Humanity faces existential crises driven by the persistence of neocolonial capitalism and a state form that continues to de-humanise the majority. In Beyond the Neocolonial, Michael Neocosmos argues that the failure to enable, let alone to realise the popular desire for freedom in post-independence Africa lies in the continuity of the colonial state and the dominance of analytical, statist thought over the transformative power of the dialectic.
Tracing the genealogy of emancipatory politics from the ancient wisdom of Egypt’s Ma’at and Ionia’s isonomia to the revolutionary theories of Lenin, Mao, Fanon, and Cabral, Neocosmos asserts that politics must be understood as a collective thought-practice of universal equality. He challenges the “stasis” of the current world order by recovering silenced histories of African popular inventiveness: from the egalitarian society constructed by the Bossales in Haiti to the mass democratic experiments of the United Democratic Front in South Africa.
Critiquing the exhausted “party form” and the myth of the “heroic liberator,” the book highlights the emancipatory potential within African popular culture, arguing that proverbs and the Palaver contain latent prescriptions for resolving contradictions and healing community. This work is a call to abandon the “epistemology of ignorance” and revive a dialectics of becoming, locating the agency for a truly human future not in the state, but in the masses who make history.
Three Poems by Bertolt Brecht, Okot p’Bitek, and Yannis Ritsos
Dedications and Acknowledgments
Prefatory Remark
In Lieu of a Foreword: some inspirational declarations and metaphors
Introduction: what is to be thought?
1. Politics as a Collective Thought-Practice and Human Emancipation as its Essence: thinking the common good
2. The Ancients and the Thought of Politics: arkhē and the dialectic of physis and nomos
3. Sourcing an Emancipatory Politics for Today: reviewing the classics
4. Thinking Emancipatory Politics through African Popular Culture
5. Resolving Contradictions among the People and the Dialectical Emancipatory Potential of Proverbial Metaphors
6. Haiti from Inventive Popular Sovereignty to Neocolonial State
7. Beyond the Party Form? An alternative political experiment and the figure of the heroic liberator
8. Democracy as Perverted Freedom: the anatomy of the African neocolonial state
Conclusion: silencing as analytical procedure in political theory and practice
References
Author bio
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Michael Neocosmos is Emeritus Professor in Humanities at Rhodes University and Research Associate at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, both in South Africa, and as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar University of Connecticut Humanities Institute,…
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This book examines citizenship, identity and belonging in Kenya through an analysis of literature, film, music, and theatre. Reflections on women, statelessness and refugees are central considerations.
The pamphlet begins with two letters written by Paul the Apostle in which Christianity first acquires a universal address. The new religion came to exclude people who were not Christians from the count of the human. This became explicit around a thousand years later when Pope Urban II authorised the First Crusade.
In 1492 planetary history was split in to two. Muhammad XII of Granada conceded defeat to Isabella and Ferdinand, the Catholic monarchs of Portugal and Spain, who went on to expel the Jews from the territory under their control. Europe became a Christian project. In the same year Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean and Europe also became an imperial project with a planetary reach.
The origins of the racial ideology can be seen in this period, in which ideas about religion came to be entangled with fantastical ideas about the imagined purity of blood. But it was in the English colony of Virginia in the seventeenth century that the legitimation for the exclusion from the count of the human began to move from claims made in the name of religion to claims made in the name of science. This is the point at which modern racism, rooted in the appearance of the body, began to cast its malignant shadow across the planet.
The author argues that the struggle to put an end to the epoch of world history that opened in 1492 will require new ideas, and new practices. It follows the Caribbean tradition that runs from Aimé Césaire to Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter in affirming the need for a counter-humanism, a radical humanism, a humanism that, in Césaire’s famous phrases, is “made to the measure of the world”. There is a need for a shift in the ground of reason towards the lived experience and struggles of people rendered, in Wynter’s phrase, as ‘pariahs outside of the new order’.
Africa Matters: Cultural politics, political economies, & grammars of protest provides a sampling of insightful articles from the first five issues of Nokoko, journal of the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. It brings together pieces that the journal’s editorial board felt were particularly perspicacious in their analysis and resonant in their crafting. Uniting them in this book permits a new dialogue to emerge around the key themes of cultural politics, political economies and grammars of protest. Their intersection here sheds light on important issues for Africans in the twenty-first century.
This book, originally published by AwaaZ in Kenya, provides insights into journalists of Indian origin who wrote about the struggles of Kenyan people.
The inside story of the struggles of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, referred to by British colonialism as the ‘Mau Mau rebellion’, is little known today. The autobiographical material written by Karari Njama (a senior leader in the Mau Mau hierarchy) and compiled by Donald L. Barnett was first published by Monthly Review Press in 1966 as Mau Mau From Within: An Analysis of Kenya’s Peasant Revolt. It was reprinted in 1970; it has remained out of print for many years. As the late Basil Davidson put it in his review of the first edition: “Njama writes of the forest leaders’ efforts to overcome dissension, to evolve effective tactics, to keep discipline, mete out justice … and to teach men how to survive in those merciless forests. His narrative is crowded with excitement. Those who know much of Africa and those who know little will alike find it compulsive reading. Some 10,000 Africans died fighting in those years . Here, in the harsh detail of everyday experience, are the reasons why.”
The book is an extraordinary story of courage, passion, heroism, combined with recounting of colonial terror, brutality and betrayal. It is a story of how the very idea of being ‘Kenyan’ was intimately linked to the idea of freedom, a connection that was destroyed not only by the firepower of the British, but also by those who collaborated and established themselves as the beneficiaries of neocolonial rule. Disconnecting notions of freedom from identity left only a caricature that rapidly descended into tribalism and ethnicity.
This momentous story of the struggle for freedom described here is relevant not only for a new generation of Kenyans but also for all those engaged in emancipatory struggles internationally. For so long as the experiences arising from the struggles described in this book are perceived as merely ‘African’ or ‘Kenyan’, it is not possible to fully grasp the contributions they have made to the struggle for a universalist humanity.
What is recounted in this publication is more than an ‘analysis of a peasant revolt’. It is, above all, a history of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army. As Ngūgī wa Thiong’o points out in his Preface to this new edition, ‘we don’t have to use the vocabulary of the colonial to describe our struggles.’ We were tempted to rename the book ‘Kenya Land and Freedom Army from Within.’ But because the original title has wide recognition, and one of the characteristics of movements of the oppressed is to appropriate derogatory terms
Moçambique celebrou, em Junho de 2020, 45 anos de sua independência. Os ganhos e avanços que o país alcançou nesta quase meia década de independência são inegáveis, mas os desafios que subsistem são muitos. Este livro reflecte sobre Moçambique contemporâneo nos seus vários aspectos, destacando a formação e o papel do Estado, a democracia, a participação dos cidadãos, a política económica e social e o desenvolvimento. Como se pode ver, o livro não é temático e oferece diversas perspectivas de autores e autoras que se dedicam à investigação, ao jornalismo e ao activismo. O livro pretende exactamente oferecer uma leitura do país a partir dos olhos daqueles que não ocupam uma posição de poder mas que vivem, experienciam e lêem a realidade do país a partir de uma perspectiva crítica da sociedade.
O objectivo deste livro é dar uma melhor compreensão do que tem sido o processo de independência em Moçambique e porque é que o país pós-colonial ainda é ‘colonial’ na sua estrutura política e económica. Assim, são dados muitos exemplos para dar ao leitor a possibilidade de confrontar as perspectivas teóricas aqui utilizadas com os casos concretos.
Todos os estudos deste livro mostram que quarenta e cinco anos de independência não foram vividos da mesma forma pelas elites que governam o país e pelas populações que vivem sob o seu domínio. Por um lado, as elites no poder e os seus parentes beneficiaram, e ainda beneficiam, dos recursos do país, enquanto que uma grande parte da população continua à espera das promessas da independência. De um ponto de vista político e económico, os estudos que compõem o livro destacam como o “desenvolvimento” em Moçambique tem estado em contradição com as necessidades do país. Significa que o actual modelo de desenvolvimento responde muito mais ao capital internacional do que à transformação social de Moçambique.
La présente publication du Réseau Pas de REDD en Afrique (No REDD in Africa Network) a pour but de démystifier le REDD, les projets de type REDD et toutes leurs variantes, et de montrer ce qu’ils sont vraiment : des mécanismes injustes conçus pour lancer une nouvelle phase de colonisation du continent africain. Les exemples présentés démontrent clairement que le REDD est une escroquerie et que les pollueurs savent qu’il leur permet d’acheter le « droit » de polluer.
Under-Education in Africa: From Colonialism to Neoliberalism is a collection of essays on diverse aspects of educational systems that were written over a period of four and a half decades, written from the point of view of an activist educator.
With the focus on Tanzania, they cover education in the German colonial era, the days of Ujamaa socialism and the present neo-liberal times. Themes include the social function of education, the impact of external dependency on education, practical versus academic education, democracy and violence in schools, the role of computers in education, the effect of privatization on higher education, misrepresentation of educational history, good and bad teaching styles, book reading, the teaching of statistics to doctors and student activism in education.
Two essays provide a comparative view of the situation in Tanzania and the USA. Linking the state of the educational system with society as a whole, they explore the possibility of progressive transformation on both fronts. They are based on the author’s experience as a long-term educator, his original research, relevant books, newspaper reports and discussions with colleagues and students.
The author is a retired professor of medical statistics who has taught at colleges and universities in Tanzania and at universities in the USA and Norway.
