AGENCY AND THE STATE

The loss of emancipatory content in the politics associated with socialism and national liberation, as well as their subsequent collapse into state politics, is by now well known; in fact, this outcome has been so common that it seems to have the status of a ‘law of repetition’, as Achille Mbembe has put it in relation to his reading of Fanon. Today salvation is sometimes sought in social movements of an undifferentiated ‘multitude’ (e.g. Hardt and Negri, 2001; Amin and Sridhar, 2002; Bond, 2004), or in the exercise of citizenship rights by disparate sectors of the population making claims on the state for economic, social or political resources and entitlements. I debate human rights discourse at length in chapter 14 and argue there that it cannot form the basis of an emancipatory politics; here I am more concerned to address issues surrounding the notions of ‘civil society’, ‘social movement’ and ‘citizenship’, the key concepts for thinking popular politics in the current sequence, in which consensus is governed by liberal thought, and to suggest alternatives to existing forms of conceptualising political emancipation. I will argue that in thinking emancipatory politics, these cannot be reduced to mere agency; the point is not simply to demarcate an ‘active’ citizenship from a ‘passive’ one (although that splitting may provide in actual practice the basis for a thought of politics), but rather to think beyond the constraints of ‘citizenship’ itself, which denotes only one particular contemporary form of the relationship between the state and its people in Africa.

Critical approaches to neo-liberalism in Africa have overwhelmingly concentrated on analysing the problems, both theoretical and empirical, of its economic arguments and policies. There are numerous texts and scholarly works criticising structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), the ideology, practices and perspectives of the international financial institutions (IFIs), the disastrous effects of neo-liberal economic policies on Africa, and the inability of states to control their national economies and rethink development.