The legibility and explicability of “African historicities” therefore gets subsumed under the sign of what he calls the continent’s “special unreality,” the manner in which, because “narrative about Africa is always a pretext for a comment about something else,” the continent itself becomes “the very figure of what is null, abolished, and, in its essence, in opposition to what is: the very expression of that nothing whose special feature is to be nothing at all.” Against this “prior discourse against which any comment by an African about Africa is deployed,” his project attempts to recover what he approvingly cites J.F.
Achille Mbembe, for example, argues that Africa has been persistently characterized in terms of its fundamental stasis, what he calls its “facticity” and “arbitrariness,” and he takes Hegel’s statement that “the thing is and it is merely because it is” to reference both the manner in which the continent get conceptualized according to its fundamental self-referentiality and the manner in which this underdetermined ontology defined by its underdetermination gets imposed on the continent from without. It is quite conventional to position “Africa” as either wholly itself or wholly an expression of not-itself, and to problematize the study of Africa in terms of this opposition. Yet it seems symptomatic (of something) that his theoretical staging in the introduction is an argument about the perniciousness of dehistoricizing Africa which proceeds precisely by dehistoricizing the very discourse which is seen to do it, rendering it a single fetishized entity onto which the dehistoricizing of Africa can be blamed. Once he gets into the meat of his argument, in his chapters, he does some profoundly important things on the subjects of governance and culture in Africa (though, as always, most specifically applicable to the Cameroonian context and less so elsewhere).
I’ve always found Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony both incredibly provocative and frustrating, so I’m trying to frame this chapter by the problem it presents, the way (as I see it), it manages to reproduce the original problem in its theoretical framing, even while - in practice - formulating some of the most interesting solutions to that problem in the body of the text. A bit of text from the chapter I’m working on, only slightly torn from its context and edited to stand alone.
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