Achille Mbembe: “The Negro, Figure of Human Emancipation”

Achille Mbembe: The dismantling of apartheid in 1994 closes a long historical phase of modern struggles for emancipation. This phase began with the great campaigns for the abolition of the trade in negros, and of slavery. It continued with the decolonization movement and the civil rights struggle in the United States. In some sense, Mandela represents the last word concerning these struggles for equality. He attacks head-on the dogma of white supremacy and the domination of race which poisoned the life of nation-states for so long. This is reason why today, the entire world celebrates his life.

Achille Mbembe: In my reflection, the status of South Africa is paradoxical. What South Africa allows me to see, is what arises from the possible. South Africa manifests, within its history and in its contemporary life, in a more striking manner than any other African country, what we are capable of doing, that is to say, the potential we have. But at the same time, South Africa shows the difficulty confronting the desire to create the new, even in postrevolutionary societies.

Achille Mbembe: It is a concept, a notion whose multiple meanings have varied throughout its history, starting from at least the 15^th century. The word “negro” refers as well to a kind of fiction, one that demands to be translated into reality by way of dreams, desire, or violence and cruelty. But above all, it is a concept that refers to the impossibility of control, including the control of those who have been enslaved by it, subjugated to extreme dehumanizing conditions: slaves. From this fact, it is a name that refers to the possibility—always present within history– of a radical uprising.

Achille Mbembe: It is the figure of the possibility of disobedience, insurrection, and emancipation. The history of human emancipation is, in some way, a negro history, at the same time it is a history of Negros, to the extent that each human being has in him or herself a Negro part.

Achille Mbembe: We know what the Haitian experience has become, but at its origins, the Haitian moment of our modernity constituted a kind of revenge. Haiti emerged into the world as a consequence of a war led by slaves. The great fear of the property owners from the 15^th to the 19^th century was that one night the slaves would unite, and burn down the plantation. To such a degree that the plantation was a paranoiac structure. Of course, the plantation was an economic structure where paternalism, rape, and violence dominated. But the plantation was also a psychic structure that was of a completely paranoiac order where the function of fear was to constantly reproduce fear in an infernal cycle wherein neither the slaves nor the masters knew how to interrupt it, how to get out of it. This mechanism of fear reproducing fear was based on fantasy, fabulation. In order to function in this way, the machinery needed to anchor itself in “race”.

Achille Mbembe: Starting in the 15^th century, capitalism has always needed racial subsidies for expanding its reproduction both in time and space. The invention of the Negro operates within a context of transnationalization. What I call the first capitalism was that which was inaugurated on the Atlantic rim. In this triangular commerce that linked Europe, Africa, and the Americas, both goods and slaves were circulated. We witness here the emergence and consolidation of certain technologies, the invention of insurances. In this time period, a right to property forges itself in Europe against the backdrop of the commerce in slaves. It is impossible to understand the evolution of juridical, philosophical, and narrative structures in Europe without taking into account the slave trade.

Achille Mbembe: Race is too “useful” to be the object of an erasing. In the contemporary context, it has become more and more difficult for us to state with clarity the reasons for which we constitute a common world. These reasons are no longer obvious at all, and instead of patiently reconstructing the reasons for living together, we create a situation in which what is important is to go looking for the things that separate us. In this context, race becomes an operator because it allows us to separate those that are “us” from those that are not. The mobilization of the racial signifier allows us to split up humanity into those who should live and those who can be endangered with indifference, those belonging to the class of the superfluous.

Achille Mbembe: We are in a moment today where the money-form usurps the functions of creation and redemption that were once attributed to God. It is the moment we what we call Mammon in the Bible, or the principle of money, pushes aside the principle of the divine and takes its place. From the moment when the principle of money takes the place of the principle of God, the principle of money becomes the first and last relay of all significations and institutes itself as a cult of idolatry whose dogma consists of confusing everything, mixing up everything: what comes from the human, what comes from the thing, what comes from commercial goods. All this no longer matters.

Achille Mbembe: Yes! If you think about it, this was the imperialist principle at its origins. The forms of its manifestation have evolved but the genetic code of imperialism is precisely that. You sow chaos, you set people against each other and you create situations of civil war. You administrate disorder, chaos. Imperialism consists of the management, for its own benefit, of chaos that we provoke, undertake, and organize. We see this today in the wars of occupation, of economic extraction, and the dismantling of everything that resembles to any degree the common good.

Achille Mbembe: From a geo-strategic point of view, a new rush to Africa is taking place. Who are its principle actors? It is the old western powers, but there are also new powers such as Brazil, China, India, and Turkey, or even middle-eastern actors such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia. There is a cluster of actors that have in common, for diverse reasons, the sentiment that Africa constitutes a space whose resources should be controlled in order to assure themselves a place on the contemporary world stage. It is within this general framework that we should re-read the French military interventions on the African continent. Military interventions that the socialist government seems to want to multiply and accelerate. In taking as its pretexts the weakening of state structures in places such as Mali and Central Africa. In evoking the threat, no doubt real, of a violent form of Islam, as opposed to the Islamic traditions concerned with syncretism and synthesis. The French government decks out its military interventions with clothes of humanitarianism, when it is not sounding the old refrains of secular friendship between France and the Africans. But what is the price to pay for this? Who pays it? How? Why? Why is it that France can intervene like this in this region of the world which is supposed to be sovereign and independent? If this region of the world is sovereign and independent, then why can’t it solve its own problems, take on the extreme situations it is faced with, using its own forces and its own means? And if Africa itself is not able to solve its own crises that lead here and there to human catastrophes, why should we hold on to the illusion that it is capable of governing itself? And let’s make sure things are clear, if it cannot govern itself, then why not simply put it under administrative protection? This is the conceptual framework through which I question the military interventions. This is the only position of responsibility possible for Africans. What would be ideal is for the hegemonic void at the heart of the continental dynamic to be filled. If it is not, then it constitutes an appeal to exterior powers who, for reasons we can’t quite know, decide to intervene.

Achille Mbembe: The event of our times is indeed the downgrading of the status of Europe, the fact that Europe is no longer the world’s center of gravity. This event opens up enormous opportunities for critical thinking but it is also the bearer of danger. Europe will resist, it will not easily let go of its position. At bottom, one of the sources of the essential dimension of the tensions we are witnessing can be found in the fact that Europe, having arrived at its terminus, is not capable of reanimating itself, of reanimating what I call its Idea. The moment which we find in front of us will be difficult one. Moreover, it already is. In attempting to preserve their hegemony, Europe and the United States are going to encourage the Balkanization of the world. They are going to favor the multiplication of borders and their militarization. They are going to facilitate the repeal of a series of rights, the normalization of the state of exception, which allows for the violence of the State to circulate throughout societies in a more fluid manner. The search for enemies and their execution, preferably in an extra-judiciary manner, will become the nerve center of their world politics.

As in your last book, Sortir de la grand nuit, you imagine a beautiful alternative, that of a “rising of humanity”, what do you mean by this?

Achille Mbembe: It’s an idea that I owe to a tradition of African critique that goes from W.E.B. Dubois to Edouard Glissant. First of all, it refers to the painful experience of slavery and the effort slaves made to conserve the essential part of their humanity, in order to take back life and in order to have communion and a link with the ensemble of the living. This process of taking back life, of reappearing from the depths of infamy, of restoring a certain form of inherent dignity to the human condition, is what I call the rising of humanity. It is a rising that by definition, in order to be valid, must be shared.

Achille Mbembe: If we can change our ways of looking, hearing, and listening, it is possible to perceive these signs. The reality is that a lot of people have been devastated, dazed, and bombarded from all sides. Both by the political system on its way to petrification and by an economic regime that has reached its maximum vanishing point, and in the process, has been transformed into a violent abstraction. They are devastated by the power of fiction favored by a media system that lives off the indefinite reproductions of fears and fantasies. And so they are looking for themselves. The signs of another possible history are there to be found, within the emergence of new kinds of transnational solidarity, in part via aesthetic and imaginary creation, within a series of small abolitions such as can be seen in South Africa where certain ideas of family, marriage, and love triumph. I think we must push on these small steps in order to open up even more holes within a truly closed system.

Une pensee d’emancipation [An emancipatory thinking]

Achille Mbembe is professor of History and Political Science at the University of Witwatersand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He also teaches in the Romance Languages Dept. at Duke University and is and professor of Global Studies at the Global Center for Advanced Studies. In his latest essays, from an anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist heritage, he unfolds a fertile and stimulating reflection on post-colonial societies marked by complex re-assemblages as well as by the predation of which Africa has been the target by the way in which neoliberal politics has been deployed on a global scale. From this critical thinking flows the thinking of emancipation sketching the contours of a common world.

Interview by Rosa Moussaoui

Published in reality report: http://www.esjrr.org
Originally appeared in L’Humanité.
Translation by Drew Burk and Andrew Baird, Global Center for Advanced Studies.