Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think
- Part 1 Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
- 1 Theoretical introduction: Understanding historical political sequences
- 2 From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: The politics of freedom and equality, 1791–1960
- 3 Are those-who-do-not-count capable of reason? On the limits of historical thought
- 4 The National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa, 1945–1975
- 5 The People's Power mode of politics in South Africa, 1984–1986
- 6 From national emancipation to national chauvinism in South Africa, 1973–2013
- 7 Rethinking militancy in the current sequence: Beyond politics as agency
- 8 Understanding fidelity to the South African emancipatory event: The Treatment Action Campaign and Abahlali baseMjondolo
- Part 2 Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
- Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - The National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa, 1945–1975
from Part 1 - Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2018
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think
- Part 1 Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
- 1 Theoretical introduction: Understanding historical political sequences
- 2 From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: The politics of freedom and equality, 1791–1960
- 3 Are those-who-do-not-count capable of reason? On the limits of historical thought
- 4 The National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa, 1945–1975
- 5 The People's Power mode of politics in South Africa, 1984–1986
- 6 From national emancipation to national chauvinism in South Africa, 1973–2013
- 7 Rethinking militancy in the current sequence: Beyond politics as agency
- 8 Understanding fidelity to the South African emancipatory event: The Treatment Action Campaign and Abahlali baseMjondolo
- Part 2 Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
- Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The colonized's challenge to the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of points of view. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute.
– Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961 (translation modified)The problem of the nature of the state created after independence is perhaps the secret of the failure of African independence.
– Amílcar Cabral, Return to the Source, 1973NATIONAL LIBERATION AND POPULAR EMANCIPATION
The truth which the event of Haiti 1804 opened up was that of the political emancipation of colonised African peoples, the idea of independence and the formation of African nations achieved by people themselves through their own efforts. It was indeed with the struggles for African independence in mind that C.L.R. James wrote his Black Jacobins (James, 2001: xvi). And it was the idea of the nation that lay at the core of independence and post-independence political subjectivities; in times of struggle it was understood as a pure affirmation, but with the advent of state formation it was to be proposed as a social category. The sequence of the National Liberation Struggle (NLS) mode of politics lasted approximately from 1945, the date of the Pan-African Congress held in Manchester, up to say 1975, 1973 being the year of the assassination of both Amílcar Cabral and Salvador Allende (Hallward, 2005). During this period a particular subjectivity developed through which national liberation and freedom were jointly thought in Africa in a specific manner. What makes the following investigation of the NLS mode necessary is that ‘nation’, the category through which freedom was thought is, in Lazarus's terms, a circulating category, a category of politics as well as one of social science. In my terms, ‘nation’ can either be an ‘excessive’ or an ‘expressive’ category. I propose to look at the relations between the idea of the nation and emancipation primarily through the work of Frantz Fanon and, to a lesser extent, of Amílcar Cabral.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Thinking Freedom in AfricaToward a Theory of Emancipatory Politics, pp. 112 - 133Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2016