How are we to begin to think human emancipation in Africa today after the collapse of the Marxist, the Third World nationalist as well as the neo-liberal visions of freedom? How are we to conceptualise an emancipatory future governed by a fidelity to the idea of a universal humanity in a context where humanity no longer features within our ambit of thought and when previous ways of thinking emancipation have become obsolete? In the formulation made famous by Frantz Fanon on the last page of The Wretched of the Earth, how are we to ‘work out new concepts’ for a new humanism? This book seeks answers to these questions in the light of what has become apparent, namely the absence of a thought of politics within all three of these conceptions of universal history today. This may seem paradoxical, but if we are to understand politics as a collective thought-practice – as that which constitutes human collective agency – then it should be clear that all three have substituted, in one way or another, the idea of power, that of the state, for human agency itself. The state may have been understood as the main agent of social change; however, it is not the agent of universal history. Only the people themselves can fulfil that role.

These kinds of questions have become particularly urgent for the simple reason that millions of people worldwide, a large proportion of whom live on the African continent, are simply condemned to being unable to acquire the basic necessities of life, disconnected as they are from (formal) market relations, whether as buyers and consumers or as sellers of their labour power.