6

Afropolitanism

ACHILLE MBEMBE

Translated by Paulo Lemos Horta

For almost a century, African discourse, whether of literature, philosophy, or the arts, has been dominated by three intellectual and political paradigms which, as it happens, are not mutually exclusive.

First, there are several variations of anticolonial nationalism, which have had a deep influence on culture, politics, economics, and even religion. Second, there are various reinterpretations of Marxism from which many forms of “African socialism” have developed. Finally, there is a pan-African sphere of influence that has privileged two types of solidarity—a racial and transnational solidarity, and an anti-imperialist and international solidarity.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, this intellectual trend has not changed fundamentally, even if behind the scenes important social and cultural transformations are taking place. The gap between the real life of a society on the one hand and the intellectual tools a society uses to understand its future on the other can pose risks to thought and culture. Indeed, the three intellectual and political paradigms have grown so institutionalized and ossified that today they can no longer be used to analyze ongoing transitions with the slightest bit of credibility. Almost without exception, the institutions embodying these paradigms function as “guaranteed incomes.” Moreover, they hinder the renewal of cultural criticism, stifle artistic and philosophical creativity, and reduce our ability to contribute to contemporary thought on culture and democracy.

Worlds in Movement

Of all the transformations taking place, two in particular could weigh heavily on cultural life as well as artistic and political creativity in the coming years. First of all, answers to the question “Who is African and who is not?” are being reconfigured.

For many, to be “African” is to be “black” and therefore “not white,” the degree of authenticity measured on a scale of raw racial difference. Thus, many kinds of people have a link to or some connection with Africa—something that gives them the right ipso facto to claim “African citizenship.” Naturally, there are black Africans. They were born and live in African states as nationals. Yet if black Africans form the majority population of the continent, they are neither its sole inhabitants nor the sole producers of its art and culture.

From Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, other populations have settled in various parts of the continent, during various periods of history, and for various reasons. Some, like the Arabs and Europeans, came as conquerors, traders, or missionaries. Fleeing persecution or misfortune, filled with hope of a peaceful life, or driven by thirst for wealth, others, like the Jews and Afrikaners, settled under more or less tragic historical circumstances. Still others, like the Malays, Indians, and Chinese in South Africa, came essentially as migrant laborers, settling down and starting families. More recently, Lebanese, Syrian, Indo-Pakistani, and hundreds of thousands of Chinese migrants have come onto the scene. They all arrived with different languages, customs, cuisines, fashions, prayers—in other words, their own ways of being and doing. Today, the relationship between these diasporas and their societies of origin is complex. Though their members may also belong somewhere else, many of them see themselves as full-fledged Africans.

While Africa has long been the destination of many different population movements and cultural flows, the continent has also been a point of departure to other regions of the world for centuries. This ancient process took place throughout what is usually referred to as modern times, and followed the three routes of the Sahara, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Indian Ocean. The creation of black African diasporas in the New World is the result of such a dispersal. Slavery, which involved not only the European-American world but also the Arab-Asian world, played a decisive role in this process. As a consequence, traces of Africans are spread across the capitalist and Islamic worlds from one end to the other. In addition to the forced migrations of previous centuries, colonialism has also driven migrations. Today, millions of people of African origin are citizens of countries around the world.

Even with a definition of who and what is “Africa[n],” when discussions arise about aesthetic creativity in contemporary Africa, political and cultural critics tend to pass over in silence this historical phenomenon of worlds in movement. From an African point of view, the worlds-in-movement phenomenon has at least two facets: dispersion and immersion. Historically, the dispersal of African populations and cultures was not only a matter of foreigners coming to settle in our backyard. In fact, the precolonial history of African societies is one of peoples in perpetual movement over the continent. It is a history of colliding cultures, caught in a maelstrom of war, invasion, migration, intermarriage. It is a history of the various religions we make our own, of the technologies we exchange, and of the goods we trade. The cultural history of the continent can hardly be understood outside a paradigm of itinerancy, mobility, and displacement.

Colonialism once threatened to freeze this culture of mobility through the modern institution of borders. Recalling the history of itinerancy requires discussion of mixing, blending, and superimposing. In opposition to the fundamentalists preaching “custom” and “autochthony,” we can go so far as to assert that what we call “tradition” does not in fact exist. Whether one is speaking of Islam or Christianity, trade or speech, ways of dressing or even of eating, no institution or cultural practice has survived the bulldozer of miscegenation and vernacularization. This was the case well before the colonization of Africa. Indeed, there is a precolonial African modernity that has not yet been taken into account in contemporary creativity.

The other aspect of the worlds-in-movement is immersion, which affected the minorities that came from afar to ultimately settle and start families on the continent. Over time, links with their countries of origin, whether European or Asian, became remarkably complex. These minorities became cultural hybrids through contact with a new geography, climate, and people. Yet due to the history of colonialism, Euro-Africans in particular continued to aspire to racial supremacy and to mark their difference from, even contempt for, anything “African” or “indigenous.” This is especially true in the case of the Afrikaners, whose very name means “Africans.” There is the same ambivalence among Indians, Lebanese, and Syrians. Most of these immigrant populations express themselves in the local languages and participate in certain national customs; nevertheless, they live in relatively closed communities and do not marry outside them.

Thus, a part of African history lies elsewhere, outside the continent, but a part of the history of the rest of the world, of which we are inevitably the actors and guardians, also lies inside Africa. Our way of belonging to the world, of being in the world, and of inhabiting the world, has always been marked if not by cultural mixing, then at least by the interweaving of worlds. That interweaving is a slow and sometimes incoherent dance with forms and signs which we have not been able to choose freely, but which we have succeeded as best we can in domesticating and putting at our disposal.

It is this cultural, historical, and aesthetic sensitivity that underlies the term “Afropolitanism”—awareness of the interweaving of the here and there, the presence of the elsewhere in the here and vice versa, the relativization of primary roots and memberships and the way of embracing, with full knowledge of the facts, strangeness, foreignness, and remoteness, the ability to recognize one’s face in that of a foreigner and make the most of the traces of remoteness in closeness, to domesticate the unfamiliar to work with what seem to be opposites.

The Nativistic Reflex

The second ongoing transformation pertains to the rise in power of the nativistic reflex. In its mild form, nativism manifests as an ideology glorifying differences and diversity, while fighting to safeguard customs and identities perceived as threatened. According to nativistic logic, identity and political struggle are founded on a distinction between “those who are from here”—autochthons—and “those who came from outside”—nonnatives. Nativists forget, however, that in their stereotyped form the customs and traditions which they profess to follow were often created not by actual autochthons, but by missionaries and settlers.

Thus, during the second half of the twentieth century, a form of bioracism—autochthons versus nonnatives—appeared almost everywhere on the continent, cultivated in politics by a particular idea of victimization and resentment. Violence stemming from such ideologies is seldom directed toward the victim’s actual torturer. The victim almost always turns against an imagined torturer who, coincidentally, is weaker—that is, another victim who has nothing to do with the original violence. A genocidal impulse inhabits victimization ideologies, as demonstrated in many countries, and not only in Africa. Such ideologies create a culture of hatred with an incredible power of destruction, as we have seen in Rwanda and elsewhere.

Afropolitanism is not the same as Pan-Africanism or negritude, but rather an aesthetic and a particular poetics of the world. It is a way of being in the world, rejecting on principle any identity based on victimhood—which does not mean that it is blind to the injustice and violence inflicted on the continent and its people by the law of the world. It is also a political and cultural stance toward the nation, to race, and to difference in general. Insofar as African states are total inventions, and recent ones at that, strictly speaking there is nothing in their essential nature that can force us to worship them—which is not to say that we are indifferent to their fate.

As for African nationalism, it originally stood for a powerful utopia with an unlimited insurrectionary potential—an enticement toward self-recognition, toward facing the world with dignity as beings endowed with a human face. But as soon as nationalism turned into the official ideology of a predatory state, it lost any ethical heart, becoming a demon “who roams at night and flees the light of day.” Nationalism and nativism both continue to come up against the human countenance and dignity. Racial solidarity as advocated by Pan-Africanism does not evade these dilemmas. Once contemporary Africa awakens to the notions of multiplicity, including racial multiplicity, that are integral to its identity, it will become untenable to reject the continent solely on the basis of a form of African solidarity. Moreover, how can we not see that this so-called solidarity is deeply harmed by the violence of brothers against brothers, the violence of brothers against mothers and sisters, that has occurred since the end of direct colonialism?

Broad-Mindedness

Thus, we must move forward to something else if we are to revive the intellectual life of Africa and at the same time the possibilities of an art, a philosophy, and an aesthetics that can say something new and meaningful to the world in general. Today, many Africans live outside Africa. Others have chosen of their own accord to live on the continent but not necessarily in their countries of birth. Many of them have had the opportunity to experience several worlds in their ceaseless comings and goings, developing an invaluable wealth of perceptivity and sensitivity in the course of movement. These people can usually express themselves in more than one language. They are developing, sometimes unknowingly, a transnational culture which I call “Afropolitan” culture.

Among them, there are many professionals who go about their daily business continually measuring themselves not against the village next door, but against the world at large. A great number of artists, musicians, composers, writers, poets, and painters have exhibited a deep sense of such “broad-mindedness” since the beginning of the postcolonial era. On another level, a small number of metropolises can be counted as “Afropolitan.” In the latter half of the twentieth century, Dakar and Abidjan fulfilled this purpose in West Africa. Dakar represented the cultural counterpart of Abidjan, the business center of the subregion. Unfortunately, today Abidjan has been undermined by the cancer of nativism. In East Africa, Nairobi once occupied the role of the region’s business center and seat of several international institutions.

But today the preeminent center of Afropolitanism is Johannesburg, South Africa. In this metropolis built on a brutal history, a new form of African modernity is developing that has little to do with what we have known before. Johannesburg draws on multiple racial legacies, a vibrant economy, a liberal democracy, and a culture of consumerism that partake directly of the currents of globalization. Through a growing ethic of tolerance, the city is likely to revive African aesthetic and cultural creativity, just as Harlem or New Orleans once did in the United States.