterhegemonic assessments of modern politics and its multiple modes of articulation, and of democracy and the contemporary politics of iconization [posterization]. Highlighting this distinctive syncretism, Quayson mentions the idea that Laurent Kabila, the late political leader of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) had, “as part of the symbolic paraphernalia that surrounded him in his meetings with the international press . . . a flag on which was embossed the logo of Simba, the young lion in Disney’s The Lion King” (ibid., p. 46). This cross-cultural patterning is not only evident at the level of sartorial disposition and popular myth-making, but also within elaborate formations of governance that combine—as in the regimes of Arap Moi and Robert Mugabe—elements of democracy together with features of authoritarianism in their modes of administrative governmentality. Quayson has some key insights into the African postcolonial condition. For instance, he makes the point that the postcolonial African state is primarily motivated by what he calls a “totalitarian impulse” which has several features. “The primary one is that of the proliferation of binarisms, such as those of good versus evil, us versus them, dissent against the state versus support for the state, with the governed being invited to take sides in this Manichaen allegory” (ibid., p. 50). Within the modes of postcolonial political administration, the mysticism, obscurantism, and irrationalities that emerged from an old precolonial order are conjoined with equally disconcerting elements derived from forms of modern governmentality. Quayson says this much. But what I would like to add is that perhaps we might extend the critique of fascism to these forms of governance, since in promoting an ethic of excessive nationalism, or ultranationalism, and ethnicity, they have also done great evil as the totalitarian and semi-totalitarian regimes of Moi, Mugabe, and Eyadema, and so many other African leaders demonstrate. The modern public sphere in postcolonial Africa is further complicated by “the modalities of the gift economy” (ibid., p. 51). Anthropologists such as Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan have also interrogated the peculiarities of this economy of social transaction in postcolonial Africa in the age of digital globalization (de Sardan, 1999). However, Quayson mentions that this economy

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is to be found not only in Africa alone. It also exists in China where “obtaining and changing job assignments, doing business, buying certain foods and consumer items, getting into good hospitals, obtaining housing, and even buying train tickets all call for the skillful and strategic giving of gifts and the cultivation of obligation, indebtedness and reciprocity” (ibid., pp. 51–52). Quayson adds that the practice is called kalabule in Ghana (ejunge in Nigeria). He also argues that the postcolonial African state is fundamentally syncretic in its modes of legitimation and in its abilities to stabilize and reinforce its functions and its economy of violence. “The processes by which the bureaucratic state apparatus is abstracted for private use subtend the incoherence of the postcolonial nation-state form itself” (ibid., pp. 52–53). More important, and in relation to the public sphere in Africa, it ought to be noted: whereas class relations denote contradictions within relations of production, kinship relations connote contradictions within largely organic arrangements that are supported by rituals of exchange and reciprocity. It is perhaps the reason that totalitarianism and democracy in Africa often fade into each other. (Ibid., p. 54) This insight is much needed beyond the field of literary theory, Quayson’s traditional domain, by which I mean it is required in the field of political theory and its related discourses. In this respect, empirical studies are required, not only to reinvigorate the field, but also to grant legitimacy to this crucial theoretical insight. Quayson’s interests in political studies and theory are deepened when he turns his attention on Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni crisis. (For an analysis of the Ogoni crisis, see Osha, 2005c; 2007.) The Grecian conception of tragedy serves as a model of analysis, but I would argue that his direct political insights into the crisis carry much more powerful and intimate nuances. Achille Mbembe’s theorizations of African postcolonial relations come under slight attack. Mbembe employs the Bakhtinian notions of the carnivalesque and the banal to describe a mode of sociopolitical (dis)order that is equally tragic and ludicrous. In addition, Mbembe rereads the texts of Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, and Cornelius Castoriadis in his formulations on African politics. Quayson suggests that the aestheticization of violence, the banal, and the tropes of carnivalization that occur in the African postcolony, which Mbembe makes his theoretical point of departure, are not the only ways of making meaning of African forms of political contestation: Mbembe’s cultural theory is extracted from a range of sources, allowing him to highlight a variety of vectors of the postcolony. It is possible, however, to expand Mbembe’s hybrid theory by drawing not just on literary and cultural theory, but on some specific literary paradigms, such as

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As mentioned previously, Quayson’s most profitable insights into the Ogoni crisis stem primarily from a deep ethnographic understanding of the political situation and of the crisis, and not through the employment of the conceptual apparatus of Grecian tragedy. Accordingly, it is highly disturbing to know that a 1995 World Bank study “shows that 76 percent of all the natural gas from petroleum production in Nigeria is flared, compared to 0.6 percent in the United States, 4.3 percent in the United Kingdom, and 21 percent in Libya” (ibid., p. 67). Also imperative to note is, “Nigerian oil fields contribute more to global warming than the rest of the world put together” (ibid.). The livelihoods of farmers and fishermen in Ogoni and in the Niger Delta generally have been severely affected by deplorable environmental conditions, which environmental activists call environmental terrorism, created by the oil exploration and exploitation activities of multinational concerns. SaroWiwa was not only a fighter for environmental justice and sanity as he was also concerned with issues relating to political and cultural self-determination. With the adoption of the Ogoni Bill of Rights (OBR) in the early 1990s, it was obvious that the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), which Saro-Wiwa founded, was set to collide with the Nigerian state. He was eventually hanged along with eight other Ogoni activists on 10 November 1995. Quayson suggests that Saro-Wiwa’s powerful charisma as a mobilizer might have created enemies for him within Ogoniland itself. G. B. Leton and E. N. Kobani, who were pioneer president and general secretary respectively of MOSOP, resigned from the movement over disagreements with Saro-Wiwa concerning political strategy. They wanted to participate in the ill-fated 1993 general elections, but Saro-Wiwa was against it. That caused a major fissure within the movement. I would like to give an unconventional reading of this particular situation by suggesting that SaroWiwa’s stance in relation to his MOSOP collaborators demonstrates that it might have been a victim of some of the adverse effects of culture heroism. His standing as an effective political activist, and a quite charismatic one at that, might have engendered an anti-democractic tendency in some of his political gestures and in some of his acolytes. Gilroy highlights how Marcus Garvey, as a pioneer of Black consciousness and struggle, encouraged and articulated elements of fascism— sometimes knowingly and sometimes unknowingly—within his movement. I would not go as far as accusing Saro-Wiwa of an espousal of fascist doctrines. But I would suggest that he might have fallen victim to some of the antidemocratic features inherent in culture heroism at some crucial moments during the Ogoni struggles against the brutalities of the Nigerian state and its equally brutal collaborators, including multinational oil corporations. Howev-

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er, this is only one way of examining Quayson’s concept of cultural heroism. On the other hand, the sheer magnitude of the violence and degradation occurring in the Niger Delta necessitates even deeper methodologies of analysis that address the coloniality of the logic of oppression and the complex complicities of different sources of power in reinforcing that oppressive logic. (For an analysis of this particular problem, see Ike Okonta and Douglas Oronto, 2003). Quayson contends that the Ogoni crisis was produced by the prevalence of “cultures of impunity” in many postcolonial African societies: War, the ultimate culture of impunity, is only an exacerbation of what is an endemic form of social disorder whose spasmodic expressions can be glimpsed in the violent land seizures in Zimbabwe today, the chaotic violence on the streets of Lagos, and the pillage of natural resources in Sierra Leone, Angola and other places. (Quayson, 2003, p. 73) By extension, the conditions that gave rise to the Ogoni crisis are inherent in the many sociopolitical legacies of the old colonial order which the postcolonial state usually reproduces uncritically. Quayson, in recapitulating Saro-Wiwa’s historical importance, writes: The fight for a right to a clean earth, the struggle against a negating totalitarianism and the predatory privations unleashed by international capital, and the effort to arouse a silent people into an engagement with history are all values that give his activism a resonance beyond Ogoniland. (Ibid., p. 74) Quayson also employs the term, culture of impunity to address the postapartheid situation in South Africa. He uses it to explore the tensions and relationships between a formerly colonized subjectivity and its struggles for decolonization through what I term the “disfigurement of the language and consciousness of colonization.” Quayson analyzes Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger (1978) as a text that addresses the dynamics between colonized body, language, and society. In this regard, he argues: the colonized’s quest for identity cannot be fully expressed without the dismantling of colonialism, and since this dismantling, . . . has to be achieved through so much bloodshed and violence, the quest for a language that seeks to shape reality is always undermined by the consciousness of brutality and violence that attends the colonized’s body. (Quayson, 2003, p. 74) The broken, misshapen body is also a central preoccupation in Quayson’s text. Accessing the human form may consist of two kinds of operations: it may entail a disavowal of the textual apparatus (the document) for the mes-

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siness of everyday life; or, the reconfiguration of everyday life as documentary evidence. Quayson moves in both directions. We feel fear, pity, fascination, repulsion, or surprise when confronted with the physical form of human disability. This phenomenon constitutes a widespread reality in Africa where cultures of impunity and genocidal conflicts are common. Quayson reminds us that physical impairments as a result of war will continue to be common sights due to the horrendous events in Angola, Mozambique, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and DRC. To overcome the specter of genocidal strife, we need to return to the time-tested virtues of “self-reflexivity, patience, fortitude, hope, and, above all, dialogue” (ibid., p. 124). Quayson’s critical theory yields two quite interesting concepts; culture heroism and cultures of impunity, which he employs in many productive situations. For instance, the violence that is prevalent in South Africa today is as a result of a culture of impunity: The issue of crime in South Africa is of course couched in terms of law and order, and rightly so but there is a sense in which the current spate of crime that was manufactured by the apartheid state as a means of prosecuting its unjust war against its enemies. (Ibid., p. 96) What makes Quayson’s insight distinctive? It interrogates the interstices between literature, anthropology, critical theory and politics together with broader sociocultural texts or what he describes as “paratextual apparatuses” to excavate novel configurations of meaning that signal a post-binary mode of discourse in African forms of literary and critical theory, or what have been collectively termed as “African modes of self-writing” Also, it opens up a space by which we can explore the open-ended processes of multiculturalism in Africa and beyond. Quayson advocates the postcolonization of the Western canon and at the same time pursues a project of de-ghettoization of African critical theory by locating the universal within and beyond the particular. In addition, he is against most forms of primordialization and nativism, forms that entrench cultural insularity and ghettoization as most ideologies of multiculturalism push in the other direction toward the establishment of cosmopolitan modes of social life.

Ten THE (RE)COLONIZATION OF GLOBALITY 1. Introduction It is interesting to observe a few features about the agency of the subject in the Indian sub-continent to emphasize the de-peripheralization of the socalled periphery and to bring to the foreground the resilience of individual and collective agency, even within a context of presumed subalternity. The texts I employ to illustrate these points also demonstrate how conditions of locality and customary mores continue to play a prominent role in constructing subjectivity, in addition to demarcating the limits of agency, even as global forces persist in the drive to subvert efforts at subjective agentialization. It can be argued that within a milieu of substantial disadvantage and dispossession, the forces of locality are often able to reconfigure global hegemonic power in ways that liberate local manifestations of agency. The work of two Indian scholars discussed in this chapter portrays the multiple interactions between the local and the global, and between the particular and the universal, all of which constitute some of the concerns of this study. It is often argued that the concept of the contemporary global is extremely problematic and difficult to theorize. Yet, it is often useful to attempt to theorize it to make sense of the multiple disjunctures, and commonalities, that characterize the contemporary world. Perhaps a major starting point would be to de-universalize the global, or to look for the parochial within the global and the ways in which it ends up being universal. In The Politics of the Global, Himadeep Muppidi adopts this approach. He begins by examining the local and global politics in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and the efforts of its chief minister, Naravarapally Chandrababu Naidu, to make his state efficient and a destination for global capital. To accomplish this, he intends to create a situation whereby: the public will expect government services to be comparable with the best services available from the private sector in terms of quality, accuracy, timeliness and user-friendliness. Clients will no longer tolerate delays, bureaucratic mistakes or excessive time-consuming and difficult procedures (2004, p. xiv) This means accepting a model of the global in which major United States’ economic decisions, such as the American Competitiveness Bill, in a way, become far more significant within the context of Andhra Pradesh than in the United States itself. In making this point, or in advancing this sort of reading,

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Muppidi privileges a notion of globality that is counter-hegemonic and which is, at the same time, de-universalized and devoid of the atavism of a kind of parochialism, or what might be termed under less harsher circumstances, the imperatives of the local. However, what is not projected in Naidu’s understanding of globalization is that national economies often lose autonomy and the scope for self-determination becomes narrower. This crucial bit of knowledge is almost totally absent. So, in some respects, he connects with the sort of pro-globalization ethic fostered by figures such as Thomas Friedman, and further complicates different notions of the global. Muppidi’s main brief is “an exploration of the spaces and strategies for resisting the colonization of the global” (ibid., p. xviii). It sounds plain enough, but it might not always be that simple. He reminds us that globalization, for the majority of the world’s people, is often believed to be a form of colonization and so for this reason ought to be resisted. The claim has also been made that a “democratic deficit” exists in global affairs and the global institutional order. This means there are grave contradictions within the current world system. For instance, Chinese and Indian nationals make up the majority of the world’s population, yet this fact hardly matters within the existing structure of the global institutional order as Muppidi suggests. Extremely difficult problems are encountered in making attempts to construct a unified global political constituency. This better explains the notion of democratic deficit. Muppidi spends a great deal of time rereading the theories of some social scientists on the politics of the global which he often finds wanting. Then he raises a quite evocative point on the question of identity: If identities are constitutive of interests and practices, and the corporate identities of states are historical products, shouldn’t this historical constitution of state identity be open to meaningful analysis?” (Ibid., p. 9) Another significant point in this regard is, “actors normally have multiple social identities that vary in salience . . . . Social identities have both individual and social structural properties” (ibid., p. 10). Similarly, the constructions of these different identities are often mediated by different relations of power. But let us return to the more prominent features of the politics of the global. The present crisis of global capital is partly a result of the “increasing disjuncture between the ‘territorial reach’ of capital and the boundaries of the nation-state” (ibid., p. 14). The multiple forms of accumulation engendered by global capital have ended up creating new layers of inequality, or new structures of colonization that we have to find new ways to conceptualize. The postmodern West conceives of its modern and premodern Other as incomplete and oftentimes as a threat that must be contained, “the ‘incompleteness’ of the developing state, a ‘lack’ awaiting completion, which arises primarily because non-Western states are defined, framed, and judged within a framework of categories that takes the Western experience as the universal norm” (ibid., p.

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16). To this hegemonic view, Muppidi posits another, “Given the diversity of human beings and political communities in the world, it is reasonable to assume that there are multiple social realities, multiple ways of imagining and inhabiting our world” (ibid., p. 20). Consequently, two models of globality are proffered, “a colonial globality structured around the silencing of difference and a postcolonial one that relates to difference through democratic engagement and dialogue” (ibid.). Not surprisingly, the second model informs the thrust of Muppidi’s argument. He then contemplates the possibilities for the evolution of “a global morality that seemingly transcends politics, context, and issues of agency and social power” (ibid., p. 23). On this particular point, he argues that global morality can be made to be “intersubjectively desirable.” One would argue that this notion requires far more elaboration. The question of social imaginaries plays a significant role in relation to issues of agency, identity, and social power, as Muppidi demonstrates. Accordingly, we are informed: the social imaginary exists in a mutually productive relationship with social actors and is thus either reproductive or transformative of their social identities and relatedly their powers, interests, and practices. (Ibid., p. 25) Also, “the social imaginary works to produce specific relations of power through the production of distinctive social identities” (ibid.). This constant attention to matters of individual and collective agency, and its framing in the language of humanism, together with discourses of counter-hegemony, in the age of rampant neoliberalism is quite interesting to find in the domain of social science. It means the domain is beginning to take note of the crucial advances that have been made in postcolonial theory and cultural studies. This awareness of postcolonial theory as praxis for resistance is brought to bear on the critique of the projects of liberalization and modernization. Consequently, Muppidi makes the point, “liberalization is articulated as a process that would make the state more responsive to the outside, threaten its internal autonomy, and hurt its capacity to look after domestic interests” (ibid., p. 34). It is a project of political and economic disempowerment. Sometimes there is repetitiveness about the way Muppidi recounts these fairly old gains of postcolonial theory. “The postcolonial identity is thus characterized by a strongly ambivalent identity-logic: a strong articulation of repugnance and a repudiation of the colonizer, but also its mimicry” (ibid., p. 43). Views such as this one did not begin with Homi Bhabha alone. We can trace its origins back to the figure of Frantz Fanon, to the ideologies of resistance and Blackness, and then back to a host of notable contemporary figures; Edward Said, Aijaz Ahmad, Gayatri Chakravory Spivak, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. This kind of viewpoint has almost become standard fare in cultural studies.

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More importantly, the notion of ambivalence is the realm of practical politics does have its extremely startling moments. For instance, the figure of nonresident Indian (NRI) evokes significant moments in postcolonial theory and history. Muppidi describes it here: The NRIs are neither Self nor Other, both Self and Other. They inhabit the spaces of the West and of India. As residents of the West, NRIs are quite intimate with modernity. But as persons of Indian origin, and it doesn’t matter how many centuries ago they originated, NRIs are also coded as successfully reproducing Indianness in alien spaces and of forever desiring to return home. (Ibid., p. 56) The figure of the NRI disrupts the logic of colonial globality by its own logic of ambivalences. Colonial globality, which Muppidi condemns, not only affects the nonWest sector, the weak, and the poor, as he suggests. Through its homogenizing tendencies, it strips the world of its diversity and both consumers and the consumed become victims of its violence. Corporate capitalism is destroying difference on a global scale and the demarcations between sites of consumption and sites to be consumed become blurred. Muppidi makes this point eloquently. On another level, Muppidi’s work is a graphic demonstration of the much-needed meeting between theories of international relations and postcolonial studies. Such meetings provide ways in which to resist the violences of corporate capitalism and reconfigure the postcolonial self as a self of rational global agency. One wished this meeting between Bhabha and the icons of global social science theory had been staged much earlier. One also wished they were staged with even greater frequency. Two major trends emerge regarding the pervasive phenomenon of colonization, although there are many others. On the one hand, a trend is powered by corporate capital and then on the other, another tendency is fueled by the presence of the postcolonial self which deflects the singular logic of capital with its own particular projects of (re)colonization. These global, largely lopsided and inadequate binaries are the polarities between which different struggles are being waged over self and meaning, both of which can be subsumed under the category of representation and place. 2. An Anatomy of Global Peasantry Capitalism, just as colonialism or modernity, is an inherently uneven process. It is not always helpful to assume that the trajectories of non-Western forms of capitalism would parallel Eurocentric ones in the ways in which they remake societies. This is one of the key lessons of Sharad Chari’s book, Fraternal Capital: Peasant-Workers, Self-Made Men and Globalization in Provincial India. In writing this text, Chari sets himself the task of writing an ac-

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count of the industrial present and “then turn to agrarian history to make sense of memories of toil in reshaping industrial work practices today” (2004, p. 51). Tiruppur, Tamil Nadu, India, the site of analysis, is noted for knitwear, and through a combination of local and global transformations, it has come to acquire a considerable degree of significance as a veritable hub of industry. Chari traces the wide-ranging nature of these transformations—economic, social, political, cultural, and sexual—by which a provincial Indian town reconstitutes itself as a locus of a globally propelled center of industry. Under these changing conditions of production, Tiruppur exhibits the trappings of energetic modernizing economic advancement. “Of all the buildings in view, it is the opulent facades of the newly rich that catch the eye: the haphazard gaudiness of Greco-Tamil mansions with tinted windows and polished granite exteriors” (ibid., p. 9). “Tiruppur is a town of rags-to-riches stories” (ibid., p. 29). To appreciate the value of this assessment, we need to understand the dynamics by which a class of “fraternal capitalists using agrarian history remake the industrial present” (ibid.). The historical transitions by which place, work, self, and sex are disarticulated and rearticulated and Chari’s mappings of these processes, is an informative reading and analysis of individual and collective agential dynamics in contexts of postcolonial subalternity. Being a Tamil Brahmin by birth, and coming from a privileged Western locus, Chari was cognizant of relations of power accruing from his position and he made a constant effort to “unlearn his privilege as his loss” following the example of Spivak. In desconstructing the logic of privilege, he also had to unmask the powerful social articulations of gender: While women would speak to me alone for a while, unmarried or recently married women would often become embarrassed after an initial period. Older women, women at workplaces or in groups, and women I knew through my daily activities were exceptions, as I perhaps did not pose a threat. I could only spend substantial time with young workingclass women and girls when, for a short period, I accompanied Ms Sujana Krishnamoorthy, an academic and an activist from New Delhi, on her interviews in Tiruppur’s working-class neighborhoods. (Ibid., p. 48) Just as Chari’s work is an inquiry into the nature of subaltern capitalist production, it also beams a searchlight on the broader ramifications of global capital: “the globalization of capital has deepened inequalities between differentiated regions and populations, radical writers in the late twentieth century began speaking of the globalization of the Third World, the deepening of internal peripheries through sweatshops and prisons within advanced capitalism, and of the casualization of low wage work everywhere” (ibid., p. 32). Undoubtedly, this scenario of capitalist penetration replays itself in multiple ways in different regions of the globe. The mechanisms by which the globalization of capital entrenches itself in postcolonies are hugely interesting. Chari

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employs the word “postcolony,” but does not theorize it (ibid., p. 33). However, I think, it is a key concept for trying to understand the mechanisms of everyday life in postcolonial subalternity. Unquestionably, Chari’s portrayal of a milieu of postcolonial subalternity is markedly different from the mode of sociopolitical relations that some Afro-pessimists claim form the bedrock of African postcolonial existence. However, Chari offers an essential insight in affirming, “subaltern critiques of Enlightenment legacies make it all the more important to decenter metropolitan accounts of capitalism rather than to presume European ideal types as guides to global processes” (ibid., p. 34). Similarly, Chari reasserts the point, “the peasant has always been a reminder of singularities and of the unevenness of capitalist development” (ibid., p. 39). This is one of the central lessons of the book. If metropolitan processes of capitalism do not always provide an accurate guide of how similar processes replay themselves in contexts of peripheral capitalism, it is also useful to note that discourses such as development economics do not quite capture the configurations of power and knowledge that perpetuate subaltern domination. The inherently plural nature of subaltern capitalist development becomes apparent when Chari argues: local power and the political incapacity to finance public sector investment through direct taxes—both in complex ways the consequence of the Indian state’s inability to transform agrarian production relations— effectively prevented the emergence of a developmental state akin to the East Asian “Tigers” (Ibid., pp. 35–36) In Tirrupur, as in most parts of provincial India, processes of informalization are evident both within the economy and the state. However, these processes do not inevitably lead to a breakdown of law and order since “multiple forms of social control of activity” constantly mediate the social space (ibid.). Chari warns against the danger of subaltern economies slavishly imitating neoliberal examples of economic production: “Incomplete neoliberal reforms have tended . . . to perpetuate primitive accumulation in the formal economy governed by an informal state rife with decentralized violence and corruption” (ibid., p. 44). Chari expends a great deal of effort in analyzing how the moral economy of work [velai], as reformulated by the Gounders, the dominant peasant caste in Western Tamil Nadu, wrought the far-reaching transitions from an agrarian form of existence to a mode of decentralized industrialization in Tiruppur. Accordingly, he demonstrates “how Gounder men used a culturally and historically specific labor theory of value to translate and renovate the elements of their agrarian past to reorganize industrial work” (ibid., p. 163). In analyzing the moral geography of work among the Gounder, Chari teases out a key strain in his theses:

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Class mobility and the making of bosses allowed Gounder men to link power over the labor process to power over social labor in a new politics of work. Consequently, they remade industrial work while remaking themselves as a new class fraction, which I call the Gounder fraternity of decentralized capital. (Ibid., p. 226) The fraternalization and decentralization of capital in Tiruppur led to the emergence of an interconnected network of sister firms that, through their particular mode of production, “allowed Gounder toil to be writ large over social labor” (ibid., p. 232). The Gounders are also known for their thrift. The processes of informalization within the Tiruppur knitwear industry contributed to the seasonality of work and widespread instances of multitasking. On-the-job skill acquisition, provided by the horizontal mobility in Tiruppur, is markedly different from Taylorist modes of industrial production, which are more formalized and hierarchical. Let us turn to the structures of power that underpin the industry’s modes of activity, first, the local sources of power. The Gounders came to be a prominent force on the industrial scene through, as we have noted, a reconstitution of the ethics of labor and by fabricating useful fraternal networks of industrial production. The old business elites usually maintained an aristocratic relationship with the ethics of labor. They deemed it beneath their dignity to soil their hands with work. The Gounders seized upon the opportunities provided by this lapse thereby transforming the moral economy of the values of local industrial production. In Chari’s words: the . . . failed route is that of the old guard of industrialists, of traditional “business communities,” who have been slow or in many cases unable to adapt to the supervision requirements of the new, decentralizing production form. (Ibid., p. 137) The homosocial structure created by the fraternalization of capital have a couple of defining features: (1) “new firms were most often not proprietorships but partnerships with close family members and landowning kin who join as ‘sleeping partners,’ who would contribute capital for a profit share but would not be involved in day-to-day production”; and (2) the moral economy of the social networks created by the fraternalization of capital “mirrors the dependent chains of ‘sister concerns’ that facilitate subcontracting and dedicated production” (ibid., p. 211). On the one hand, one of the defining features addresses the internal structure of the predominant typology of the firm, while on the other, the second defining feature unearths the forms of internal and external fraternalization by which sister concerns are aggregated. So far, the focus has been on local structures of power. However, the picture changes slightly when local production is linked to global dynamics and expectations. “Fraternal hegemony only proved to be a stepping stone to a

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deeper form of gendered hegemony which hold not only the working class but also a mass of small toiling owners in thrall to an industry ruled by an apex class of exporters” (ibid., p. 272). The exertions of local production to meet global demands and expectations have several disfiguring effects: (1) a radical transformation of the local geography of work occurs; (2) the politics of capital and its fraternalization assume more intricate forms; and (3) new forms of sexualization emerge that necessitate reconceptualizations of the dominant theories pertaining to the feminization of labor. The effects of globalization are more wide-ranging than portrayed in this quite reductive schema. In going fully global, a shadowy Italian, Antonio Verona, came to Tiruppur in 1979. First, he took over a moribund production unit run by an unfit Gounder and his incompetent son. Although he maintained legal links with the owner, he was fully in charge. Soon after, the owner died mysteriously of a heart attack. Verona then constructed a 10,000 square foot manufacturing concern with the aim of linking the local geography of toil to global production values and targets. While the typical local firm produced a case per day, Verona’s company churned out 7000 per day. According to Chari: Verona was the first high volume foreign buyer from Tiruppur and his account at SBI of Rs 2.5 million per year was bigger than anyone else’s, as SBI staff still concur. Verona sent one shipment of eleven containers to Europe and by the time it reached the shores of Italy all the garments had “Made in USA” tags. There remained no trace of India on the identity of the goods. By the early 1980s, Verona could be found in his lavish home lounging by the poolside with his Tamil secretary/lover. As a representative of the global, Verona had ruptured the boundaries of local production, but it was when he went after organized labor that the Gounder fraternity took notice. (Ibid., p. 236) Verona’s high volume production values undoubtedly shifted the gears of local production in Tiruppur, in which markets for export play a central role. As mentioned earlier, the underside of export production values is related to newer forms of capitalist exploitation and newer configurations of sexualization and sexual violence. Perhaps not surprising is, “cosmopolitan Gounder exporters supervised the feminization of labor along the lines of wider attempts to equate cheap labor with docile and dexterous women workers” (ibid., p. 243). On the level of personal relations, Chari suggests that the deeper penetration of capital created the conditions for the replacement of customary bride price practices with the institution of dowry and this transition subsequently led to a greater complexification of the fraternalization of capital. But even Tiruppur itself suffers a form of feminization within the context of global production: “knowledge of consumption and the means of creating new tastes are closely guarded elements of the advertising and design phases of production concentrated in Europe and North America” (ibid., p. 80).

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In trying to understand how a provincial Indian town made the leap from locally aimed production into the vortex of globalized activity, we have to appreciate, “an entrepreneurial caste has learnt to deploy its alleged caste character, to turn subaltern knowledge to capitalist advantage” (ibid., p. 238). An appreciation of local knowledge provides a crucial key for understanding how subaltern modes of capitalist production bypass and complicate dominant metropolitan ones. As such, the theories offered by knowledge derived from neoliberal metropolitan contexts do not fully account for substantial local dynamics within the frame of subalternity. This is a key point that Chari constantly stresses. The mode of subaltern capitalist production in Tiruppur that Chari describes bears some similarities with forms that exist among the Ibos of eastern Nigeria, Hausa-speaking peoples of northern Nigeria, and the Senegalese Murid traders, who have been able to fashion an ethic and a mechanics of global production and marketing by drawing generously from foundations of local knowledge. Another important point Chari makes is to assert that the penetration and development of capital are often based on an almost compulsory creation of different classes and conditions of subalternity. Chari argues that the take off of globalized industrial production in Tiruppur came with a price which is the feminization of the labor force to make the passage of capital smoother. At the moment of political liberation, debates about Indian national economic policy: were posed in terms of Nehruvian commitment to heavy industrialization and self-sufficiency in capital goods versus Gandhian commitments to rural employment, democracy, and appropriate technology. (Ibid., p. 186) These values are still evident in Tiruppur’s economy. Chari’s text reaffirms the argument that intelligent critiques of globalization usually make; global production usually arises from local specificity that is invariably plural and complex. He suggests the institution of a postcolonial order of economic and industrial relations need not necessarily follow a metropolitan model; that local relations of power, more than anything else, define the boundaries of the new industrial configuration in Tiruppur; that this new configuration came about through a new ethic of labor which undermined the old aristocratic order of things and social value; and that it also led to new forms of sexualization and relations of gender, which resulted in a greater degree of monetarization and commodification of personal relations, including relations of affect, and of the entire social fabric. Capitalism, everywhere, the book strongly suggests, is predicated on engendering forms of subalternity to produce profit. Finally, Chari proves that we can have theoretically convincing accounts of processes of globalization from below. These two different kinds of analyses—Muppidi’s and Chari’s—are associated with thinking in terms of coherences, unities instead of in terms of

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separateness and discourses of self-peripheralization. The outcome suggested by these accounts is that global flows lose their strangeness and discomfiting grandeur while apparently local processes and initiatives acquire velocities that accentuate their cultural and political significance. Obviously, these developments necessitate reconceptualizations of both the present and the future.

Eleven RACE AND A POSTMODERN WORLD Recent literature on the conundrums of African development continues to demonstrate that the entire contours of argumentation are structured along a basically binary model in which either forms of Western progressivism dominate or discourses of indigenization hold sway. This model of discursive binarism extends to virtually all aspects of contemporary African intellectual production. It has been noted, “the classical debate in African philosophy between ‘academic’ or ‘modern’ philosophy and ‘ethnophilosophy’ is not so much about whether African philosophy should have roots in Africa; both sides agree on this. The contested question is whether the roots of African philosophy should consist of a direct cultural continuation of indigenous African traditions or consist of critical work concerned with African issues and practiced by Africans” (van Hensbroek, 2001, p. 6). However, it is not only in the field of African philosophical discourse that we observe this deeply structured and structuring discursive dichotomy. A line of contemporary African thought claims that two tendencies have shaped the trajectories of contemporary African academic discourse and are more or less ensconced within the “framework of developmentalism” or what is termed “disciplines of nativism” (Mbembe, 2001c, p. 3). Two of the most sophisticated critiques of the discourse of nativism remain Paulin J. Hountondji’s African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1983) and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992). It is always inspiring to encounter debates, discourses, and texts that disrupt the long established hegemonies of this discursive binarism in Africanrelated intellectual production. Philippe-Joseph Salazar’s An African Athens: Rhetoric and the Shaping of Democracy in South Africa (2002) has many fine attributes. First, as Salazar was a student of Roland Barthes, he adopts the Barthesian mode of French theorizing in mediating the question of South African subjectivities within the context of a constantly transfiguring postmodern public realm. Second, he offers a sustained critique of the rhetorics of democratization and the problems of de-apartheidization. Third, Salazar advances an articulation of nonracialism from which many debates on multiculturalism have much to gain. He develops a poetics of nonracialism in a world experiencing, in varying degrees, the entrenchment of different forms of fascism and fundamentalism. Finally, it reconfigures the many insights of classical Greek thought, along with postcolonial African political discourses and thought. The results that emerge from this alchemy of discourses are truly inspiring. Apartheid was an ideology of violence and repression par excellence yet “the apartheid restriction on the public space led ironically to the concentra-

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tion of dissident oratory in highly charged sites, whereby speeches acquired in a more far reaching potency” (Salazar, 2002, p. 9). Salazar consistently makes the question of rhetoric and its impact in the making of the new South African nation his primary concern. The ghastliness of apartheid did not reduce all levels of South African life to a state of barbarity. Instead, different rhetorical devises and discourses flourished to fabricate other threads of commonality and belonging. Public acts, figures, and spaces were inflected by modes of counter-articulation that constantly subverted and bypassed the hegemony of the apartheid regime. Not surprisingly, these different modes and sites of counter-articulation covered a wide spectrum of spaces and figures. For instance, Desmond Tutu’s rhetorical stance in relation to apartheid was different in relation to Steve Biko’s or Chris Hani’s. Also, Nelson Mandela’s rhetorical status as a legendary and actual anti-apartheid figure would be different from Desmond Tutu’s. This has much to do with attributes of charisma, personal histories, and the instrumentalization of public space and social memory. Salazar contextualizes Tutu’s place in the making of the post-apartheid nation as one marked by considerable religiosity for what is a postEnlightenment temporal frame. These words can be regarded as the signature of Tutu’s rhetorical value, “Friends, like you I abhor violence. I condemn the violence of an unjust system such as apartheid and that of those who want to overthrow it. In the beginning God . . . in the end, God” (ibid., p. 14). Tutu is, after all, a man whose wish is to see a “rainbow nation” of God established on South African soil. Salazar points out, “rarely indeed in modern history has the emergence of a democratic nation been guided by such strict religious oratory.” Whereas, “in traditional European democracies, rooted in eighteenth-century free thinking, the exercise of the public mind and the achievement of reasonable participation in the exercise of power are carefully separated from religion; religion is often perceived as the fossilized remnant of a predemocratic system of deliberation” (ibid., p. 16). On the other hand, Mandela’s rhetorical gifts and strategies are markedly different. For one, he is a politician and this vocation exhibits a tension between homonoia (concord of minds) and homologia (what one professes): the tension between the “concord of minds,” which is respectful of plurality and difference, and the concord of words . . . . the showcase of political verbiage in which politicians use words to achieve a semblance of agreement, or, even, an appearance of disagreement. (Ibid., p. 21) In this mode of public deliberation, Mandela “eulogizes the powers of his own phone, of his own voice, as any good Sophist would” (ibid.). In the post-apartheid context of a new South Africa, new rhetorical orientations evolved that have similarities with other more established democratic traditions in contemporary times and in antiquity. As such, we are to note:

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nineteenth-century democratic deliberation deliberately placed a ‘mute’ command on the voice of the President, with its potential for garnering power; the President’s was after all the only unmistakably solo voice speaking from the seat of executive power—while the two correlated, the legislative and the judicial, were multi-personed, dislocated, dissonant, even cacophonous. (Ibid., p. 32) These cacophonous seats of political deliberation and power are deemed to be more representative of the spirit of democracy. However, there are significant moments in political history, and the history of democracy in particular, when what Salazar terms “rhetorical Caesarism” flourished (ibid.). Important political figures who demonstrated instances of rhetorical Caesarism include Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Sir Winston Churchill, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and Charles de Gaulle. In spite of the influential rhetorical postures of these renowned figures of modern democracy, generally, “in theory, presidential rhetoric is dangerous to deliberation and dangerous to democracy” (ibid., p. 33). The relationship between deliberation and political power is quite central for the study of rhetoric: “deliberation in a nondemocractic public sphere tends to mold itself (as rhetorical studies on imperial Rome and early modern Europe have shown) into a concerted praise of the Prince.” There is a problematic conjucture between political power and what Salazar defines, in this context, as praise. In addition, “the most comprehensive system for the political ecology of praise was developed in ancient regime France” (ibid.). Praise, in modern and postmodern political deliberation, creates several contextual problems. The Machiavellian prince attracted and courted praise. He had a whole court of praise-singers. But as we have noted, this sort of political figure belonged to another time and another ethos of political activity and operated according to different notions of authority, obligation, and legitimacy. His immediately noticeable autocratic leanings and attributes would seem unbearably offensive to the postmodern democratic palette. Salazar demonstrates the many contradictory peculiarities of history and context that informed Mandela’s presidency. First, there are tensions between rhetorical Caesarism and postmodern democracy, between the secular and the sacred, the private and the public, between tradition and postmodernity, and the different and competing ideologies of raciology. In a passage, Salazar captures this multiplicity of contextual tensions: the celebrations accompanying Mandela’s 80th birthday (usually only monarchies or autocracies celebrate their leaders’ birthdays as national events) assumed the dimension of public festivity on 18 July 1998, spawning many public involvements. Massive media interest was brought to bear on Mandela’s marriage to the widow of Mozambique’s President Samora Machel. (Like national birthday celebrations, such

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Such insights give deeper theoretical dimensions to South Africa’s ongoing democratic experiment and the different tensions between premodern and post-apartheid forms of political deliberation. But Mandela’s presidency had other telling implications. His widely celebrated birthday event, his version of a royal morganatic union, and his different glamorous public appearances are “elevated to the rank of public deeds in order to affirm the ‘integrity’ of the President: his integral ethos, his arete (excellence)” (ibid., p. 40). This rhetorical and public position leads to a situation whereby “private ethos and public ethos can become confused” (ibid., p. 39). Moreover, “by one of those bittersweet ironies of dialectics, this renders [Mandela’s] successors’ rhetorical treatment of private and public virtues even more problematic” (ibid., p. 40). The precise nature of the presidential successor can be conceived in these terms, “removed from the praise-laden function of the founder of the nation, yet in contact with the praise manipulation of the virtuous acts that ensued, how can a presidential successor’s rhetorical intervention escape authoritarianism or timidity?” (ibid.,). Here, we have two distinct rhetorics of presidency within the new South African nation, the first, exemplified by Mandela in which political power, praise, and prudence are held together in precarious balance, and the second, typified by his successor who in the aftermath of the euphoria of political liberation has to contend with the strictures of a presidency that must actively seek to distinguish between the public and the private, the secular and the sacred, the premodern and the postmodern, and other dichotomies. In this way, these different contextual typologies exemplify, more frequently, the condition of the postcolonial instead of the postmodern. However, this observation is not appropriate for all the existing scenarios in contemporary South Africa. The rhetoric of political power is followed by the rhetoric of collective empowerment in the economic domain. After the attainment of deapartheidization, which is primarily the signature of political liberation, the discourse of empowerment is compelled to assume more concrete forms, forms which relate not only to the structures and practices of everyday life, but which also seek to transform them. Political liberation has more farreaching implications when it confronts the irresistible dynamics of the purely economic realm. Within this unavoidable configuration, the persistent trope of race is reinserted and reappropriated by the social body. Also, consumer culture becomes a marker of race; “Black consumers buy more, faster and better quality than their White counterparts” (ibid., p. 43). Within the context of racialized discourses of consumer culture, South Africa’s much-touted multicolorism becomes problematic as it recedes in the face of a banal and clichéd raciology. It is instructive to note here, “empowerment in the public sphere is

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derivative of what has been called an “African Renaissance” (ibid.,). The rhetoric of an African Renaissance has become more persistent and consequently has received considerable media attention, especially during the presidential tenure of Thabo Mbeki. In addition, it has also received a sizeable amount of academic scrutiny. (See for instance, QUEST: An African Journal of Philosophy, 15:1-2 (2001), which is a special issue on “African Renaissance and Ubuntu Philosophy.” This special edition has contributions by figures such Mbeki, Dirk J. Louw, Priscillia Jana, and a few other prominent names who have written on the issue.) From some of the academic discussions available, the concept of an African Renaisance or Ubuntu (philosophy) is nothing new. For instance, a political ideology such as Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa, which formed the basis of his social and economic development policies in Tanzania after Tanganyika gained independence from Britain in 1961 and its union with Zanzibar to form Tanzania in 1964, is motivated by similar preoccupations (1966; 1968). Ubuntu philosophy is largely derivative of discourses of nativism: In the European Renaissance period the ambition of culture-makers was not to simply reinstate classical values, classical themes and classical ideals, but to surpass them. The promise of an African Renaissance may lie not in a fixation on African heritages as such, but in the ambition to reappropriate them critically and creatively and so surpass them. (van Hensbroek, 2001, p. 7) In addition, commentators have not failed to notice, in terms of discursive orientation, that the current notion of an African Renaisance is not much different from other earlier raciologically-based concepts relating to the Black subject such as Leopold Sedar Senghor’s “Négritude” (see Jahn, 1968; Ba, 1973; Markovitz, 1969.) Also, there are even fewer theoretically sophisticated raciologically derived concepts of Blackness available that surpass the general horizons of the current articulation of African Renaissance. For instance, Senghor’s concept of Négritude is far more sophisticated than many of his contemporaries assumed. By contrast, Wole Soyinka’s famous taunt, “a tiger needs not proclaim his tigritude” in relation to Senghorian aesthetics and philosophy of Blackness appears to be ill conceived. Senghor was reacting to an incapacitating political ecology of racism, which shook his faith in Enlightenment modernity and its claims to universal humanism. During World War II, Senghor had been incarcerated for a couple of years in German prison camps near Poitiers, France. Within the deathscape administered by the political technology of the time, he still managed to compose poetry, and read Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Western philosophy. He also reconnected with fellow Africans who shared songs and tales from their homelands thereby fostering an alternative understanding of humanism and sociality.

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It is quite attractive to suggest that Senghor’s prison experiences, his deep knowledge of Western intellectual traditions, and his love and respect for African values, traditions, and cultures combined to produce a subjectivity that was transcultural and transnational in its sympathies, accomplishments, and aspirations. Arguably, Senghor has laid down the bases for a postanthropological humanism, one that truly points to the possibilities for a democratic cosmopolitan world. This is the kind of world that Appiah has been agitating for since the publication of his book, In My Father’s House (1992). It is not enough to promote an ideology of Blackness in direct response to a raciological universe without also proffering an ideal of solidarity as a counter-measure, as the concepts of African Renaissance and Ubuntu philosophy might end up doing if any form of complacency is allowed. Salazar does not suggest this possibility in a disconcerting way. Instead, he deliberates upon scenarios that might encourage true postmodern democracy using, as usual, Athenian conceptual parallels. Accordingly, he avers: the “rainbow nation” the “constitution” of the nation, and the means to communicate these notions inscribe in the ethos of the President the “friendship that binds citizens—the politike philia”—of Aristotelian democracy.” (Salazar, 2002, p. 70) However, Aristotelian democracy alone cannot rebuild the new South African nation. New forms of solidarity, forgiveness, and constitutionality are required: “the splintered identity of the South African nation under apartheid had to reconstruct itself, not merely through universal suffrage or via the iconic charisma of Mandela, but through a storytelling process, the narrative of peace” (ibid., p. 75). The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was an outcome of this process. The Report of the Desmond Tutu-led TRC sought to proclaim the truth about the evil of apartheid and to promote reconciliation. Finally, “the Report is both an exposure and a weighing of South African diversity, dissent and specific vices that make up the nation” (ibid., p. 81). As Salazar correctly affirms, “the TRC also created a new vocabulary, one that is now pervasive in the political lexicon, both in South Africa and in other fractured democracies” (ibid., p. 83). Nigeria, Rwanda, and Bosnia are nations that have followed the South African example with varying degrees of success. However, for South Africa, the rhetoric of peace and multiracial democracy had to work. After all, “apartheid was the ultimate transgression against ‘democracy’ (the common standard); it excluded Blacks from the social compact and perverted, for the Whites, the social link” (ibid., p. 87). A credible rhetoric of peace was required to erect a “New South Africa,” a rainbowism that announced in undeniable terms, a racial diversity and a demographic egalitarianism. Needless to add, this is easier said than done.

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An appropriate rhetoric that set in motion the discourse of ethnic diversity and multiracialism was unleashed: “Many rights, one constitution,” “Many voices, one parliament,” “Many parties, one democracy,” “Many paths, one direction,” “Many ideals, one freedom” (ibid., p. 101). How were these to be accomplished given the horrendous history of apartheid that had scarred the South African nation? Salazar argues that the South African rhetoric is what we must investigate to better understand its courageous attempts at multicolorism. Here, he undertakes a quite interesting theoretical maneuver that is genuinely Barthesian in both intent and effect. Salazar reconfigures Barthes’ semiotics of fashion and glamour within the South African context to theorize and traverse a complex ecology of identity and race. This configuration of fashion and glamour grants the new South Africa its distinctive postmodern complexion. The publications Elle, MarieClaire, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, FHM, Men’s Health, Conde Nast House and Garden, have all taken root in South Africa. As Salazar informs us, “glamour magazines are . . . powerful agents in the public sphere” (ibid., p. 109). He demonstrates how these magazines, employing the power of glamour and the seductiveness of wealth, are actively articulating a new politics of identity, belonging, and racial diversity within the geo-body of South Africa. Salazar makes a significant contribution in not only identifying glamour magazines as a fertile resource for reading the new semiotics of the body and race, but also in theorizing their different cultural and political potentials. But this reconfiguration of the rhetoric of peace, glamour, and beauty can only acquire its most complete meaning when situated in its proper historical context. Since medieval times, it had become established to civilize competition either in the realm of beauty or battle (ibid., p. 123). Salazar reminds us that tournaments, or tourneys, were developed in medieval times “as a means to redirect chivalry’s demand for military action in principalities where political structures were adopting a more modern and peaceful shape” (Salazar, 2002, p. 125). As such, there is a historical and structural relationship between glamour, war, and sport. Salazar, in two graphic instances, recounts this structural relationship in the new South African nation. The first instance,“In South Africa people deliberately and enthusiastically marked the end of a warring culture by adopting new symbols of public glamour, peaceful competition and ‘derealized’ competition . . .” (ibid., p. 126). The second instance, “Signs of apartheid have been converted into cosmeticized rhetorical markers of diversity” (ibid., p. 127). Next, Salazar turns to the reality of space and its different possibilities for public deliberation. Unquestionably, “social space is entertaining. Social space is conducive to self-celebration. Social space is an occasion for social conversation” (ibid., p. 153). Accordingly, golf courses in the new South Africa have become “powerful loci for an unfolding public deliberation on safety, gentility, affordable luxury, and, by capitalization of symbols, crossracial integration” (ibid., p. 150).

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As South Africa struggles to construct its own Acropolis, several issues come to mind; for one, the prospects of establishing a universe of genuinely transcultural, transracial, and democratic values. The possibility for birthing a mode of post-anthropological cosmopolitan democracy has become a serious matter in contemporary times. For more on this, see Paul Gilroy (2000), who makes a bold attempt to grapple with the issue. Salazar’s treatment of the possibilities for the establishment of a postmodern democracy within the racially problematic South African context is admirable in many ways. First, he departicularizes the South African present with his many skillful allusions to Greek antiquity. Second, he advances a discourse on democracy that is both novel and refreshing. Third, his Barthesian reconfiguration of glamour, beauty, and sport commends itself, and not just as an exquisite piece of cultural critique. In addition, Salazar’s analyses broaden the scope for understanding a new semiotics of the body in Africa as the continent struggles out of the bonds of needless exceptionalism. Finally, he points the way for popularizing a nonracial discourse that promises many connections between democracy and cosmopolitanism.

Twelve SARAH BAARTMAN, SEXUALITY, AND THE THEATER OF RACE Suzan-Lori Parks’ play, Venus (1997), provides ample grounds for interrogations of several issues and topics I have raised. For instance, it offers a crucial template for exploring notions of the Black body, Black sexuality, totalitarian knowledge, and race, in addition to Victorianism, and the borders between the human and animality. In the discussion that follows, I interrogate aspects of these broad topics and their interstices. How does the politics of race and sexuality intersect and how do the categories of the human and the bestial mediate over the shifting domains of subjectivity? Also, how do Western notions of Blackness and otherness mediate the eddies of White desire? What role does scientific knowledge play in the constructions of sexuality on the one hand, and the organization of desire on the other? These are questions that one is forced to pose when reading Venus. Parks’ play provides the ground to read different intersections of race, sexuality, scientific knowledge, and desire within a significant moment of the Western imperial project. A figure of historical value provides Parks with the predominant impetus for writing the play: the figure of Sarah Baartman. Baartman was a young woman of Khosian origin in the Cape of present-day South Africa who was taken to London in 1810. She had a feature known as steatopygia. So pronounced was this aspect of her physical features that she became transformed into an object of commercial exploitation in which her body was commodified, fetishized, and exoticized. In exploring the historical value of the figure of Baartman, Parks not only exposes tropes of commodification, fetishization, and exoticization, but also the ever-shifting states of infrahumanity that the Black subject in the era of classical colonialism had to negotiate. In Parks’ play, Baartman is known as the Venus Hottentot. At the beginning, the legendary dimensions of her life are quickly foregrounded: a character says of her, “wild Female Jungle Creature. Of singular anatomy. Physiqued in such a way that she outshapes all others” (1997, p. 5). Another says, “thuh gal’s got bottoms like hot air balloons. Bottoms and bottoms and bottoms pilin up like 2 mountains. Magnificent. And endless. An ass to write home about. Well worth the admission price” (ibid., p. 7). At play here, are the tropes of fetishization and commodification I mentioned earlier. We are also intimated about the possible causes of her death that are directly linked with the kinds of activity these tropes engendered. We are informed that she died through overexposure or by liquor. In life and in death, Baartman is not free. Another crucial trope the play explores is the tyranny of possession. She was exhibited naked in Europe

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without her consent by deception. She is also constantly “otherized” to be represented, “coco candy colored and dressed all au naturel, she likes when people peek and poke” (ibid., p. 8). In the strategy of deceit, it is implied that she would be “the African dancing princess.” A duplicitous business speculator tells her that England is a “big town. A boat ride away. Where the streets are paved with gold” (ibid., p. 15). When she is called a princess, she is raked with disbelief. Almost in the same vein, we are reminded of the violence of (mis)representation. She says “Im shy” (ibid., p. 16). But only a few moments ago, a character had said, “she likes when people peek and poke” Also, the concerted efforts made to transform her into “the African dancing princess” disregard (1) the fact of her stated shyness and (2) the obvious innocence of her sexuality. Through the inexorable dynamics of (mis)representation and commodification, her sexuality acquires a misdirected self-awareness. In addition, through the tyranny of the gaze, the force of the external eye, Baartman’s sexuality and self-consciousness attain other levels of articulation that are not altogether free from the fundamental violence that motivated them in the first instance. Baartman’s innocence and naiveté are demonstrated in several ways, “I’ve come here to get rich. I’m an exotic dancer. Very well known at home. My manager is at this moment securing us a proper room. We’re planning to construct a mint, he and me together” (ibid., p. 20). Here, she assumes that she will make a fortune displaying her skills as a dancer. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, it is the objectification of her sexuality that is at issue here and the profits that accrue from such commodification are to be enjoyed only by the financial speculators who “discovered” her. A particular moment captures the distance, or proximity, between the speculator’s objectification of her sexuality and her lack of awareness about it, “tomorrow I’ll buy you the town. For lift up yr skirt. There. That’s good” (ibid., p. 23). In some instances, objectification is not always directly linked to overt sexualization: “you smell. So smelly yll make em come running. Good God. Heres a bucket and a brush. Take a bath its yr big day today” ibid., p. 29). In addition, what can be regarded as a recontextualization of the sadomasoschism scene, with its attendant tropes of bondage, is evident. A showwoman in England whose business it is to display exoticized and otherized Black bodies says, “Ive 2 ladies here joined at thuh lip. Bornd that way they’ll die that way mano a mano lip tuh lip” (ibid., p. 33). The theme of bondage differs from the contemporary sado-masochism scene because Baartman’s plight even as a piece of constructed reality suffers from a violence that is one-dimensional. It is also marked by its lack of both irony and the freedom of invention. It is a form of colonial violence that is incapable of self-reflexivity. Here one locates a crucial problem at the heart of the human and animal dichotomy. The show-woman calls her objects and subjects of display “ladies” and yet they are kept in bondage just like animals. It is as if at the moment of sexualization or sexual arousal they are humanized

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but not before or after. There is a constant movement from the human to animality and back in which the Black subject of sexual objectification is persistently exposed to the pressures of White gaze and desire. It is the spirals of White desire that determine both the humanity and animality of the Black subject. In addition, the conflicting notions of Western and non-Western forms of beauty are foregrounded: Early in the present century, a poor wretched woman was exhibited in England under the appellation of “The Hottentot Venus.” The year, 1810. With an intensely ugly figure, distorted beyond all European notions of beauty, she was said by those to whom she belonged to possess precisely the kind of shape which is most admired among her countrymen, the Hottentots. (Ibid., p. 36) This passage captures most of the central themes of Parks’ play—the Black subject in classical coloniality and her conflicting status, the violence and tyranny of possession, fetishization, commodification, aesthetics, and totalitarian knowledge. These are themes that resonate in philosophy. Again, the movement of the Black subject between humanity and animality is evident. Because Black aesthetics do not always conform to Western notions of beauty, the Black subject is often thrust into the realm of animality, but through the undulations of White desire, the existential status—animal and human—of the Black subject is never constant. In many ways, Parks demonstrates how the Black subject in the era of classical colonialism is a creation of the spirals of White desire. Her status also wavers between the polarities of humanity and animality. Baartman’s (re)invention between the boundaries of humanity and animality is constantly reaffirmed throughout the play. The show-woman exclaims: turn to the side, Girl. Let em see! Let em see! What a fat ass, huh?! Oh yes, this girls thuh Missin Link herself. Come on inside and allow her to reveal to you the Great and Horrid Wonder of her great heathen buttocks”. (Ibid., pp. 42–43) Baartman is available for public display from 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. every day between Monday and Saturday. When she asks the show-woman for her share of profits accruing from the displays, she is rebuffed and threatened with gang rape. Eventually, she is seen as a public menace: the Court intends to interfere and receive her immediately under its protection; for the purpose of restoring her to her friends and her country so that she not become a burden to the state and contribute to our growing social ills. (Ibid., p. 64)

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This passage, even when it criminalizes her, manages to recognize her humanity. But almost immediately, the status of her uncertain and problematic humanity is questioned and undermined: She was surrounded by many persons, some females! One pinched her, another walked round her; one gentleman poked her with his cane; uh lady used her parasol to see if all was, as she called it, natural. (Ibid., p. 69) In death, she is both exoticized and rigorously medicalized: The Baron Docteur The height, measured after death, was 4 feet 11 and ½ inches. The total weight of the body was 98 pounds avoirdupois. In the following notes my attention is chiefly directed to the more perishable soft structures of the body. The skeleton will form the subject of future examination. (Rest) External characteristics: The great amounts of subcutaneous fat were quite surprising. On the front of the thigh for instance fat measured 1 inch in thickness. On the thighs reverse the measure of fat was 4 inches deep. On the buttocks proper, rested the fatty cushion, a.k.a. Steatopygia the details of which I’ll relate in due course. (Ibid., p. 92) The same doctor, who clinically medicalizes, her ignores professional ethics and begins having carnal relations with her, “OK OK I confess: I wanna keep my Sweets all to myself. I’m very greedy” (ibid., p. 125). The doctor is not the only character who harbors lustful feelings for Baartman, as she claims his colleagues in the academy “touch” her behind his back. Again the human and animal dichotomy is complicated by what appear to be deep relations of affect and carnality which compel a reconsideration of the ever-shifting split and the theme of bestiality: The Venus Love me? The Baron Docteur I do. Ah, this is the life. (Ibid., p. 102) When Baartman becomes pregnant, just how deep and sincere his love is for her becomes apparent:

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The Baron Docteur God. Is there anything we can do about it. Ive a wife. A career. A reputation. Is there anything we can do about it we together in the privacy of my office. Ive got various equipments in here we could figure something out. (Parks, 1997, p. 128) For the doctor, once Baartman has crossed the line that divides the human and the beast, her fundamental humanity becomes difficult to shake off or ignore. In conducting carnal relations with her, he has created a quite human problem that in the realm of gross animality does not quite exist. Animals do not agonize in the way humans do about the consequences of copulation. Animals do not procure abortions for unwanted pregnancies. Animals do not problematize notions of personal integrity. The demands of survival and the exigencies of the flesh rarely move beyond the level of pure instinct. So in transgressing boundaries of sexuality, the doctor undermines the artificial human and animal dichotomy that prejudice had erected around the figure of Baartman. In a way, a base form of desire exoticizes her, and it also creates a dual approach to viewing her. A colonial kind of desire, through a quite curious gesture, robs her of basic humanity via a fractured and skewed lens of sexuality. Her sexuality is objectified and commodified by: (1) the innocence of its initial lack of awareness; and (2) White desire which through its paroxysms unsettles the artificial categories of White rationality. As pointed out, within the context of extreme Victorianism, Baartman’s status within the family of the human is never secure. In this regard, race is a crucial factor. The immense protuberance of her buttocks that had initially been reconfigured as a defining mark of animality also becomes a site of excessive exoticization and eroticization. Eroticization leads to sexual congress and eventual humanization. However, it is difficult to think what might have happened had Baartman been a male figure. Nonetheless, Baartman’s humanity is never stable as its status is always defined by the vagaries of White desire. Her humanity also depends on the ever-shifting dynamics of the microphysics of power. Who determines what is human or humanity? Which categories of beings belong or do not belong to particular conceptions of humanity? By extension, the hierarchies of race and gender go a long way in determining what is human and the beings that make up humanity. Michel Foucault’s work on the microphysics of power and human sexuality is relevant at many levels, but encounters a fundamental problem when it is inserted in a scene fractured by the violence of race. This is because the question of race and the brutal hierarchies it engenders questions the category of a universal humanity. Foucault’s analyses of human sexuality do not prob-

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lematize human and animal dichotomy or the idea of a universal humanity, so they work only at a level of interrogating an assumed universal sexuality, but not quite at the level where sexuality is experienced and articulated at a site of infrahumanity. What Foucault does instead is to demonstrate how the violence of the sexual act disrupts forms of social order and the need to constantly police and regulate it. One of the strategies Victorian sexuality employed to police and regulate the sexual act was not through brutal mechanisms of repression, but by subtle conventions of containment in which “a single locus of sexuality was acknowledged in social space as well as at the heart of every household, but it was a utilitarian and fertile one: the parent’s bedroom” (Foucault, 1990, p. 3). The theologians of eighteenth and nineteenth century sexuality were not only concerned about the regulation of sexuality but also the production of discourse (episteme) pertaining to the sexual field: First, there was medicine, via the “nervous disorders”; next psychiatry, when it set out to discover the etiology of mental illnesses, focusing its gaze on “excess,” then onamism, then “frauds against procreation,” but especially when it annexed the whole of the sexual perversions as its own province; criminal justice, too, which had long been concerned with sexuality, especially in the form of “heinous” crimes and crimes against nature. (Ibid., p. 30) Within the domain of the human, Western culture also produced forms of juridical constraints for the policing of sexuality—Canon law, the Christian law, and civil law (ibid., p. 37). With the entry of different forms of legislation into the field of sexuality, some aspects of the field were criminalized: On the list of grave sins, and separated only by their relative importance, there appeared debauchery (extramarital relations), adultery, rape, spiritual or carnal incest, but also sodomy, or the mutual “caress.” As to the courts, they could condemn homosexuality as well infidelity, marriage without parental consent, or bestiality. What was taken in to account in the civil and religious jurisdictions alike was a general unlawfulness. Doubtless acts ‘contrary to nature’ were stamped as especially abominable, but were perceived as an extreme form of acts “against the law” (ibid., p. 38). The elaborate regulatory procedures and mechanisms led to a hysterization of women’s bodies, a pedagogization of childrens’ sex, a socialization of procreative behavior, and a psychiatrization of perverse pleasure (ibid., pp. 104–106). More importantly, it would be pertinent to ascertain how the concept of sovereignty plays out in Baartman’s drama of sexuality and existence. Within the context of England, she is denuded of sovereignty and kept in a cage like an animal. In Hobbesian times, “the sovereign exercised his right of life only

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by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing; he evinced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring” (ibid., p. 136). Stripped of personal liberty, Baartman is thrust into a Hobbesian epoch by a Victorianism that is meant to spell the beginning of sexual modernity. So apart from straddling an inconstant divide between humanity and animality, a particular tussle between modernity and pre-modernity plays itself out as the inscription of Hobbesianism within the heart of Victorian sexual modernity. The era of biopower introduced concerns “centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by procedures of power that characterized the “disciplines”: an “anatomo-politics of the human body” (ibid., p. 139). How does the disciplining of Baartman’s body come across within the sphere of biopower? First, we must note that even when socioeconomic modes of organization sought to enforce the docility of the body for the purposes of capital, there was also a concurrent trend to undermine the power of the sovereign just as individual rights and liberties and the attendant concepts expanded. It is deemed fit for Baartman’s body to be made amenable to economic exploitation, but it is not acceptable to grant her the rights that accrued to the individual within the context of modernity. So a powerful process of selectivity is at play across a series of sites: the site that serves as the public display of her body, the market as a principle of economic organization and rationality, the domestic site in which she conducts amorous relations with the doctor, and finally, the contexts in which her human and animal attributes are debated and problematized. In these different sites, her humanity is sometimes emphasized to the detriment of her assumed animality and vice versa. By extension, the meeting point of race and sexuality also proves to be exceedingly problematic in the drama of Baartman. Accordingly: Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, the thematics of blood was sometimes called on to lend its entire historical weight toward revitalizing the type of political power that was exercised through the devises of sexuality. Racism took shape at this point (racism in its modern, “biologizing,” statist form): it was then that a whole politics of settlement (peuplement), family, marriage, education, social hierarchy, and property, accompanied by a series of permanent interventions at the level of the body, conduct, health, and everyday life, received their color and their justification from the mythical concern with protecting the purity of the body and ensuring the triumph of the race. (Ibid., p. 149) The doctor who elects to have carnal relations with Baartman undermines the above racial conception of sexuality. In view of such a conception, he fails in his duty in ensuring the purity of the race and he also transgresses the sexual

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boundary that separates the human from the bestial. First, he commits a grave racial blunder and he carries out—according to the prevailing sexual morality of the time—an act of sexual bestiality. He is an extremely anomalous character. Much as the doctor disrupts the accepted social and sexual order, he contributes significantly to the re-humanization of Baartman by his acts of sexual transgression. In this manner, he abandons the prison house of Victorianism for an emancipatory postmodern ethic. Even with her assumed drawbacks of pre-modernity, Baartman also unwittingly participates in the construction of an order of ethics, which also bears the mark of a form of aesthetics. Sexual congress between the doctor and Baartman undermines the category that identifies her as an animal. Even the scandal of her pregnancy can only be read and bestowed with meaning within the category of the human. In a different way, Baartman is also anomalous. She is deemed to exist at the level of pure animality yet she is supremely capable of expressing refined emotions of affect. She fully understands the institution of matrimony and its social power just as she is aware of the intricacies, bliss, and dangers of amorous situations. In essence, the metaphysic that constructs separate conceptions of the human and the bestial unravels. Baartman undermines that metaphysic by the elaborateness of her speech, by her dreams and expressions of affect, and by an understanding of the logic of capital. These attributes elevate her above the merely bestial. The constructed categories of the human and bestial, in which she is thrust within the second, lose a great deal of their power and stability. Baartman, in the ways just described, exposes the limitations of these categories and their fundamental artificiality. However, in spite of her multiple subversions of those artificially constructed categories and in spite of copious evidence testifying to her humanity, she is made to live and die like a beast. Nonetheless, as we ought to have noticed, she is not an animal in the vile meaning of the word. She is capable of speech and of the intimacies of affect and is aware of the demands and obligations of modern matrimony. So, at an ontological level, the common perception of her as an animal loses force. The figure of the modern medical practitioner was crucial to the colonial structure of power in legitimating a racialized hierarchy for humanity. The figure was also responsible for the devaluation of the Black subject, within the context of the racial hierarchy he had helped to establish, but ends up upsetting that hierarchy. Medicine played a key role in the autosexualization of the social body and the embourgeoization of sexuality. It was at once a tool of power and a part of it. Medicine made a forceful entry into the pleasures of the couple: it created an entire organic, functional, or mental pathology arising out of “incomplete” sexual practices; it carefully classified all forms of related pleasures; it incorporated them into the notions of “development” and instinctual “disturbances”; and it undertook to manage them. (Ibid., p. 41)

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Given this kind of power structure, the doctor denudes Baartamn of her humanity, engenders her social isolation, and then proceeds to transgress the sexual boundaries he is meant to enforce. He is a figure of deep ambivalence which is also a reflection of the ambivalence of the nature of White desire. Attraction and repulsion are embedded in the typology of this desire, which both commodifies and fetishizes Baartman’s body and what it implies within its order of signification. The same desire that fetishizes and commodifies her body is in turn compelled to re-humanize her through the expenditure that Baartman’s body initiates and the violence it provokes. Before Baartman’s body and sexuality engender expenditure, excess, and rupture on the part of White desire, we must remember that her invention as a figure of modernity is based on a foundation of violence. She is first and foremost a victim of violence. Baartman’s body is inflicted with notions of ambivalence that stem from external sources. She is desired for purposes of commodification and “scorned” for her freakishness. She disrupts the same and other dichotomy by moving between the two, both by virtue of her inexplicable powers and by dint of the rush of White desire. Her freakishness, which ought to be the reason for causing feelings of revulsion against her, becomes also the reason for her marketization. The cause of her “otherization,” her exoticization, forms the basis for her de-humanizing commodification. So is Baartman’s humanity ever absent according to the popular assumption? Her humanity is always present, but its modes of enunciation are always subject to the vagaries of White desire. Similarly, the ambivalence within White desire, and its movements between repulsion and attraction, provide the grounds for the status of her being, for stating whether she is an animal of the lower kind or quite human. White desire is not only free to decide her ontological status, but it also has powerful supporting institutions to enforce its whims. The stroke of irony is that Baartman, even in her state of relative powerlessness, exudes a power that deprives White desire of its consistency.

CONCLUSION This study has been preoccupied by a major problématique of African philosophy that is, “does it exist?” This problématique has it positive and negative sides. Its most obvious shortcoming is that it robs one of the will to philosophy, or the will to knowledge. In the English speaking parts of Africa, it stunted the search for appropriate methodologies meant for the development of the discipline. However, as mentioned earlier, it does have its positive influence as well. The most obvious manifestation of this influence lies in the attraction of its negativity. I have described this negativity with a plethora of phrases; the fear of birth, crises of delivery and perhaps more appropriately, the problem of origins. Various African philosophers have responded to this problématique differently. The most inventive of them have ignored the power of its negativity through different powers of the imagination and modes of conceptuality. For instance, Kwasi Wiredu, in Philosophy and an African Culture (1980) and Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective (1996), employs his background in analytic philosophy to reinvent the limits of Akan thought within the context of modernity. Paulin Hountondji, in African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1983), takes up the critique of ethnophilosophy that through his consistency becomes of mode of philosophizing. V. Y. Mudimbe in The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (1988), Parables and Fables: Exegesis, Textuality and Politics in Central Africa (1991), and The Idea of Africa (1994), adopts a wide variety of disciplinary approaches—linguistic, archaeological, anthropological, literary, and philosophic—to delineate the figures of the Black subject within the Western archive. By this broad trajectory, he reveals a mode of philosophic problematization which appears to be at first quite unsettling, but which is successful in circumventing the problem of origins, and which, by the sheer breadth of its conceptuality, announces many possibilities for African philosophy. In many ways, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s work, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, resembles part of Mudimbe’s corpus in its courageous multidisciplinarity—critiques of postcolonialism and postmodernism, the question of race, literary criticism, and an engagement with the politics of identity—and in its readiness to approach the philosophical from the not conventionally philosophical. All the philosophers mentioned here bypass the problem of origins as I mentioned by: (1) overcoming the power of its negativity; and (2) wielding their powers of imagination and modes of conceptuality. Similarly, I approach the philosophical from the not conventionally philosophical. However, this assertion does not depict the entire picture, for what is philosophical is a problematic issue. As such, one of the discursive strategies of this study has been to place in the foreground the issue of theoretical agency in forms of contemporary African philosophical discourse. In so

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doing, it becomes apparent that the way in which Kwasi Wiredu reformulates traditional Akan thought in modern analytic philosophy constitutes not only an overcoming of the problem of origins, but also an articulation of a particular kind of theoretical agency. The theme of agency has also been one of the preoccupations of this study. First, there is the question of discursive agency which is addressed at the conceptual level. There is also a more practical engagement with agential dynamics as they concern literary and intellectual production in a postcolonial setting. In addition, there are analyses of agential dynamics within different contexts of subalternity in the age of contemporary globalization. Finally, there is an engagement with the theme of agency as it relates to the field of African sexualities. This is an especially fertile site of inquiry because it is hardly addressed in conventional forms of African philosophical discourse. However, it is quite significant for several reasons. First, the dearth of research within the domain parallels what existed in African philosophy until quite recently. Judging from the studies emerging from sexuality as an academic domain, multidisciplinarity has become a major engine of discursivity just as it is turning out to be in African philosophy. Also the study of sexuality is linked to many vital philosophical themes—the politics of identity, the principles of pleasure, raciology, discourses of power, and technologies of control and domination. Revisiting the linkages between African philosophy and Africanist anthropology is vital. The emergence of ethnophilosophy as a form of discourse is inextricably linked to colonial Africanist anthropology. However, with the acceleration of the processes of decolonization, interesting discursive shifts in anthropological discourse have occurred, which can be profitably reinscribed into sub-disciplines of contemporary African thought as both sources of inspiration and as the basis for critique. To understand the birth of contemporary African philosophy it useful to have some understanding of the ways in which colonialist Africanist anthropology constructed the African subject within the materiality of the Western archive and as a subject of the Empire. Colonialist anthropology was deeply implicated in this operation. Yet, part of contemporary colonialist anthropology has been involved in its unmasking and in the unmasking of the entire colonial enterprise. Contemporary African thought can avail itself of this opening in the ongoing project of decolonization. In short, the primary motivations behind this study are, first, it is an attempt to bypass the perplexing problem of origins. Second, it constitutes an espousal of a set of themes that lie outside conventional African philosophical discourse. The foundational problématique of contemporary African philosophical discourse makes it a contested domain, but also one that is open to all kinds of interventions. As such, there are different approaches to the discipline as well different disciplinary configurations involving philosophical, anthroplogical, and non-philosophical orientations. A large part of this study attempts to reflect these diverse tendencies. One is aware that this may appear

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a bit pretentious, but the presence of the foundational problématique of African philosophy and the abiding question of race are just two major motivations that require an affirmative attitude toward the encroachment of silence. If the discipline is unable to provide a vocabulary for a multiplicity of themes and problems that pervade everyday contemporary existence, then we are compelled to reach into areas and specificities of thought that are not conventionally philosophical.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS SANYA OSHA is a SARChI research fellow at the Tshwane University of Technology in South Africa and has worked in three continents; Africa, Europe and the United States. He has several academic publications in the fields of philosophy, anthropology, literary theory and cultural studies. A series of his articles on subjects such as Samir Amin, civil society and African philosophy was published in the Encyclopedia of African Thought in 2010 (Oxford University Press). His major publications include, Kwasi Wiredu and Beyond: The Text, Writing and Thought in Africa (2005) and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Shadow: Politics, Nationalism and the Ogoni Protest Movement (2007).

SETH N. ASUMAH is State University of New York Distinguished Teaching Professor, Professor of Political Science, and Chairperson of the Africana Studies Department at the State University of New York College at Cortland. His research and teaching areas include African Politics and Society, Politics of Developing Nation-States, Politics of the Middle East, Politics and Multiculturalism, Comparative and International Politics, U.S. Foreign Policy, and World Politics. Professor Asumah is author, coauthor, and coeditor of seven books, including Prisons and Punishment: Reconsidering Global Penality, 2007 (with Mechtild Nagel), Diversity, Multiculturalism, and Social Justice, 2002 (with Ibipo Johnston-Anumonwo), The Africana Human Condition and Global Dimensions, 2002 (with Ibipo Johnston-Anumonwo and John Marah), Educating the Black Child in the Black Independent School, 2001 (with Valencia Perkins), Issues in Africa and the African Diaspora in the 21st Century, 2001 (with Johnston-Anumonwo), and Issues in Multiculturalism: Cross-National Perspectives,1999 (with Johnston-Anumonwo). In addition, he has authored over thirty-five book chapters and articles, and reviewed over forty-seven books and book manuscripts for publication. Asumah has won many awards, including the State University of New York’s highest teaching honor and rank, Distinguished Teaching Professor (2007), the American Political Science Association Outstanding Teaching in Political Science Award (2008), the Rozanne Brooks Dedicated and Excellence in Teaching Award (1999), and SUNY Cortland Excellence in Teaching Award (2002). He has also received many honors, including The Honor Society of Phi kappa Phi, the Political Science Honor Society of Pi Sigma Alpha and the International Honor Society of Phi Beta Delta.

SUBJECT INDEX aesthetic purity, 99 African Center in London, 109 Africanity, 4, 5, 11, 20, 73 Afrocentri(cism)(sts), 18, 20, 37, 51, 79, 115, 131 agenc(ialization)(y), 28, 167 de-agentialization, 32, 41 aggressivity, 82 Akans, 20–22, 31, 140, 141, 195, 196 akrasia, 150 alienation, 50, 73, 86, 103, 111, 115– 118, 161 ambiguity, 117 ambivalence, 20, 61, 65, 170, 193 American Competitiveness Bill, 167 American towns, nineteenth-century, 152 amnesty, 81, 82 analytic tradition, 1, 15, 16, 121, 130 ancestors, 29, 64, 77 ancient regime in France, 179 androgyny, 123 Anglophonic A. African thought, 18 A. colonialists in South Africa, 61 A. discourse, 51 A. divide in Africa, 9, 16, 95, 121, 129 Francophonic literary form, A. perception of, 96 personality, A. concept of African, 2 A. philosophers, 45, 47 Angola, 165, 166 anthropology, 9, 16, 25, 29, 49, 53, 86, 108, 121–123, 151, 155, 158, 161, 162, 166, 184, 195 Africanist a., 4, 73–75, 196 colonial a., 1–3, 18, 41, 57–71 passim, 73, 196 etic a. frameworks, 90 history and a., 147, 150 Levy-Bruhl’s anachronistic a. project, 31 Marxist a., 130 North Atlantic a., 75 philosophico-a. discourse, 26, 42, 80 philosophy and a., conflict between, 148 humanism, post-a., 182

reconciliation, a. of, 81 Western a., 15, 18, 30, 122, 124 antimiscegenation laws, 134 anomie, 90, 103 apartheid(idization), 37, 50, 61, 92, 115, 166, 178, 182, 183 anti-a., 178 de-a., 34, 36, 83, 177, 180 post-a., 6, 35, 36, 81, 82, 155, 165, 178, 180 apoliticism, 44 arbitrariness, 100, 104, 124, 134 armistice, 81 art, 13, 89, 98, 102 language of a., 99 literary a., 13, 108 primitive a., 127 Western a., 119 Aryans, 129 Asante culture, 136, 140–142 astrology, 79 authorit(arianism)(y), 64, 85, 100, 110, 162, 179, 180 African a. figures, 150, 153, 154 moral a., 148 paternal a., 119, 120, 123, 129, 130 political a., 125 privitization of public a., 156 religious a., 65 autonomy, 76, 121, 168, 169 Balkanization, 91 banal(ity)(ization), 89, 126, 163, 180 barbar(ism)(ity), 104, 129, 131, 132, 142, 146, 178 Barthesian thought, 110, 177, 183, 184 beauty, 78, 145, 183, 184, 187 Bechuanaland, 65, 67 bestiality, 188, 190, 192 Bible, non-Hellenized message of, 129 biculturalism, 17 binar(ism)(ity)(ization)(y), 12, 16, 31, 34, 58, 92, 126, 133, 142, 162, 170, 177 post-b., 159, 160, 166

212

POSTETHNOPHILOSOPHY

biopower, 191 birth, 100, 101, 126 b. ceremonies, 29 fear of b., 116, 118, 195 Black(ness)(s), 19, 22, 23, 27, 63, 83, 107, 108, 130, 134, 156, 169, 182 B. aesthetics, 187 B. agency, 83 anti-White, B. racism, 159 B. bodies, 186 B. consciousness, 32, 164 B. consumers, 180 control over B. populations, 61 cultural attainment, B. Africa’s, 32 B. elites, 82 inferiority of B. race, 49, 62 inner rhythm, cult of B., 28 B. letters/scholars, 96, 127 B.’s psychological wellsprings, 26, 42 B. segregationists, 160 B. sexuality, 133, 185 southern Tswana, B. people of, 59 B. subject(ivity)(s), 9, 10, 16, 32, 36, 37, 93, 131–133, 181, 185, 187, 192 Greek antiquity, B. s. in, 31 racial hierarchy, B. s. in, 192 sexual objectification, B. s. of, 187 Western archive/culture, B. s. in, 20, 195 B. writers in apartheid era, 35, 36 Boerish masters, 65 Bosnia, 182 Botswana, 74, 78, 152 breaking, 120 Bretton Woods institutional order, 110 bricolage, 121, 122 Britain, Empire of, 62, 65, 160, 181. See also England Britishness, 160 brutal(ity)(ization), 2, 22, 65, 102, 108, 135, 143, 152, 157, 164, 165 b. hierarchies, 189 Hobbsian b., 135 b. subjectivization, 135 Buddhism, 117, 120, 142 building, 120 burials, 29, 154 Burundi, 24, 46 Byzantine Empire, 152

Canon law, 190 Cape Verde, 11 capital(ism)(ization), 33, 74, 75, 119, 144, 161, 172, 191 anti-c., 75 corporate c., 150, 170 decentralized c., 173 European c., 67 c. exploitation, 174 female figure under c., 145 fraternal c., 171, 173, 174 global c., 16, 32, 57, 68, 92–94, 136, 144, 167, 168, 171 human c., 64, 65 industrial c., 67 intellectual, c of public, 104 international c., 165 logic of c., 144, 192 c. production, 75 social c., 154 subaltern c., 171, 172, 175 symbols, c. of, 183 Tiruppur, c. in, 173 Western c., 68 carnal knowledge, 21. See also sex(uality) carnival(esque)(ization), 163 Cartesianism, 20 caste, 172, 175. See also class(ism) c.-class domination, 144 categorical distinctions, 24 Catholicism, 47 Christianity, 20, 21, 62, 64, 66, 105, 124 African C., 67 C. conversion, 15 C. Europe, 64 Judeo-C. form of marriage, 131 C. law, 190 C. m(issonaries)(oralists), 21, 61, 67 C. proselytization, 20 Citizen’s Forum, 104 civil rights, 143 class(ism), 13, 16, 31, 53, 59, 68, 74–76, 84, 133, 143, 163 c.-caste superexploitation, 144 devalued c., 132 dominent c., 62 exporters, apex c. of, 174

Subject Index class(ism), con’t. c. mobility, 173 political c., 102 ruling c., 99 working-c., 94, 171, 174 clearing, 120 Cold War, 68 colon(ialism)(iality)(ization), 5, 9, 11, 12, 14, 17, 18, 25, 31, 31, 37, 41, 49, 50, 58–60, 62, 64, 65, 68, 74, 91, 97, 115, 117, 124, 132, 133, 142, 143, 156, 165, 170, 187 agression, c. as potent force of, 120 anthropology of c., 57–71 passim anti-c., 13 British and French forms of c., 96 classical colonialism, 185, 187 decolonization, 4, 5, 41, 50, 58, 59, 74, 97, 99, 102, 115, 138, 142, 143, 144, 165, 196 lingering effects of c., 73 premodern coloniality, 6 neocolonialism, 138, 141 postolonialism, 28, 140, 195 pre/postcoloniality, 11, 14, 15, 22, 32, 37, 91, 154, 159 recolonization, 9, 10, 34, 37, 38, 160, 167–176 passim comfort women, Japanese 135 commendement, 156 commitment, 89, 92 art, c. to, 102 global/world c., 105, 108 social c., 99 commodification, 53, 80, 90, 152, 156, 175, 185–187, 193 communist/postcommunist Eastern Europe, 152 computer technology, 84 conflict, 5, 9, 33, 34, 37, 54 disciplinary c. between history and anthropology, 147 genocidal c., 166 Lacanian conflict, 77 c. management/resolution, 81, 82, 85, 86 moral c., 150 Tutsi c. in Rwanda, 23

213

Congo, Democratic Republic of (DRC), 9, 10, 33, 54, 157, 162, 166 C. guerilla fighters, 54 Congolese Democracy (RCD), 34 Congress of Berlin, 1884, 91 Congress of Berlin, 1885, 37 conquest, 65, 130, 146 consciousness, 23, 54, 97, 146, 159 African c., 2, 17, 122 African subject, c. of, 124 Aristotelian philosophy of c., 26 artistic c., 100 Black c., 32, 164 brutality, c. of, 165 colonialism of c. and c. of colonialism, 58–60, 65, 165 environmental c., 99 ethical schizophrenia in c., 21 ethnophilosophical c., 5 false c., 75 language and c. relationship, 130 philosophy of c., 83, 95 pre-Fanonian c., 32 reconciliation, c. of, 82 self-c., 186 violence of apartheid, c. of, 92 Constructivism, 119 contentment, 116, 142 corruption, 6, 92 decentralized c., 172 moral c., 103 poetics of c., 147–158 passim Creator, 29 crime, 82, 108, 157 nature, c. against, 190 South Africa, c. in, 166 transnational c., 155 crisis of the nation, 156 criticism literary c., 97, 106, 108, 195 populist c., 61 social c., 102 cruelty, 134 culture(s), 3, 6, 17, 28, 32, 52, 78, 86, 87, 138, 161, 182 African c., 55 agriculturist c., 126 Akan c., 141

214

POSTETHNOPHILOSOPHY

culture(s), con’t. Asante c., 140 Bantu c., 51 bourgeois c., 122 cities, c. of, 124 consumer c., 180 corruption, c. of, 152 counterculture, 139 counter-productive c., 64 c. critique, 105 democratization, 110 ethic of c., 89–96 passim Greek polis, c. of, 132 c. heroism, 161, 164, 166 high c., 102 impunity, c. of, 165, 166 indigenous c., 14 Islamic c., 131 c.-makers, 181 matriarchal c., 132 missionaries’ c., 59 Nkoya c., women in, 76 obsolete views on c., 85 Ogoni crisis, c. element of, 100 patriarchal c., 115, 116, 123, 132, 137 philosophy of c., 1 political c., 101 postcolonial c., 13 postindustrial c., 145 reading c., 99 regression of c., 100 subculture, devalued, 132 traditional c., tribal c., 17, 125, 145 Twana c., 65 Victorian c., 12 warring c., 183 Western c., 20, 190 Dadaism, 119 dark(ness), 122, 123, 125, 129, 131, 132, 135 d. continent, 62, 63, 120 death, 35, 98, 101, 104, 149 African continent, d. in, 38, 54 A. postcolony, d. in, 157 embrace of d., 118, 119 life, relation of d. with, 37, 70

man, d. of, 93 rites of d., 122 d. penalty, 139 politics of d., 23, 181 social d., 99 debt, 69, 70, 163 decolonization. See under colon(ialism) (iality)(ization) 4, 5, 41, 50, 58, 59, 74, 97, 99, 102, 115, 138, 142, 143, 144, 165, 196 after effects of d., 69 conceptual d., 9 discourses on d., 9–39 passim ideological d., linguisitic d., 10 politic(al)(s of) d., 9, 10, 98, 103 theorists of d., 64 deconstruction, 25, 29, 30, 122 Foucauldian d., 30 Mudimbe’s d., 15 radical d., 74 Wiredu’s d., 10, 22 democra(cy)(tization), 28, 68, 143, 144, 161, 162, 169, 175, 180, 183 Africa, d. in, 104, 163 anti-d. tendency, 164 apartheid as transgression against d., 182 Aristotelian d., 182 consensual d., 37 cosmopolitan d., 6, 93, 182, 184 culture, d. of, 110 d. deficit, 168 European d., 178 multiracial d., 182 nondemocratic public sphere, 179 postmodern d., 6, 179, 182, 184 pre-d. deliberation, 178, 179 pro-d. activists, 89, 105, 112 rhetoric of democratization, 177 undemocratic power, 161 d. values, 184 Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). See under Congo dependency, 69 determinism, political, 101 deterritorialization. See under territoriali(ty)(zation)

Subject Index developmentalis(m)(ts), 55, 81, 85, 177 dialectical reconstruction, 97 diaspora, 11, 69 dictatorship, civilian, 104 difference, 62, 62, 66, 70, 85, 96 cultural d., 68 irreconcilable d., 123, 124 liberation of d., 83 metaphysics of d., 50, disability, 166 discrimination, 134, 136 diversity, 10, 79, 159, 160, 169, 170, 182, 183 divina(tion)(tory) systems, 78, 79, 84 domestic interests, 169 domination, 37, 38, 54, 65, 68, 135, 152, 155, 196 caste-class d., 144 colonial d., 120, 130 subaltern d., 172 symbolic d., 64 econom(ies)(y), 21, 26, 42, 49, 52, 67, 68, 74, 89, 109, 126, 137, 180 African e., 69 bodily afflictions of e. nature, 77 e. colonial domination, 130 e. controls, 191 e. decisions, 167 development e., 154, 172, 181 e. disempowerment, 169 dominence, e. structures of, 140 e. emancipation, 102 e. exploitation, 144, 191 e. invasion, 64 gender, e. of, 126 gift e., 162 global e., 25, 54, 55 political e. of the global, 31 e. injustice, 100 modernizing e. advancement, 171 moral(ality) e., 65, 150, 153, 172, 173 political e. of m., 155 national e., 168, 175 phallic e., 134, 135 political e., 92, 129, 130, 149 postcolonial e. relations, 175 e. power, 136

215

e. production, 172 public conduct, e. of, 155 regional e. space, 69 scale, e. of, 69 social transaction, e. of, 162 socio-economic factors, 12, 59, 62, 191 (socio-)sexual(ity) e. of, 7, 76, 132– 134, 144, 146 subaltern e., 172 e. transformations, 171 violence, e. of, 152, 156, 163 écriture feminine, 121, 139 Egypt, 10, 18, 32, 79, 85, 115 elit(es)(ism), 45, 52, 99, 173 African e., 12 Black e., 82 educated e., 13 local e., 12, 13, 85 political e., 85, 154, 156 ruling e., 100 emancipation, 102 African collective self, e. of, 32 e. postmodern ethic, 192 employment, 175 South Africa une. rates, 82 England, 12, 61, 62, 105, 133, 186, 187, 190 enlightenment, 90, 93, 100, 172, 178 post e. imagination, 66 e. modernity, 115, 128, 132, 181 e. rationality/reason, 122, 161 environmental rights, 101 epistemolog(ies)(y), 37, 38, 60, 66, 80, 83, 140, 142, 154 African e., 2, 20, 74 e. categories, 20 conventional e., 17 e. dichotomization, 20 Eurocentric discourse, e. in, 62 nativism, e. of, 132 e. reconstructions, 36, 37 social e., 63, 64 Western e., 10, 14 erotici(sm)(zation), 119, 121, 122, 130, 139, 144–146, 189 ethnicity, 16, 38, 59, 85, 112, 133, 148, 153, 162 African e., 24, 86

216

POSTETHNOPHILOSOPHY

ethnicity, con’t. e. diversity, 183 e. group relationships, 81 e. inferiors, 135 Nkoya e. group of Zambia, 76 e. particularity, 28 e. strife, 24 ethnocentris(m)(ts), 2 ethnophilosophy, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 18, 25–27, 30, 41–55 passim, 73, 124, 141, 147, 151, 177, 195, 196 African e., 15 Eurocentricism, 5, 51, 54 capitalism, E. forms of, 170 E. discourse, 62, 121, 133 E. imagination, 64 E. racism, 25 evangelist(s), 61, 64, 66 exceptionalism, 93, 150, 184 exotic(ism)(ization), 44, 185, 186, 189, 193 exploitation, 22, 28, 52, 54, 65, 146, 152, 164 capitalist e., 164, 174 commercial e., 185 economic e., 144, 191 Expressionism, 119 fact, 21, 24 confusion between power and f., 54 female figure, African, 6, 115–146 passim, 185, 188 males over f., 63 passive f., 62 feminin(e)(ism)(ity), 123, 130 f. interventions, 122 masculine/f. distinction, 142 f. text, 119–121 fetishization, 44, 185, 187, 193 Francophones, 14, 15, 45, 47 F. Africa, 18, 47, 51, 61 Anglophone-F. differences, 96 literary expression, F. forms of, 96 migrant F. trading communites, 153 freedom, 13, 28, 53, 77, 120, 123, 124, 147, 154, 183 invention, f. of, 186 nationalist f. fighters, 102 sexual f., 146

French Museum of Ethnography, 94 fundamentalism, 10, 11, 23, 24, 90, 177 gangsterization, 120, 156, 157 gender genocide, 5, 24, 54, 137, 166 Ghana, 1, 3, 12, 55 G. nationalism, 13 ghetto(ization), African 4, 52, 68, 166 de-g., 19, 59, 93, 166 gift giving, 153 Gladstone administration, 65 glamour, South African, 183, 184 glissement, 121, 122 global(ity)(ization), 6, 9–11, 24, 31–34, 37, 38, 73, 83, 86, 90, 93, 94, 97, 98, 111, 148, 151, 152, 160, 168, 174, 175, 196 anthropology of g., 57–71 passim capital, g. of, 171 digital g., 23, 162 economic g., 54 (re)colonization of g., 167–176 passim third world, g. of, 171 God, 24, 47, 66, 67, 77, 178 Kingdom of G. in Tswana, 62 gods, 101 Gounders, 172–174 government(ality), 135, 150, 154, 155 administrative g., 162 g. arbitrariness, 104 confusion between public affairs and private g., 54 g. disfavor, 104 indirect g., 68 g. recklessness, 104 g. services, 167 guilt, 146 gynecological aberrations, 130 Hausa-speaking peoples, 175 healing, 77, 82–84, 86 hermaphroditism, 125–128, 130 hetereogeneity, 119 heterology, 123, 124, 130 HIV/AIDS, 36, 82 Hobbesian jungle, 157 Hobbesianization, 102

Subject Index Holocaust, 90, 93 homologia, 178 homonoia, 178 homosocial structure, 173 horror, 134 house-warming ceremonies, 154 human(ity), 29, 80, 82, 83, 92, 165, 169 animal-h. dichotomy, 133, 185–193 h. capital, 64, 65 chattel vs. h., 108 h. dignity, 47 h. disability, 166 mobility of h. populations, 69 rational h., 150 h. relationships, 81 h. rights, 93, 99, 101, 103 h. sciences 156 h. sexuality, 189 h. societies, 152 h. survival, 125, 126 h. values, 90 humanism, 27, 28, 91, 92, 94, 96, 169 anthropological h., 182 European h., 90, 93 postracial h., 108 theological h., 81 universal h., 181 Western h., 93 Zambian h., 83 Hutu/Tutsi conflict, 23, 24 hybridity, 28, 67, 68, 70, 123, 141 I Ching, 78 I vis-à-vis the other, 123, 124 iconization, 162 identit(ies)(y), 14, 16, 19, 28, 34, 36, 66, 69, 86, 90, 120, 123, 134, 139, 165, 168, 169, 183 African i., 1, 2, 10, 11, 18, 118, 141 collective i., 2, 152 i. construction, 35, 54 genocide and i., relationship between, 24 identitarian i. contradictions, 93 i. fundamentalism, 11 i. insularity, 3 i. politics, 31, 160

217

lifeless forms of i. (objecthood), 50 i.-logic, 169 politics of i., 23, 24, 38, 96, 112, 195, 196 postcolonial i., 2, 169 splintered i. of South Africa under apartheid, 182 transnational i., 69, 140 transracial i., 140, 141 imperialism, 5, 16, 17, 51, 68, 74, 117, 133, 143 colonialism and i., relation between, 132 cultural i., 32 global i., 10, 34 neoimperialism, 33, 141 Southey’s polemic i., 61 impunity, 165, 166 incompetence, governmental, 104, 144, 167, 168, 171, 172, 174 India, 6, 11, 143 economic policy, provincial I., 175 nonresident I. (NRI), 170 I. philosophy, 117, 142 I. subject, 132 indigeneity, 32, 38 industrialization, 83, 172, 175 infidelity, 146, 190 informalization, 69, 84, 86, 144, 157, 172, 173 injustice, 100, 104 inscription, 115, 117, 191 institutionalization, 103, 136, 156 deinstitutionalization, 69 integrity, 79, 148, 180, 189 intellectual asphyxia, 118 intellectualism, Brahmanical, 117 Western i. traditions, 128, 182 Interculturality, 73–87 passim. Internet, 79, 111, 113, 160 Islamization, 144 jouissance, 23, 85, 121, 122 journalism, 89, 107 Kamiriithu Community and Education and Culture Center, 33 Kenya, 1, 33

218

POSTETHNOPHILOSOPHY

kinship, 141, 163 Nambikwara k. structures, 75 knowledge, 65, 80, 172 African structures of k., 14 A. gnosis as system of k., 122 k. production in A., 35, 51–53 anthropological k., 5 carnal k., 21 consumption, k. of, 174 contradictory orders of k., 85 esoteric k., 77 evangelists’ k., 64 indigenous women’s k., 133 information technologies for k. dissemination, 79 multicultural forms of k. resources, 78 peripheral k., 42 scientific k., 185 secret k. of White Male Father, 116 self-k., 161 subaltern k., 175 totalitarian k., 185, 187 universal k., 22 will to k., 195 labor, 60 bonded l. in India, 144 feminization of l., 174, 175 Gounder’s power over social l., 173, 174 intellectual l., 4, 43, 44, 90, 112 international division of l., 42 migrant l., 75, 136 value, l. theory of, 172 Labour Party, 160 Lacanian conflict, 77 language(s), 11, 19, 48, 64, 70, 82, 83, 97, 108, 140. See also linguistic(ism)(s) African l., 21, 24, 124 Akan l., 22 authentic thinking and l., 119 autonomic hegemony of l., 29 colonized body, society, and l., dynamics between, 165 consciousness and l., relationship between, 130 discourse/narratives, l. of, 20, 32, 48, 138

disfiguration of l., 121, 135 European l., 119 feminine text, l. of, 120 French l., 33 German l., 119 humanism, l. of, 169 hybrid l., 66 identity, authenticity, freedom, and l., connections between, 120, 139 Kikuyu (Bantu) l., 33 oppressed, l. of, 43 philosophy of l./l. of philosophy, 17, 23 political and l., relationship between, 49, 99 politics of l., 24 Law of the Father, 121 leopard, figure of the, 75, 79, 84 Lesotho, 136 liberalization, 169 liberation, 3, 41, 115 Africa, l. in, 84 difference, l. of, 83 Pan-Africanism as theory of l., 11 political l., 13, 15, 17, 33, 44, 50, 91, 102, 175, 180 post-l. era, 102 transcontinental l., 10 Liberia, 24, 90, 157, 166 liminality, 121, 127 linguistic(ism)(s), 29, 30, 48, 83, 195 art, l. aspect of, 99 comparative l., 17 l. decolonization, 10, 15, 16, 23 l. reconstruction, 32 literature, 22, 28, 30, 61, 104, 159, 195, 196 African l./criticism, 94, 97, 98, 138 African-American l., 117 l. art/creativity, 13, 94, 102, 103, 111 French l., 18 identity, create by l. means, 140 international l. prizes, 107 l. theory, 163, 166 Latin American l. history, 96 Nigerian l., 101, 103, 106–112 PELS Literary Series, 111 White l., 107 logic, 19, 65, 121 ambivalences, l. of, 170

Subject Index logic, con’t. binary l., 12 capital, l. of, 144, 170, 195 democracy, l. of, 144 identity-l., 169 negotiation and bargaining, l. of, 153 (neo)imperialism, l. of, 33, 34 oppression, l. of global, 33, 165 (post)colonization, l. of, 25, 28, 34, 39, 62, 170 privilege, l. of, 171 sciences, l. of, 46 symbolic l., 81 transnationalization of recolonization, l. of, 10 violence of Hobbsian irreversible l., 157 logocentricism, 29 low wage work, 171 Lusophonic African regions, 61 maladjustment, structural, 69 Mali, 11 marginal(ity)(ization), 57, 75, 99, 109, 119, 120, 122, 124, 129, 140, Africa, demarginalization of, 53 diversity, demarginalization of, 160 Marxism, 17, 19, 45, 46, 50, 51, 55, 75, 87, 91, 123, 130 masculinist cannon and text, 117 matrilaterality, 63 matrilin(eality)(y), 140–442 mediocrity, 80, 99 Mediterranean societies, 152 memory, 6, 27, 125, 127, 178 ethic of m., 89–96 passim metaphoricity, 131, 146 metaphysics, 29, 50, 120, 123, 147, 155 Indian m., 142 multiculturalism, m. of, 161 metropole, 106 migrant communities, 153 mimesis, 67, 68, 123 mind, 20–24, 30, 120, 130 European m., 90 positivist m., 73 public m., 100, 178 misappropriation, 148, 151 misogyny, 139

219

missionar(ies)(y), 21, 26, 59, 61, 62, 64– 67, 74 Mobutism, 54 modern(ism)(ity), 5, 14, 16, 17, 30, 66, 70, 80, 105, 117, 135, 142, 144, 145, 159, 161, 170, 193, 195 Africa, m. in, 4, 29 m. aporia, 93 coloniality context, m. in, 12 m. dialectic, 19 discourse of m., 143 Euro-m., 12, 67 (post)enlightenment m., 59, 115, 128, 132, 181 postm., 25, 28, 29, 59, 73, 79, 80, 110, 140, 195 tension between m. and postm., 80 pre-m., 93, 191, 192 sexual m., 191 syncretic nature of m., 162 transfigurative m., 142 moncultural milieu, 101 monetarization, 69, 152, 154, 156, 175 moral(ity)(s), 6, 21, 65, 67, 92, 100, 102, 103, 107, 136, 143, 145, 148– 150, 152, 153, 155, 157, 169, 172, 173, 192 morganatic union, 180 motherhood, 146 Mozambique, 166, 179 multicolorism, 180, 183 multiculturalism, 90, 160, 166, 177 multivocality, 156 Nambikwara. See kinship structures naming, 29, 120 narrative, 32, 55, 132, 162 hermeneutic-n. approach, 3 linear n., 119, 129 peace, n. of, 182 national(ism)(ity), 16, 34, 142, 150, 153, 162 Ghanian n., 13 global n., 9 Indian n., 144 nation-building, 143 nation-state, 38, 70, 168

220

POSTETHNOPHILOSOPHY

nation-state, con’t. patriarchal n., 31 postcolonial n., 163 nativ(es)(ism), 12, 26, 42, 44, 45, 52, 55, 60, 61, 66, 70, 128, 130, 132, 141, 151, 159, 166, 177, 181 Native Americans, 79, 134 necropolitical destruction, 96 Négritude, 2, 25, 27, 28, 30, 32, 37, 83, 94–96, 181 neoliberalism, 169 New Objectivism, 119 Nigeria, 6, 11, 24, 85, 89, 90, 98, 101, 104, 105, 107–112, 157, 163, 164, 175, 182 N. columnists, 103 N. literature, 107–109, 111, 112 N. polity, 100 postcolonial N., 99, 100 post-independence N., 161 N. writers, 98–101, 103, 107 Nkoya of Zambia, the, 76, 78, 84 nothingness, 117 objecthood, 50 Ogoni Bill of Rights (OBR), 164 Ogoni crisis, 100, 163–165 Ogun, cult of, 93, 105 oppression, 2, 27, 43, 45, 70, 116, 136, 138, 146 African o., 122 global o., 32, 33, 92 humanism of the oppressed, 94 Japanese o., 135 o. logic., 165 male o., 76, 120, 143 racial o., 36, 37 sexist o., 137, 143 sociopolitical o., 74 structural and epochal o., 83 women, o. of, 135 orality, 14, 97 Organization of African Unity, 91 origins, 4, 52 problem of o., 17, 41, 55, 73, 195, 196 Osofisan-Osundare-Saro-Wiwa generation, 98

other(ization)(ness), 5, 14, 16, 29, 50, 59, 123, 130, 185, 193 African philosopher as o., 22 Black o., 63 premodern o., 168 same/other dynamic, 66 self/other dynamic, 170 subaltern o., 80 tension between I and the o., 123 uninformed o., 161 ownership, 150 Pan-Africanism, 4, 10–12, 32, 37, 38, 89 pantheism, 29 patriarchal order, 131, 139, 142, 143 patrilineal tradition, 126 patrimonialism, ,154 peace, 82, 182, 183 amnesty and p., distinction between, 81 peasantry, 75, 152, 170, 172 PELS Literary Series, 111 person, 21, 24, 108 phallocentrism, 120, 130, 137, 138 phallocratic system, 135 phobia, 129, 131 phonologism, 29 pleasure, perverse, 190 poesis, 123 poet(ics)(ry)(s), 30, 59, 76, 87, 95, 98–101, 105, 107, 108, 110–112, 123, 181 poetics of corruption, 147–158 passim poetics of nonracialism, 177 politike philia, 182 polity, 100, 148 polygamy, 21, 146 positivism, 17, 73, 85, 87, 130 postcolony, 42, 52, 54, 66, 67–70, 91, 96, 99, 105–107, 135, 137, 145, 149, 155–158, 163, 172. See also colon(ialism)(iality)(ization) postmodernity, 6, 10, 93, 179. See also modern(ism)(ity) power, 5, 42, 43, 63, 65, 71, 115, 146, 168, 172 abuse of p., 151 agency, p. of, 122, 169 apartheid, p. during, 35

Subject Index power, con’t. brutal or impersonal p., 22 colonial p., 129 colonialism, p. struggle caused by, 58, 68 confusion between p. and fact, 54 discourses of p., 196 economic p., 74, 136 empowerment, 41 female figure/woman, p. re:, 127, 145 glamour, p. of, 183 hegemonic p., 139, 167 idea of Africa re: p., 122 labor, p. over, 173 mental p., 30 microphysics of p., 189 Mobutist myths of p., 54 oppression and p., 165 prerogatives of p., 134 political/ruling p., 13, 33, 54, 70, 85, 86, 92, 99, 100, 172, 178–180 sacrifice, p. of, 86 secualar p. and religious authority conflated, 65 social p., 169, 192 sovereign, p. of, 190, 191 technologies of p., 145 Tiruppur, p. in, 175 White canon, p. of, 107 pre-logicality, 31. See also logic prevarication, 151 pride, 43, 135, 154 primordialisms, 31 privatization, 150, 156 privilege, 74, 80, 171 production, 63 agrarian p., 172 contradictions in relations of p., 163 economic p., 172 global/local p., 174, 175 intellectual p., 196 Anglophonic/Francophonic differences in i. p., 96 British and French i. p., 96 African i. p., 33, 38, 51–53, 55, 177 literary/textual p., 76 African l. p., 97 Nigerian l. p., 109–112 North Atlantic capitalist modes of p., 75

221

petroleum p. in Nigeria, 164 scientific p., 51 Taylorist modes of industrial p., Tiruppur, p. in, 171, 173–175 progroms, 131 promiscuity, 130 psychoanalysis, 86 Pygmie, figure of the, 128 rac(e)(iology)(ism)(ization) (do racial), 1, 2, 5, 6, 11, 16, 38, 49, 53, 59, 62, 63, 68, 82, 93, 108, 115, 129–133, 135, 138, 140, 143, 177–193 passim, 195–197 anti-White, Black r., 159 de-racialization, 10, 36, 92 Eurocentric r., 25 political ecology of r., 181 reverse racism, 159 rainbowism, 6, 178, 182 Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD), 34 randomness, 137 rationality, 14, 19–22, 27, 30, 85, 134, 135, 150, 156, 161, 189, 191 readable/unreadable distinction, 120 Realism, Brechtian, 119 reason, 63 enlightenment r., 122 ethnological r., 127 European technological r., 64 scientific r., 142 unreason, 67 Western r., 66 White male r., 120 recolonization. See under colon(ialism)(iality)(ization) reconciliation, 80–82, 85, 90, 95, 96, 182 reflective integration, 19 reminiscences, childhood, 93 Renaisance, African, 181 repression, 18, 100, 121, 136, 146, 177, 190 retrodiction, 83 rhetoric, 6, 33, 38, 103, 156, 178 African r., 181, 183 r. Caesarism, 179 democratization, r. of, 177 diversity, r. of, 183 Mandela’s r., 178

222

POSTETHNOPHILOSOPHY

rhetoric, con’t. peace, r. of, 182, 183 political r., 115, 180 Tutu’s r., 178 Roman Empire, 152 runic divination, 78. See also divina(tion)(tory) systems Rwanda, 23, 24, 26, 33, 34, 46, 90, 157, 166, 182 sagacity, 1, 3, 44, 55 same/other dynamic, 14, 66 sangoma(hood)(s), 77–80, 87 segregationists, Black, 160 self(hood), 100, 160, 170, 171 African s., 14, 50 A. collective s., 32, 36 s.-awareness, 63, 161, 186 s.-celebration, 183 s.-confidence, 105 s.-consciousness, 186 s.-construction, 77 s.-determination, 164, 168 s.-exile, 98 s.-image, 67 civil society, s.-regulating, 67 s.-division, 50, 77 s.-invention, 117 masculine s., 117 multicultural s., 159 s.-peripheralization, 176 postcolonial s., 170 s.-publication, 110 s.-refle(ction)(xivity), 74, 166, 186 s.-subsistence, 69 s.-sufficiency, 175 s.-worth, 2, 117 s.-writing, 59, 166 semiotics, 7, 108, 183, 184 Senegal, 11, 28, 47, 48, 91, 144, 145 Senegalese Murid traders, 175 Senghor, Leopold Sedar sentence, 24 sexuality, 31, 76, 115, 117, 129, 132, 185–193 passim, 196 Black s., 133 economies of s. in Africa, 7, 139, 140, 144, 146

embourgeoization of s., 192 Victorian s., 190 shame, 146 Sierra Leone, 24, 90, 157, 165, 166 signification, 38, 63, 110, 119, 127, 134, 193 slave(ry)(s), 37, 43, 49, 50, 97, 115, 117, 138, 143 anti-s. movement in U.S., 13 Atlantic s. trade, 12, 90, 91 bond-s., 144 master-s. relationship, 91 mental enslavement in Africa, 42 mission work among s., 60, 61 social(ism)(ists)(ity), 16, 17, 28, 36, 50, 153, 154, 181 s. control of activity, 172 s. conversation, 183 s. hierarchy, 191 s. space, 155, 172, 183, 190 s. stratification, 12, 13, 68, 69 s. systems, 81, 153 sociopolitical engineering, 90 Somalia, 24, 90 soul, 21, 24, 51 South Africa, 6, 10, 34–36, 38, 46, 57, 83, 90, 92, 110, 132, 153, 156, 165, 166, 178, 180, 183–185 S. A. diversity and dissent, 182 nonracialized S. A., 11 post-apartheid S. A., 6, 35, 36, 81, 82, 155, 178, 180 S. A. postcolony, 66 S. A. rhetoric, 183 S. A. subjectivities, 177 sovereignty, 33, 34, 42, 54, 69, 89, 145, 146, 190, 191 (pre) Soviet Union collapse, 17 spirit(s)(uality), 21, 23, 24, 26, 36, 42, 62, 65, 77, 84, 86, 91, 119, 179 absolutist s. dominion, 62 category of the s., 24 s. entity, 21 s. incest, 190 s. inequality, 65 s.-material dichotomy, 142 s. qualities, 26, 143 state (collapse; dissolution of the state; the exit of the state)

Subject Index steatopygia, 133, 185, 188 subalternity, 167, 175, 196 postcolonial s., 171, 172 subject(hood)(ification)(ivity)(s), 62, 73, 77, 80, 117, 119, 127, 161, 167, 182, 185 African s., 5, 6, 11, 15, 16, 18, 22, 24, 30, 31, 50, 58, 59, 96, 116, 117, 120–122, 124, 128, 129, 132, 152, 159, 196 Bantu s., 26, 42 Black s., see under Black(ness)(s) brutal s., 135 colonized s., 5, 6, 12, 58, 67, 70, 165 de-subjectification of Black s., 36 iconizable s., 160 Indian s., 132, 142, 167 knowing, observing s., 85 North Atlantic s., 73, 80 otherized s., 66 passive s., 60 postcolonial s., 58, 59, 153, 160 s./object relation, 5 Western s., 2 White s., 133 substance, 21, 24 Sudan, 24 supremacists, White, 160 Supreme Being, 20, 125, 126 Surrealism, 95 symbiosis, transcultural, 28 symbolism, animal, 79 syncretism, cultural, 28, 67, 86, 162 systematicity, theoretical, 10, 96 Taoism, 120 tarot, 79 temptation, 116 territoriali(ty)(zation), 34, 69, 91, 92, 144 deterritorialization, 15, 38, 97–113 passim, 117, 123 postcolonial t., 9, 38 reterritorialization, 117 text(uality), 14, 79, 96, 123, 130 African philosophical t., 118, 119 feminist t., 118, 119 male t., 121 Western t., 119, 121

223

patriarchal t., 119, 123, 130 theoreticism of Western academic philosophy, 115 thinking African t., 20 Akan t., 21 authentic t., 119 free t., eighteenth-century, 178 historicist t., 50 philosophical t., 30 race t., 108; see also rac(e)(ialism) (iology)(ism)(ization) thought (do synthesis in thought or separate if it has other contexts) Tiruppur, 171–175 toponymy, colonial, 129 tournaments, 183 traditionality, 30 transgress(ion)(ivity), 5, 80, 84, 98, 100, 119–123, 125–127, 147, 151, 160, 182, 189, 191, 192 conceptual t., 159 cultural t., 85 sexual t., 193 transnationalization, 9, 10, 33, 34, 38, 39, 69 truth, 17, 21, 24, 43, 65, 86, 119, 129, 147 Akan language, t. in, 22 ethnographic t., 76 historical t., 13 reconciliation, t. and, 90, 96 transgressive and transitional t., 30 Truth and Reconcilation Commission, 81, 182 Tswana, 58–66 Setswana (Tswanan language), 64, 65 ubuntu, 82, 83, 181, 182 Uganda, 11, 24, 33, 34 unanimism, 11, 52, 160, 161 unconscious, 119 underdevelopment, 89 undertechnologization, 89 United States, 13, 107, 108, 145, 161, 164, 167 universalism, 2, 19, 43, 151 unreality, regime of, 134 victim(izer), 62, 70, 71, 78, 91, 146, 164, 170, 193

224

POSTETHNOPHILOSOPHY

violence, 6, 17, 22, 23, 29, 30, 38, 42, 44, 54, 75, 78, 80, 92, 100, 102, 104, 116, 117, 120, 126, 134, 135, 137, 144, 145, 152, 154–157, 163, 165, 166, 170, 172, 177, 178, 186, 187, 189 sexual v., 174, 190, 193 washing, 154 White(ness), 16, 36, 159 anti-W., Black racism, 159 apartheid, W. under, 182 W. colonists, 60, 159 W. consumers, 180 W. female/woman, 120 W. prostitutes, 133, 134 W. literature, 107 W. Male oppression, 120 W. male philosophical gods, 116, 129 W. male reason, 120 W. rationality, 189 W. sexual desire, 185, 187, 189, 193 W. subject(ivity)(s), 12, 13, 133 W. supreacists, 160

woman(hood), figure of w. in, 115, 120, 121, 124–127, 130, 131, 142–144 African w., 132, 138 Black man’s desire for White w., 133 colonial urban w., 146 Nyoya w., 76 White w., 133 women’s question, 142–144 women’s rule, 131, 132 writable, the writing, 119 academic w., 79 African philosophical w., 50, 117 Blacks, Kant’s observations about w. among, 107 modern languages, w. in, 108 philosophical w. in Africa, 50 self-w., 59, 166 subjectivities rendered in w., 161 women’s w., 121 Yoruba, 91, 93 Zambia, 74, 76, 78, 83–85 Zulu bones oracle, 79

INDEX OF NAMES Abiola, Moshood Kashimawo Olawale, 90 Abraham, William, 27 Achebe, Chinua, 99, 102, 105, 107, 109, 110, 112 Adelugba, Dapo, 110 Adesanmi, Pius, 106, 112 Adesokan, Akinwumi, 106, 111, 112 Roots in the Sky, 111 Adewole, Funmi, 106, 110 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 102, 103 Ahmad, Aijaz, 169 Ahmad, Izzia, 102, 110 Ajayi, Sesan, 105 Akeh, Afam, 105, 110 Althusser, Louis, 1, 48, 75 Amaduime, Ifi, 137 Amin, Samir, 94 Amo, Anton-Wilhem, 46, 48, 55, 118 Dissertatio de humanae mentis apatheia, 118 Dissertatio inauguralis de jure Maurorum in Europa, 118 Tractatus de arte sobrie et accurate philosophandi, 118 Amuta, Chidi, 105 Anaximander, 120, 147 Anaximenes, 120 Anderson, Benedict, 150 Anozie, Sunday, 105 Appadurai, Arjun, 58, 132 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 1, 3, 4, 6, 42, 52, 55, 140, 141, 151, 182 In My Father’s House, 1, 140, 141, 177, 182, 195 Aristotle, 131, 147 Poetics, 131 Asante, S. K. B., 136, 140–142 Atta, Sefi, 106 Awolalu, Adesanya, 47 Awolowo, Jeremiah Obafemi, 47 Azikiwe, Nnamdi, 15 Bâ, Ahmadou Hampate, 103 The Fortunes of Wangrin, 103

Baartman, Sarah, 132, 133, 185, 187– 189, 191–193 Babbitt, Susan E., 137 Bacon, Francis, 63 Bahoken, Jean-Calvin, 27, 46 Bandele-Thomas, Biyi, 106–108 Barthes, Roland, 120, 177, 183 Bassey, Nnimmo, 101 Bauer, Nancy, 124 Beckett, Samuel, 108 Beier, Ulli, 95, 110 Berete, Simone, 110 Bergson, Henri, 30, 31 Bhabha, Homi, 30, 31, 169, 170 Biakolo, Emewho, 110 Biaya, T. K., 144, 146, 149 “Crushing the Pistachio,” 144 Biko, Steve, 178 Bodunrin, Peter O., 2, 3, 18, 116 Bourdieu, Pierre, 62 Braziel, Jana Evans, 139 Brontë, Charlotte, 61 Brown, Stuart, 109 Burton, Robert, 127 Butler, Judith, 116 Cameron, James, 12 Campbell, Sue, 137 Canguilhem, Georges, 48 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 163 Cesaire, Aime, 49, 50, 95, 143 Chari, Sharad, 170–175 Fraternal Capital, 170 Churchill, Sir Winston, 179 Clark, John Pepper, 105, 110 Collins, Robert O., 137 Comaroff, John L. and Jean, 4, 5, 57–71, 73, 86, 120, 155 Of Revelation and Revolution, 57, 58, 65–67 Conrad, Joseph, 135 Heart of Darkness, 135 Corneille, Pierre, 18 Cronon, D. E., 12 Crumb, Robert, 145

226

POSTETHNOPHILOSOPHY

Cummings, Robert, 12 Cuvier, Georges, 63 Dago, Ousmane Ndiaye, 144–146 Damas, Léon-Gontran, 94, 95 Retour de Guyane, 94 Dante Alighieri, 120 Darah, G. G., 105 Das, Arvind N., 148 de Beauvoir, Simone, 123, 124 Ethics of Ambiguity, 124 de Gaulle, Charles, 179 de Sardan, Jean-Pierre Olivier, 6, 151– 153, 155, 162 de Vigenere, Blaise, 127 Defoe, Daniel, 61 N’Daw, Alassane, 47 Depestre, René, 95, 96 Derrida, Jaques, 1, 29, 48, 81, 82, 121, 141, 147 Descartes, René, 18, 124 Dewey, John, 16 Dickens, Charles, 61 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 9, 15, 16, 18, 20, 22, 23, 32, 39, 48 Du Bois, W. E. B., 91 Dubow, Saul, 12 Duiker, Kabelo Sello, 35, 36 The Hidden Star, 36 The Quite Violence of Dreams, 36 Thirteen Cents, 35, 36 Durkheim, Émile, 75 Eboussi-Boulaga, Fabian, 47 “Le Bantu problematique,” 47 La Crise du Muntu, 47 Echeruo, Michael, 105 Ede, Godwin, 106, 111 Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan, 4, 18 Ezeanah, Chiedu, 110 Fagunwa, Daniel O., 105 Falana, Femi, 89 Fanon, Frantz, 16, 29, 30, 39, 49, 143, 169 “Les damnés de la terre,” 30 Fawehinmi, Gani, 89

Foucault, Michel, 1, 22, 93, 163, 189, 190 The Order of Things, 93 Fouda, Basile, 27 Freire, Paulo, 143 Freud, Sigmund, 30, 116 Frobenius, Leo, 4, 18 Fuentes, Carlos, 96 Garfield, Jay, 142 Garuba, Harry, 106, 110 Garvey, Marcus, 91, 160, 164 Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, 31, 62, 107, 108, 117, 132, 169 George, Olakunle, 97 George, Stefan, 120 Ghosh, Amitav, 161 In an Antique Land, 161 Gibson, Nigel, 30, 31 Gilroy, Paul, 6, 28, 93, 108, 159, 160, 164, 184 Gobineau, Count Arthur de, 129, 131 Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, 131 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 120, 181 Gordimer, Nadine, 89, 102, 104 Gramsci, Antonio, 60, 163 Griaule, Marcel, 3, 47 Dieu d’eau, 47 Guha, Ranajit, 101 Gyekye, Kwame, 6, 96, 116, 121, 147– 152, 155, 157, 158 Tradition and Modernity, 147 Habermas, Jürgen, 163 Habila, Helon, 102, 106, 107 Hallen, Barry, 2 African Philosophy, 2 Hani, Chris, 178 Hayes, Richard P., 142 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 25, 63, 107, 132 Heidegger, Martin, 28, 93, 116, 120, 121, 130, 147 “Help! My life in danger, Soyinka cries out” (no author), 104 Herault, George, 111

Index of Names Higo, Aigboje, 110 Hodgkin, Thomas, 12 Homer, 120 hooks, bell, 143 Hountondji, Paulin J., 1–4, 9, 11, 15, 17, 18, 26, 27, 31, 36, 41–55, 96, 106, 116, 118, 141, 177, 195 The Struggle for Meaning, 41, 42, 47, 54 Hume, David, 16, 25, 63, 107, 132 Husserl, Edmund, 18, 48, 49, 55, 142 Hutchison, Charles Francis, 12–14 Pen-Pictures of Modern Africans, 12, 13 Ibekwe, Chinweizu, 89, 102 Towards the Decolonization of African Literature (with Madubuike, and Onwuchekwa), 89, 102 Ifowodo, Ogaga, 99, 102, 110 Ige, Bola, 103–105 Iman, Ayesha, 137 Irele, Abiola, 42, 97, 105, 109 Irigaray, Luce, 121 Irobi, Isabia, 106 Iyayi, Festus, 101 Iyer, Pico, 150 Izevbaye, Dan, 109, 110 Jana, Priscillia, 181 Jeyifo, Biodun, 105, 109 Jonson, Ben, 108 Kabila, Laurent, 33, 54, 162 Kagame, Alexis, 26, 27, 46, 47 Kagame, Paul, 33, 34 Kant, Immanuel, 16, 25, 63, 107, 132, 147 Kebede, Messay, 25, 27–31 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 179 Kennedy, Randall, 131 Kenyatta, Jomo, 15 Kierkegaard, Søren, 116 Kimmerle, Erin H., 80 King, Jr., Martin Luther, 92, 162 Kobani, E. N., 164 Koboekae, Martin, 36

227

Taung Wells, 36 Kourouma, Amadou, 99 Ladipo, Duro, 110 Laleye, Prosper, 47 Larbi, Madonna Owusuah, 137 LeBesco, Kathleen, 139 Lero, Etienne, 95, 96 Leton, G. B., 164 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 123 Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, 4, 18, 25 Lincoln, Abraham, 179 Louw, Dirk J., 181 Lufuluabo, François-Marie, 27, 46 Lynch, Hollis, 12 Lyotard, Jean-François, 6, 159 Mabona, Antoine, 45 Machel, Samora, 179 Madubuike, Ihechukwu, 89, 102 Towards the Decolonization of African Literature (with Chinweizu and Onwuchekwa), 89, 102 Mafeje, Archie, 75 Magubane, Ben, 75 Maisela, Letepe, 36 Makarakiza, Archbishop André, 27, 46 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 4, 18 Malraux, André, 93 Mama, Amina, 137 Mamdani, Mahmood, 24, 57, 59 Mandela, Nelson, 110, 178–180, 182 Marechera, Dambudzo, 165 The House of Hunger, 165 Marx, Karl, 31, 52, 75 Masilela, Johnny, 36 The Empowered Native, 36 We Shall Not Weep, 36 Masolo, D. A., 116, 121 Mbeki, Thabo, 10, 11, 181 Mbembe, Achille, 1, 7, 29, 58, 68, 141, 151, 152, 156, 157, 163 Mbiti, John, 26, 29, 46 McClintock, Anne, 31, 132 Memela, Sandile, 36 Flowers of the Nation, 36 Memmi, Albert, 143

228

POSTETHNOPHILOSOPHY

Mhlongo, Nicholas, 36 Dog Eat Dog, 36 Mobutu, Joseph Désiré, 33 Moele, Kgebetli, 36 The Book of the Dead, 36 Room 207, 36 Moi, Arap, 162 Moi, Toril, 121 Moliere, Jean-Baptiste, 18 Mpe, Phaswane, 36 Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 36 Mtutuzeli, Nyoka, 36 I Speak to the Silent, 36 Muchie, Mammo, 10, 11 “Has the Pan-African Hour Come,” 11 The Making of the Africa-Nation, 10 Mudimbe, Valentin Yves, 1, 3, 4, 6, 9, 11, 14, 15, 18, 22, 25, 27, 29–31, 47, 52, 55, 57, 59, 83, 86, 96, 116, 117, 121–131, 151, 158, 195 The Idea of Africa, 127, 128, 195 The Invention of Africa, 1, 11, 122, 128, 195 Parables and Fables, 123, 126, 128, 130, 195 Tales of Faith, 122 Mugabe, Robert, 162 Mulago, Vincent, 27, 46 Muppidi, Himadeep, 167–170, 175 The Politics of the Global, 167 Murray, Stephen O., 139 Museveni, Yoweri, 33, 34 NƗgƗrjuna, Acharya, 117 Naidu, Naravarapally Chandrababu, 167, 168 N’Daw, Alassane, 47 Nduka, Uche, 102, 106, 108–110 Belltime Letters, 108 The Bremen Poems, 108 Chiaroscuro, 108 Flower Child, 108 Heart’s Field, 108 If Only the Night, 108 Second Act, 108 Neruda, Pablo, 96 Niamkey, Koffi, 53

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1, 28, 30, 93 Nkrumah, Kwame, 3, 10, 15, 44, 46, 50, 55, 91 Nwakanma, Obi, 102, 106, 111 Nwosu, Maik, 102, 106 Nyerere, Julius, 3, 15, 50, 181 Nzegwu, Nkiru, 137, 140, 141 “Questions of Identity and Inheritance,” 140 Obiora, L. Amede, 137 Obumselu, Ben, 105 Ofeimun, Odia, 101, 102, 105 Oguibe, Olu, 106 Ogunbiyi, Yemi, 105 Ogundipe-Leslie, Molara, 7, 105, 137– 139, 141 Ogunwa, Denrele, 106 Ogunyemi, Chikwenye Okonjo, 137 Ojaide, Tanure, 101, 102 Okekwe, Promise, 102 Okigbo, Christopher, 98, 99, 102, 105, 110 Okome, Onookome, 106 Okonta, Ike, 106, 165 Okpewho, Isidore, 109, 110 Okri, Ben, 106–108 Oladipo, Olusegun, 130 Oliver, Kelly, 121 Ommer, Uwe, 145 Onwuchekwa, Jamie, 89, 102 Towards the Decolonization of African Literature (with Chinweizu and Madubuike), 89, 102 Opara, Ralph, 110 Oronto, Douglas,165 Osha, Sanya, 109 Osofisan, Femi, 98, 101–103, 105–107, 110 Osofisan, Sola, 112 Osondu, E. C., 102, 106 Osundare, Niyi, 98–103, 105–107, 110 Otiono, Nduka, 102, 111 Owomoyela, Oyekan, 45–47, 53, 116 Oyewumi, Oyeronke, 137 Park, Mungo, 62 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 185, 187 Venus, 185, 187, 188 Paz, Octavio, 96

Index of Names p’Bitek, Okot, 75 Pinter, Harold, 108 Plato, 18, 52, 147 Poe, Richard, 131 Prah, K. K., 12 Quayson, Ato, 159–166 Calibrations, 159 Rabearivelo, Jean-Joseph, 95 Racine, Jean, 18 Rahajarizafy, Antoine de Padoue, 46 Ransome-Kuti, Beko, 89 Rey, Pierre-Philippe, 75 Ricoeur, Paul, 48 Rigby, Peter, 126 Persistent Pastoralists, 126 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 120 Ripken, Peter, 109 “Literature and the New Censors,” 109 Robinson, Richard H., 142 Romains, Jules, 52 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 179 Rorty, Richard, 83 Roscoe, Will, 139 Roumain, Jacques, 95, 96 Said, Edward, 169 Salazar, Philippe-Joseph, 6, 177–179, 182–184 An African Athens, 177 Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 98–101, 163–165 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 18, 30, 89, 123 Segun, Omowunmi, 102, 111, 130 Sellers, Susan, 121 Senghor, Leopold Sedar, 16, 25–28, 30, 31, 47, 94–96, 181, 181 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin et la politique africaine, 47 Senghorian ideology of Négritude, 2 Shakespeare, William, 108, 120 Shaw, George Bernard, 108 Shoneyin, Lola, 102, 111 Shukri, Ishtiyaq, 36 The Silent Minaret, 36 Smet, Alfons Josef, 47 Histoire de la philosophie africaine contemporaine, 47

229

Southey, Robert, 61 Sow, Fatou, 137 Sowande, Bode, 105 Soyinka, Wole, 4, 6, 27, 28, 89–96, 98– 100, 102–105, 107, 109, 110, 181 The Burden of Memory, 94, 96 “Descent of Barbarism . . .,” 104 “L. S. Senghor and Négritude,” 94 The Man Died, 92–93 “Négritude and the Gods of Equity,” 94 Soyinka-Achebe-Okigbo troika, 98 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravory, 52, 169, 171 Stoler, Ann Laura, 31 Stoppard, Tom, 108 Strobel, Margaret, 137 Tempels, Placide, 1, 2, 4, 15, 18, 26, 31, 42, 47, 49 La philosophie bantoue, 1, 15, 47 pre-Tempelsian anthropology, 2 Thales of Miletus, 120 Theroux, Paul, 135 Thomas, Martin, 93 Toure, Abdou, 53 Toussaint L’ouverture, FrançoisDominique, 30 Towa, Marcien, 15, 44, 47 Tripp, Aili, 137 Tutu, Desmond, 178, 182 U Tam’si, Tchicaya, 95, 96 van Binsbergen, Wim, 4, 5, 73–87, 158 Black Athena Alive, 79 Black Athena: Ten Years After, 79 Cupmarks, Stellar Maps, and Mankala Board Games (with Lacroix), 79 “Global Bee Flight,” 79 Intercultural Encounters, 73 “Transregional and Historical Connections of Four-Tablet Divination in Southern Africa, 79 van Wetering, Ineke, 80 Virgil, 120

230

POSTETHNOPHILOSOPHY

wa Thiong’o, Ngugi, 9, 10, 15, 16, 20, 23, 25, 32–34, 39, 57, 59, 64 Wamba dia Wamba, Ernest, 10, 33, 34, 39, 53 Williams, Adebayo, 112 Williams, Henry Sylvester, 10 Wiredu, Kwasi, 1–4, 9, 10, 14–25, 28, 31, 32, 36–38, 64, 96, 121, 195, 196 Cultural Universals and Particulars, 10, 19, 195

“Custom and Morality,” 21 Philosophy and an African Culture, 1, 17, 19, 195 Wordsworth, William, 61 Yai, Olabiyi, 17, 45–47, 53, 116 Zuma, Jacob, 92

VIBS The Value Inquiry Book Series is co-sponsored by: Adler School of Professional Psychology American Indian Philosophy Association American Maritain Association American Society for Value Inquiry Association for Process Philosophy of Education Canadian Society for Philosophical Practice Center for Bioethics, University of Turku Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte Central European Pragmatist Forum Centre for Applied Ethics, Hong Kong Baptist University Centre for Cultural Research, Aarhus University Centre for Professional Ethics, University of Central Lancashire Centre for the Study of Philosophy and Religion, University College of Cape Breton Centro de Estudos em Filosofia Americana, Brazil College of Education and Allied Professions, Bowling Green State University College of Liberal Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology Concerned Philosophers for Peace Conference of Philosophical Societies Department of Moral and Social Philosophy, University of Helsinki Gannon University Gilson Society Haitian Studies Association Ikeda University Institute of Philosophy of the High Council of Scientific Research, Spain International Academy of Philosophy of the Principality of Liechtenstein International Association of Bioethics International Center for the Arts, Humanities, and Value Inquiry International Society for Universal Dialogue Natural Law Society Philosophical Society of Finland Philosophy Born of Struggle Association Philosophy Seminar, University of Mainz Pragmatism Archive at The Oklahoma State University R.S. Hartman Institute for Formal and Applied Axiology Research Institute, Lakeridge Health Corporation Russian Philosophical Society Society for Existential Analysis Society for Iberian and Latin-American Thought Society for the Philosophic Study of Genocide and the Holocaust Unit for Research in Cognitive Neuroscience, Autonomous University of Barcelona Whitehead Research Project Yves R. Simon Institute

Titles Published Volumes 1 - 192 see www.rodopi.nl 193. Brendan Sweetman, The Vision of Gabriel Marcel: Epistemology, Human Person, the Transcendent. A volume in Philosophy and Religion 194. Danielle Poe and Eddy Souffrant, Editors, Parceling the Globe: Philosophical Explorations in Globalization, Global Behavior, and Peace. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 195. Josef Šmajs, Evolutionary Ontology: Reclaiming the Value of Nature by Transforming Culture. A volume in Central-European Value Studies 196. Giuseppe Vicari, Beyond Conceptual Dualism: Ontology of Consciousness, Mental Causation, and Holism in John R. Searle’s Philosophy of Mind. A volume in Cognitive Science 197. Avi Sagi, Tradition vs. Traditionalism: Contemporary Perspectives in Jewish Thought. Translated from Hebrew by Batya Stein. A volume in Philosophy and Religion 198. Randall E. Osborne and Paul Kriese, Editors, Global Community: Global Security. A volume in Studies in Jurisprudence 199. Craig Clifford, Learned Ignorance in the Medicine Bow Mountains: A Reflection on Intellectual Prejudice. A volume in Lived Values: Valued Lives 200. Mark Letteri, Heidegger and the Question of Psychology: Zollikon and Beyond. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 201. Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo, Editors, A New Kind of Containment: “The War on Terror,” Race, and Sexuality. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 202. Amihud Gilead, Necessity and Truthful Fictions: Panenmentalist Observations. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 203. Fernand Vial, The Unconscious in Philosophy, and French and European Literature: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology

204. Adam C. Scarfe, Editor, The Adventure of Education: Process Philosophers on Learning, Teaching, and Research. A volume in Philosophy of Education 205. King-Tak Ip, Editor, Environmental Ethics: Intercultural Perspectives. A volume in Studies in Applied Ethics 206. Evgenia Cherkasova, Dostoevsky and Kant: Dialogues on Ethics. A volume in Social Philosophy 207. Alexander Kremer and John Ryder, Editors, Self and Society: Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume Four. A volume in Central European Value Studies 208. Terence O’Connell, Dialogue on Grief and Consolation. A volume in Lived Values, Valued Lives 209. Craig Hanson, Thinking about Addiction: Hyperbolic Discounting and Responsible Agency. A volume in Social Philosophy 210. Gary G. Gallopin, Beyond Perestroika: Axiology and the New Russian Entrepreneurs. A volume in Hartman Institute Axiology Studies 211. Tuija Takala, Peter Herissone-Kelly, and Søren Holm, Editors, Cutting Through the Surface: Philosophical Approaches to Bioethics. A volume in Values in Bioethics 212. Neena Schwartz: A Lab of My Own. A volume in Lived Values, Valued Lives 213. Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński, Values and Powers: Re-reading the Philosophical Tradition of American Pragmatism. A volume in Central European Value Studies 214. Matti Häyry, Tuija Takala, Peter Herissone-Kelly and Gardar Árnason, Editors, Arguments and Analysis in Bioethics. A volume in Values in Bioethics 215. Anders Nordgren, For Our Children: The Ethics of Animal Experimentation in the Age of Genetic Engineering. A volume in Values in Bioethics

216. James R. Watson, Editor, Metacide: In the Pursuit of Excellence. A volume in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 217. Andrew Fitz-Gibbon, Editor, Positive Peace: Reflections on Peace Education, Nonviolence, and Social Change. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 218. Christopher Berry Gray, The Methodology of Maurice Hauriou: Legal, Sociological, Philosophical. A volume in Studies in Jurisprudence 219. Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo, Containing (Un)American Bodies: Race, Sexuality, and Post-9/11 Constructions of Citizenship. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 220. Roland Faber, Brian G. Henning, Clinton Combs, Editors, Beyond Metaphysics? Explorations in Alfred North Whitehead’s Late Thought. A volume in Contemporary Whitehead Studies 221. John G. McGraw, Intimacy and Isolation (Intimacy and Aloneness: A Multi-Volume Study in Philosophical Psychology, Volume One), A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 222. Janice L. Schultz-Aldrich, Introduction and Edition, “Truth” is a Divine Name, Hitherto Unpublished Papers of Edward A. Synan, 1918-1997. A volume in Gilson Studies 223. Larry A. Hickman, Matthew Caleb Flamm, Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński and Jennifer A. Rea, Editors, The Continuing Relevance of John Dewey: Reflections on Aesthetics, Morality, Science, and Society. A volume in Central European Value Studies 224. Hugh P. McDonald, Creative Actualization: A Meliorist Theory of Values. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 225. Rob Gildert and Dennis Rothermel, Editors, Remembrance and Reconciliation. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 226. Leonidas Donskis, Editor, Niccolò Machiavelli: History, Power, and Virtue. A volume in Philosophy, Literature, and Politics 227 Sanya Osha, Postethnophilosophy. A volume in Social Philosophy