On the "decolonial" moment

Excerpted from a Manuscript

This is a chunk of a chapter in an unpublished book-length text that I am still working on. The book is a study on “Negro slavery” as a building block of modern consciousness and one of the origins of the cultural formation known as “the West”. I am posting it here because a conversation, a few days ago, with people who may fit the old left category reminded me of how difficult it is to speak of the decolonial moment. This is not the final version of the text/chapter and definitely needs a bit more work, but it offers a historical analysis of how the moment in question emerged and why it emerged where it did.

European colonialism in Africa started with the objective of ending slavery on the continent. At least, that was a central “moral” element in a package of objectives that included non-moral ones such as trade and the production of commodities useful for the development of Europe’s modern economies. The anti-slavery motive began to take hold in the late 18th century, as I show in the chapter of this book that compares the “paradoxes” of the Chevalier de Boufflers and Mungo Park. But the main indicator of the importance of the anti-slavery motive is the insistence with which European explorers and public commentators built an image of Africa as a place whose greatest scourge was slavery. The concept of “legitimate trade” was developed in contrast with trade in human beings, seen as illegitimate and even, on the open seas, as a crime (at least by British laws). Initially, in the first half of the 19th century, the effort at blotting out this scourge was seen by its promoters as a moral crusade which could be advanced by the development of legitimate trade. But in the second half of the century, when the colonial project took sail, ending slavery became a justification for conquest in Africa, an ubiquitous theme in the deployment of Europe’s prideful “civilizing mission” and “White man’s burden.” The moral motive for portraying Africa as a land of slavery was thus reinforced by a political motive, feeding into the discourse that claimed that Africans were dominated for their very own good.

After 1945, the criticism of colonialism rejected that whole discourse as hypocritical fig-leaf for the naked exploitation of the continent and its peoples. A counter-discourse grew, which presented Africa as the victim of European greed and power lust, and especially, of the fact that Europe invented African slavery, i.e., the fact that Black Africans could be enslaved qua Black Africans (I call this “Negro slavery” later in the book). This counter-discourse was not interested in the 19th century vision of Africa as a land of slavery but in the previous era, which had been marked by the Atlantic slave trade organized by European merchants from the early 16th century to the mid-19th century. Wielded by African or Black nationalists who were fighting Western (White) colonialism and racism, the narrative de-emphasized or ignored the existence of slavery in African societies and emphasized the European enslavement of Africans. Eventually, an African ideological vision emerged that accused Europeans of having sucked the living blood out of the African people for well half a millennium, first through the slave trade, then through colonial oppression.

The vision was especially successful in the first three decades of independence, when it was an aftermath to the nationalist struggles against colonialism and was in harmony with the radical internationalist ideologies of Third-Worldism, Communism, Panafricanism, and others. It dominated the culture in high schools and universities, where history was taught by teachers who had imbibed it. Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was a classic of the times, as was Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. In those days, in the French-speaking schools where I was educated, the traite négrière (Atlantic slave trade) was self-evidently a crime against humanity and the favorite phrase for colonialism was la nuit coloniale (“the colonial night”). The radical leftist intellectuals who also ran the show in Europe (maybe especially in France) in that period, lifted these ideas up. The White man Jean-Paul Sartre, the author of Black Orpheus, was in the same constellation as a star of Black consciousness, Frantz Fanon.

In the 1990s, the West’s victory in the Cold War dealt a deadly blow to the radical left’s ideological front, dragging to the abysses the vision of history that made of the Atlantic slave trade a European crime against humanity. In Africa, the “committed intellectual” who had dominated the stage until late in the 1980s fell silent or converted to new visions, including the bourgeois liberalism which he had spent his energies denouncing before, and in which the image of Africa was very different from the one which had once exhilarated him. A parallel evolution happened in the West, where many former radical leftists became staunch defenders of liberalism or embraced the neoconservative ethos. In this context, Africa was no longer seen as a historical victim of European machinations, but rather – in a way similar to the vision which developed in Europe in the years of colonial conquest – as a historical basket case in need of something that would be of the order of recolonization (the term briefly became kosher at some point). In the 1990s, the self-confidence of a victorious Western capitalism led to a shift to the right of the political stage across Western countries. Far left parties became irrelevant while left parties lurched to the center-left, or embraced centrism, in the form of the Clinton-Blair “pragmatic” left in Anglo-America (centrism is a renouncing of ideological ambition, something which the Anglo-American right was little guilty of in that age). In this ambiance, neoliberal policies of austerity cum privatization and “trade opening” were imposed to the Global South, including Africa, which went through destructive structural adjustment. This climate was irrespirable to African nationalist ideologies, which withered at this point, “replaced” in many cases (by virtue of the fact that political nature abhors vacuum) by tribalism (with unspeakable consequences in Rwanda-Burundi) and political Salafism. The accusatory discourse about the West, enslaver and colonizer of Africa, also seemed to vanish into the air.

But it had in fact found a new, fertile ground in South Africa, where it eventually made a gradual, then swift comeback in the 2000s and 2010s. The reasons are not hard to see. Colonialism formally ended in South Africa only in the early 1990s, which led to two different, and in some sense divergent, even schizophrenic ideological orientations. On the one hand the African nationalism that was characteristic of the end of colonialism in the rest of Africa in the 1960s-80s came to life in South Africa then; but on the other hand, the reactionary ideologies that seem to be the natural products of the neoliberal age also flourish there in the form of xenophobia. Since this also targets White South Africans, seen as domestic foreigners, even as many among them still harbor the old racism, this is then a form of tribalism specific to South Africa.

At any rate, the classics of a bygone age, including especially Frantz Fanon, are now intellectual heroes for a vocal fringe of South Africa’s educated youth, even as they are largely forgotten in other African universities (I heard Ghana is an exception, for some reason). The intense tropes of anti-colonial African nationalism, restored from the ashes, have been diffused like quicksilver through juvenile Black diasporas (originated both from Africa and the Caribbean) in the West, to the shock, most often, of their university professors, who had become used to the meekness and sense of inadequacy that had grown in Africa in the 1990s. The thing is now called the “decolonial movement,” and, beyond the youthful vehemence, it has more sophisticated intellectual expressions, very close to, though a bit different from what was said and written in the 1960s-80s. It conflicts with the image of Africa that has come out of the 1990s, and which often highlights corruption, disease and other calamities for today; and slavery for the past.

To sum up: In the colonial era, the slavery that was emphasized was slavery in Africa. This reality was important for the moral standing of colonialism, which did take measures to eradicate it, despite the limitations which were later pointed out by some Africanist scholars. In the nationalist era, the Atlantic slave trade was emphasized and was described as a uniquely European crime, because this buttressed the idea of “Africa the Freedom Fighter.” This, again, was contested by Africanist scholars. In the neoliberal era, the main tendency has long been to “forget” slavery. There was no use for it, either for the West or Africa. This forgetting was not real, especially in the West, where the equation of Africa and slavery is deeply ingrained in the imagination, but it found no ideological conduit for a while. Moreover, freed from the subjective pressures of colonialism and African nationalism, Africanist scholarship has pursued its traditions of an objective – or so it has claimed – study of slavery, both the one in Africa, and the slave trades to the Americas and to the Middle East and farther afield. In what seems to be an incipient Black nationalist era, however, the history of slavery (and colonialism) is back to the fore again, putting the Atlantic slave trade center stage, and pointing an angry finger at the West.

So the question of slavery and other historical wrongs done to Africa has regained political relevance, although in a different configuration from what obtained in the 1960s-80s. While in that earlier period there was a vibrant left intellectualism which integrated this discourse in the solidarities of radical Third Worldism, today’s left offers a more ambivalent terrain. Or perhaps, more accurately, its response is divided along the lines of generational experience. The older leftist generation, which has experienced the defeat of its dreams and intellectual marginalization following the end of the Cold War, is where ambivalence is found, because its members have reacted differently to the traumatic event. Some turned liberal or even conservative, while others retreated into dogmatic forms of Marxism (Marx is the only star of the historic left who survived the downfall). From that latter perspective, political commitment based on identity was deeply suspicious. Identity was a banner flown by the New Left, the ideological leaning that defied the old left, which became identified with the notion of “class struggle.”

For old-lefties, the focus on race, gender, and sexual orientation, though not necessarily a bad thing, is a distraction from the main struggle, and even a distortion, which swerves much needed energies into divisive concerns. The African nationalist struggle was an example of the way in which the old left could be comfortable with race. Although it celebrated the Black race, it did so in the main in terms of the general struggle against capitalist imperialism. Indeed, African nationalists were often Marxists, allied with Communist parties, and seen by the capitalist powers as on the side of the Eastern Block. The New Left’s focus on race per se shifted the main source of oppression to the racial category of “White.” At the same time, this indeed was less interesting for most of the African nationalists of those days. If in the United States or South Africa, oppression was straightforwardly racial, to the extent that these countries could truly be described as racial dictatorships or even racial totalitarianisms, in much of mainland Africa (there are the exceptions of North Africa and the Sahel-Sahara fringe), racial oppression was more theoretical. At any rate, if there was a perception of oppressive White power, this perception was mediated by the experience of colonialism and neocolonialism and was often focused on particular White nations (the French, the British), and only marginally on the White race as such.

When the left front collapsed in the 1990s, identity-based struggles, which had been developed by the New Left, survived the rout but were also commandeered by liberals, i.e., defenders of human rights, freedom, and what used to be called bourgeois democracy (a description closer to the mark than “liberal democracy,” since this form of democracy is, by the admission of its own theoreticians, based on the existence of a “middle class,” i.e., on a bourgeois ethos). In the case of Africa, this was favorable to the revival of tribalism. Romantic liberal love for oppressed identities (it used to be “nationalities” in 19th century Europe), marginalized natives, and beleaguered cultures led many in the Western intelligentsias to see such things in many places around the world (including in some places in Africa), and to bring moral and lobbying support to ethnic rebels bent on bringing into life ethnic states. As someone from Niger, I was taken aback, in the early 1990s, to witness the groundswell of liberal support for the racist leaderships of Tuareg rebels (Mano Dayak, who complained that Niger and Mali were the only countries on earth where Blacks ruled over Whites; the poet Awad who claimed he was not a Nigerien and routinely referred to Blacks as slaves). Huge posters in Paris’ subway warned the French that “the Tuareg,” the “Blue men of the Desert,” were on the verge of being eradicated from the surface of the earth by genocidal Africans. This, I suspect, extended for a few months or years the Tuareg rebellions of Mali and Niger, which, in the end, were a tribal warfare with a dubious cause attacking broke states and indigent nations. Not all ethnic rebels have an appeal for the romantic imagination of liberals, especially in Black Africa (the Casamançais of Senegal would know that). The Kurds, in the Middle East, fit in the picture – and maybe it is all about nomads.

In the West, and perhaps especially in the United States, the liberalism-New-Left-merger was about “liberal guilt” making amends for “White racism,” a process that infuriated conservatives who wished to be given the freedom of being racist. I remember a political theory class I took when I was a student in the United States, where there was a running duel between a liberal and a conservative classmate on that subject. Once, the liberal student was mugged by Black youths in the ghetto of the town – he had approached them, seduced by the music they were listening, so by Black culture (of which he was deeply ignorant, as I could see by some of his questions or reactions). He gave an elaborate justification of the brutality, drawing scoffs from the conservative student. On another day, the conservative student tried using one of the readings of the day to support an argument about the freedom to express one’s individual preferences, if one does not want to hire a Black person for a job, regardless of competence. There was no response to this from the other students, other than a heavy sense of unease. Maybe, like me, they could not believe their ears, but one of the reasons for the awkward silence was clearly my presence in the all-White classroom. After discussion had started again, one of the students blurted, seemingly out of the blue: “Rahmane is Black.” Perhaps he had thus far seen me as an African, an exotic person with no particular racial identity. And now, faced with the reality of White racism, my Black identity had – as it were – sprung into view, even though I did not care for it. However, for the sake of social justice (a phrase reviled in many conservative quarters) in a country like the US, the point was made that day, for our small group, that liberals do have to care for it.

The quandary that arises from the revival of a kind of African/Black nationalism in South Africa, the Caribbean, and the West is that it is mixing the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist discourse of yore with notions of racial, rather than class struggle. In that sense, its closest ancestor is the Black American left ideological vision of the 1920s-50s incarnated, in particular, by Du Bois (and others) with the difference that this older vision did balance race and class, the “color line” and capitalist exploitation. On the left, the vestigial Marxists, though appropriately antiracists, cannot see past the lack of race-class balance in the “decolonial” movement, oblivious to the fact that the discourse on class has been long devoid of relevant political engagement (not meaning that it is not relevant as such, but it has become irrelevant in practice) and could not be easily revitalized by generations raised in a climate pregnant with ideas and concepts that were produced by the New Left, liberals, and neoliberals. And White liberals have ever shown discomfort when racial issues are spoken about by Blacks, preferring, at bottom, that the speech on the matter should come from their well-meaning, all-understanding selves – perhaps more in Europe nowadays (and especially France) than in the US. Seeing the irritability or nervousness of the older left over the decolonial movement, I have concluded that it is doing something. It seems to be, nowadays, an engine in the rise of a younger left, part of a broader house of young progressive of all colors who relate differently to race, and who are bringing back class onboard in novel ways. Judging by the flourishing of radical magazines in the US, the free use of the word “socialism” (for long a term of anathema in the country, and still so in conservative America) in a large section of the so-called millennials population, and the chances twice given to Bernie Sanders’ bid for the American presidency, mostly by the aforementioned millennials, this is more visible in the US than anywhere else.