Afro-Pessimism's Many Guises

Achille Mbembe's brilliant exercise in Afro-pessimism, "African Modes of Self-Writing," (Public Culture 14 [winter 2002]: 239-73) is neither about the self nor about writing. Rather, Mbembe substitutes ideologies without agency for concepts of the self. Is time really the only subjectivity, as Mbembe asserts at the opening of his article, or is he proposing an eschatological ideology of doom for Africa? Ideologies do not define and inscribe the self. They are, instead, robes—or trappings—for the presentation of self. The demand for self-identification emerges in the creativity of empty spaces where ideological discourses have left their traces (cf. Bhabha 1994: 51-52). Mbembe's African "self" is a unidimensional subjectivity—condemned to choose between material scarcity and ideological impoverishment, between Marxism and nationalism, between racism and mock democracy, between deconstruction and structural adjustment.

Moving nimbly from Hegelianism to postmodernism, Mbembe fixes a steely gaze on Africa's master narratives and cultural tropes. He asserts: "On a sociological level, attention must be given to the contemporary everyday practices through which Africans manage to recognize and to maintain with the world an unprecedented familiarity—practices through which they invent something that is their own and that beckons to the world in its generality" (258). Yet in balancing universalism against particularism, Mbembe covers numerous philosophies of the invention of Africa with blanket criticisms and provides little discussion of the creative spaces opened up by cultural resistance.

In his classic treatise, L'autre face du royaume, V. Y. Mudimbe (1973: 102) develops a troubling metaphor for the condition of the African intellectual:

To adopt an image, everything takes place as if the African intellectual were trapped in an elevator that perpetually goes up and down. In principle, a single gesture would be sufficient to stop the machine, get out, and rent an apartment or room; in sum, live and experience the reality of the world. But apparently, he does not understand that the initiative to escape belongs to him.

Mudimbe's anecdote refers not only to the legacies of colonialism, but also to a restricted menu of cultural choices in contemporary African societies. When the only options for the preservation of selfhood rely on oppressive political and economic ideologies, one might as well close the elevator door and stay inside.

While in the 1960s and 1970s African intellectuals played crucial roles across the continent in shaping independence struggles and new nation-states and in introducing such philosophies as Pan-Africanism, négritude, and African Humanism—all critiqued as inadequate by Mbembe—the contemporary plight of bourgeois intellectuals as political and economic refugees has left a void in many African nation-states (Mazuri 1990: 32-38). In part, this void has been filled by grassroots intellectuals, religious leaders, artists, and entrepreneurs. This development is not a product of proletarian nostalgia, as Mbembe suggests, but merely a fact of daily life. These organic leaders occupy an empty space of creativity where new ideologies and cultural strategies are shaped and deployed. It is in this milieu that the responses to the devastation of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid analyzed by Mbembe must be traced. The grassroots base of South Africa's antiapartheid movement is a case in point.

Another creative space emerges around what Afro-Parisian novelist and social critic Calixthe Beyala (1995: 20-22) terms feminitude, or the cultural and domestic resistance of African women. From Nigerian market women to Congolese cambistes (street bankers), African women have occupied creative spaces from which they have influenced the course of history. Mbembe avoids any systematic discussion of gender as an aspect of selfhood or subjectivity. Instead, he privileges dominant ideologies, institutions, and public instruments of power over private sources of resistance. The absence of any treatment of women's initiatives and unique inscriptions of selfhood is both a theoretical and empirical lacuna in Mbembe's argument.

This oversight has further consequences for the diasporic component of Mbembe's essay. In his critique of traditionalist essentialism, Mbembe downplays [End Page...