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Peter Gratton, Southeastern Louisiana UniversityMay 29, 2019The Place of Achille Mbembe in African Philosophy and the Becoming Black of the World“...Then one eliminates all references to time. All the variety of the stories is ironed out; all local reference is removed.”Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony I want to freeze-frame that quotation for the moment, which comes in Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony (2000) as the concluding part after a long discussion of how Africans were rendered outside of the world, outside of history, outside any future worthy of the name, in short put in a freeze-frame as they were said to have no past and no future. If history happens, Hegel noted, it does not happen in Africa. Let me take that one statement as the principal of all colonial sovereignty: to declare the other as inexorably out of time and out of this world. Not just, to use Heidegger’s 1929-30 seminar parlance, Weltarm, as with the animal, but Weltlos, without a world and the temporal circumspective concern that comes with it. The sovereign moment is that itself: to eliminate all reference to time—e.g., this is the neoliberal present where it is said there is no future beyond capitalism—and what is declared to all colonized existents during the long durée of what Mbembe famous dubs modern necropolitics. One sees this also, as he notes, in anti-Semitism and about Palestinians: they are ever the same, they don’t change, and hence have no relation to time or history. This denial of time matches up with a certain necropolitics since the Other has no relation to time, to death, to the coming of the future, and therefore to the democracy to come as Derrida described it and which Mbembe in crucial places this past decade affirms and which any politics of death must deny. It denies the world, the coming of the world tout court. And everything that Mbembe’s work is heading towards is not a liberal progressivism as some suggest, but another thinking of time and historicity, toward a future that comes to us, impels us here and now, to a responsibility that we cannot forswear: we are called, he argues, to think a “horizontal thinking of the world that provides a central place to an ethics of mutuality or, as Paul Gilroy suggests, conviviality of being-with others.” This, he writes, “will of necessity be a thinking in circulation, a thinking of crossings, a world-thinking” (CBR, 179). And the Other über alles is nothing less than that future, the future that colonizers and defenders of Apartheid all over the world wish to deny those put under their thumb and which nevertheless calls on us to think and act (they are the same) the “compositional logic” of the “l’être-en-commun,” a borderless world Mbembe makes the telos of his thought, if not, as critics suggest, the telos of history. The future as ever, when it comes, may be utopic or monstrous. A world—and there is just this world for him (CBR, 182)—is never so simple: its temporalizations intermingle and become in and through one another. His writings are nothing other than geographies of temporalizations, since the traumas and inheritances of the past can also very much be, alas, our present and future: this is his key thesis of the becoming-nègre of the world. There is no vulgar ‘60s Foucault here with one episteme neatly following after another, but rather multiple dispersions of temporalizations occurring, happening, arriving in this common, which he marks, following Jean-Luc Nancy’s usage, by the word partage, by a common sharing or splitting, or even, given his writings on religion, as our lot, our responsibility and common being. I won’t rehearse them but key parts of his Sortir de la grande nuit from 2010 make this clear.But first let me thank John for the invitation to be on this panel and for Achille’s generosity in being here. It will be awkward at moments watching him as I talk to you about him—he’s right there, I’ll be thinking, and if I believed in anything like authorial intent, as part of us always does, I would just want to say, why don’t we just ask him? In any event the topic of my talk today will be Mbembe’s place within African philosophy, but let me be clear: this will not be a merely historical talk of a mythic African philosophy that might have occurred before the historical and ongoing traumas of enslavement and colonialism, but rather I will be using the recent work of Mbembe to help read through the trends of African philosophy set out by the Kenyan philosopher Henry Odera Oruka, a person Mbembe to my mind never cites but nevertheless helps us to reread in light of the future Mbembe foresees for Africa and indeed African philosophy and—why not?—for the whole of the world itself. As Mbembe writes:The question of the world—what it is, what the relationship is between its various parts, what the extent of its resources is and to whom they belong, how to live in it, what moves and threatens it, where it is going, what are its borders and limits, and its possible end—has been within us since a human being of bone, flesh, and spirit made its first appearance under the sign of the Black Man, as human-merchandise, human-metal, and human-money. Fundamentally, it was always our question. And it will stay that way as long as speaking the world is the same as declaring humanity, and vice versa. (CBR, 179-80)Let me underline a move where you think I’m mixing a part for the whole: Mbembe’s wager is that we are better to see modernity as the becoming-nègre of the world in terms of what he calls “Afropolitanism,” an obvious play on the word cosmopolitanism, a world politics. This “becoming-nègre” of the world is notoriously difficult to translate but is key, for example, in the famous first-person account by Fanon in chapter five of Black Skin, White Masks when he’s confronted by a child yelling, “look, a negro!” The term nègre, often translated as black or the black man or the antiquated “negro,” of course in French has a more sinister meaning as an epithet, but also has a more promising meaning in Haitian creole as simply people or humans—and thus the becoming-nègre of the world could mean something different entirely. While Mbembe certainly worries about the becoming-nègre of the world as the capitalist reinvention of the treatment of blacks for all communities, he holds out hope for a becoming-human of the world, repeating Fanon’s call for a new humanism, albeit one, he makes clear, where we cannot easily separate the human from the animal and so forth. This would make African philosophy less a provincial enterprise to one continent, albeit the one with the most varied cultures and languages of any other, than one that speaks to all those that make circulate and take part in the creation of the world. African thought, then, for Mbembe, would be a worldly philosophy, one that has him clash with Pan-Africanist and other African philosophies that see an essential identity shared among blacks tied to a particular geography or history.I.In his seminal essay, “Four Trends in Current African Philosophy,” Oruka divided African philosophy into four trends: (1) ethno-philosophy, (2) philosophic sagacity, (3) nationalist ideology, and (4) professional philosophy as taught in universities. For our purposes, it is important to note that Oruka’s four-fold classification has long worked as a template by a number of leading African philosophers in thinking about the discipline, even if they find plenty of room for disagreement with this schema—and helps to demonstrate Mbembe’s unique place as a thinker of and about Africa and, by extension, as I’ve noted, the whole of the world.For Oruka, ethno-philosophy is exemplified by the work of Placide Tempels in the 1940s on the ontological philosophy of time of the Bantu, perhaps the first work by a Western scholar to the use the term “philosophy” with regard to the thoughts of an African people—though importantly he regarded the Bantu as having no relation to the future and frankly wrote his work all as a means of converting them to Christianity. The ethnographic trend has grown to be a considerable proportion of African philosophy. Ethnographers, be they anthropologists, sociologists, or philosophers, attempt to directly counter the view that, in Lancinay Keita’s words, there has been “no genuine African intellectual matrix which could serve as a basis for African scholarship.” For the ethno-philosopher, philosophy is latent within the everyday actions of a people; philosophy, as such, is also the worldviews that guide and maintain a culture. In addition, by reproducing both the latent and explicit philosophical doctrines of the African peoples, ethno-philosophers hope to provide future African philosophers with an “intellectual matrix” indigenous to the continent itself. Ethno-philosophy has long been under attack from a number of quarters. Paulin Hountondji and Mbembe argue that ethno-philosophy is ultimately not “African” because it is addressed to Western audiences, either by confirming the stereotypes of African thought as pseudo-philosophy or pre-scientific, or simply in trying to counters claims that Africa doesn’t have an indigenous philosophy. Mbembe writes in his 2001 “African Modes of Self-Writing”: Year after year—a Sisyphean task if ever there was one—[African philosophers take part in a] ritual [that] contradicts and refutes Western definitions of Africa and Africans by pointing out the falsehoods and bad faith they presuppose. [Some] denounce[e] what the West has done (and continues to do) to Africa in the name of these definitions. [Others] provid[e] so-called proofs which, by disqualifying the West’s fictional representations of Africa and refuting its claim to have a monopoly on the expression of the human in general, are supposed to open up a space in which Africans can finally narrate their own fables (self-definition) in a voice that cannot be imitated because it is authentically their own.That is not to say Mbembe himself doesn’t use the archives of present-day African peoples early and often, but he does so to use the archives of African peoples to bear witness to their enslavement and also to show the reinvention of communities in the present day that colonialism and post-colonialism could not obliterate even in its darkest holes of oblivion.Oruka’s second trend of African philosophy, philosophic sagacity, appears at first glance to tread the same ground as ethnography. For Oruka, whose research on Kenyan wisemen and wisewomen had been instrumental in this trend, sage philosophy is the expressed “thoughts of wisemen and women in any given community and is a way of thinking and explaining the world that fluctuates between popular wisdom and didactic wisdom.” Oruka argues “one way of looking for the traces of African philosophy is to wear the uniform of anthropological field work and use dialogical techniques to pass through the anthropological fogs [of ethnographic work] to the philosophical ground” (SP, xxi). Oruka distinguishes the thoughts of the sages from the particularist, non-universal worldviews of ethnographic works by supporting two claims. First, sages do not simply transmit the prevailing opinions of their communities; they “make a critical assessment of what the people take for granted” (SP, 28). For Oruka, the “master of popular wisdom” is merely a folk-sage as compared to the philosophic sage, who is an “expert in didactic wisdom.” Oruka chose sages who were both rural and often illiterate in European languages in order that they were deemed closer to the “traditional” African ways of life (see, for example, SP, 71). But this method for choosing sages is problematic because it assumes the traditional/modern distinction underlying colonialist ideologies, which took Africans to be too primitive and non-modern to be left to their own devices. In addition, even if we accept the dubious assumption that the sources of African thought are to be found in rural communities—an assumption of many ethno-philosophers as well—it is still doubtful that even these “traditional” philosophies developed in complete isolation from the beliefs and customs of the metropoles. A point worth raising in light of Mbembe’s work is that it is striking that Oruka’s writings on African sages was limited to Kenyan rural areas, given that he argues that men and women in “any given community,” presumably in Africa’s cities as well, express sage philosophy. We can only see this as a problematic return to a definition of the true African as rural and steeped in an already pre-conceived “tradition.” This is a point that Mbembe will make again and again: the point is not to romanticize a pre-modern or rural set of ideas, which for him don’t exist in the first place, given Africa’s well known urbanization and the rampant flows of information to and from the so-called urban to the rural and back again.Oruka’s third trend is the nationalist ideologies produced most notably by Africa’s first post-colonial leaders, including Léopold Senghor, Julius Nyerere, and Kwame Nkrumah. Generally speaking, these leaders sought not only to decolonize the nations they led, but also their countries’ minds. With influences ranging from existentialism to Marxism, these writers/statesmen are often accused of importing Western ideas into African philosophical practices, despite explicitly arguing for a “violent affirmation” of Pan-Africanism. Moreover, the writers of the Négritude movement—and this is to simplify—often articulated an essential difference between black Africans and white Europeans. While Senghor argues that European whites “first distinguish” themselves “from the object … immobilizing it outside of time and in some sense outside space,” Black Africans,by their very physiological makeup (which should not, however, make us lose sight of their psychic heredity and social experience), their behavior is more lived, in the sense that is a more direct, a more concrete expression of sensation and stimulation … thus the Negro tracks more faithfully to stimulation by the object: he espouses its rhythm. (“ON,” 119)This argument reminds many of a return to the racialism practiced by whites during the colonial period and is described succinctly by Kwame Anthony Appiah as “committed not just to the view that there are heritable characteristics which constitute a sort of racial essence, but also in the claim that the essential heritable characteristics account for more than the visible morphology.” If African philosophers are to “examine, question, and contest identities imposed on them by Europeans,” as Emmanuel Eze once put it, then it should follow that African philosophy shouldn’t merely repeat, even as it attempts to privilege one side, of the dominant colonial framework, as when Senghor remarks that “l’emotion est négre comme la raison est helléne.” This essentialism—the view that all blacks or indeed anyone shares a common identity—is attacked page by page by Mbembe. While Négritude writers were on the vanguard, literally, of battling the European colonialists politically, a number of Négritude writers, philosophically, repeated the dubious colonialist assertion that racial differences are part of a human reality arising from an a-historical inner state—for Mbembe, putting blacks again outside the world, or at least in a world apart. This is not to say that the Négritude writers, including Senghor, were not aware of the historical dimension of the ontologizing of race. Mbembe writes:There is no African identity that could be designated by a single term, or that could be named by a single word; or that could be subsumed under a single category. ...It is constituted, in varying forms, through a series of practices, notably practices of power and practices of the self. … They cannot be reduced to a purely biological order based on blood, race, or geography. Nor can they be reduced to custom, to the extent that the latter is constantly being reinvented. (“AM,” 33) The harshest words for the Négritude and Pan-Africanist movements have come from philosophers that have been just as critical of the colonial regimes, in all of its guises, but worry about the repetition of Western categories in nationalist ideologies. Frantz Fanon argued that it is “the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the Negro who creates Négritude.” Négritude, for Fanon, was a “florid writing which on the whole serves to reassure the occupying power,” because it simply inverted, but kept in place, the language of the colonialist regimes. Bodunrin calls for modern, philosophical rigor as found in contemporary universities, not in rural villages or in the common sayings of the Luo, Bantu, or other peoples. This rigor, Bodunrin believes, has and continues to be provided by the fourth trend of African philosophy identified by Oruka, namely that of “professional philosophy.” Bodunrin, following Oruka, describes the trend as thework of many trained philosophers. Many of them [including Bodunrin and Oruka] reject the assumptions of ethno-philosophy and take a universalist point of view. Philosophy, many of them argue, must have the same meaning in all cultures although the subjects that receive priority, and perhaps the method of dealing with them, may be dictated by cultural biases and the existential situation in the society within which the philosophers operate. According to this school, African philosophy is the philosophy done by African philosophers whether it be in the area of logic, metaphysics, ethics, or history of philosophy. (QAP, 2)This trend in African philosophy, then, is often identified with the Western Anglo-American philosophical tradition. “The post-colonial era in African philosophy,” he writes, “is the era of professionalism.” I think I can leave aside easily how this mirrors back to the West quite literally what it wishes to see of itself.Even as the so-called four trends have not held fast (and one could argue that they were never meant to do so), other taxonomies of African philosophy provided by Hountondji and others have been undercut by arguments made by Hountondji and Wiredu, respectively, that “our [African] philosophy is yet to come” and “it is still in the making” (MR, 53; PAC, 36). If one takes seriously these claims, then any taxonomy of African philosophy will be hopelessly provisional and incomplete, and indeed one can cite important movements in Afropessimissm, Afrofuturism, and so on since and before Oruka’s death as important evidence for this claim. I take the temporality of the “to come” of these claims quite seriously. I will come back to this.II.This brings me to Mbembe by way of answering to his thinking of the future that calls upon us here and now. Let me schematize a bit by enumerating the major claims of Mbembe’s work, especially since around 2000-1:Mbembe’s writings over the past twenty years have argued for thinking the signifier “Africa” as not representing any geographical, cultural, biological, or racial past. Any representation of it would fail to produce what this signifier must leave behind. He argues that there is no shared racial basis upon which to define “Africa,” and any definition of Africa must acknowledge its often incoherent and paradoxical meanings. He writes:Pan-Africanism effectively denied the native and the citizen by identifying them as Black. Blacks became citizens because they were human beings endowed, like all others, with reason. But added to this was the double fact of their color and the privilege of indigeneity. Racial authenticity and territoriality were combined, and in such conditions Africa became the land of the Blacks. As a result, everything that was not Black had no place and consequently could not claim [to be African]. (CBR, 91) But against a number of his critics, Mbembe does not argue that we should simply reject Pan African or Négritude writers. He writes quite sympathetically, for example, of Senghor, showing how his work presages the notion of the in-common of the world to which his work bears witness (SGN, 65-70). In sum, Mbembe argues against ethnophilosophy and Pan-Africanist claims that one must find Africa’s meaning by looking to some mythic past, one that would remove any notion of being African to those of Chinese, Arab, and European descent, and others living on the continent who have never known any other life (CBR, 51).Perhaps most controversially, he has argued that post-colonial African leaders have often used these myths of the past as well as claims of Africa’s victimhood to disavow various leaders’ and political regimes’ responsibilities for their own role in the calamities visible across Africa. Deriding those theorists who depict an easy dichotomy between Africa and Europe, between white and black, between colonizers and innocent victims, Mbembe argues that these accounts of Africa denude Africans of any agency, a repetition of the very racisms of the past such theorizing is supposed to surpass. He writes:Whether one likes it or not, Africa is firmly writing itself within a new, decentered yet global history ….. It is breaking with the ethnological paradigms that will have corseted it into primitivism or neoprimitivism. More and more, the term “Africa” itself tends to refer to ageo-aesthetic category. Africa being above all the body of a vast diaspora, it is by definition a body in motion, a deterritorialized body constituted in the crucible of various forms of migrancy.As he puts it in Critique of Black Reason: “Black discourse has been dominated by three events: slavery, colonization, and apartheid. Still today, they imprison the ways in which Black discourse expresses itself” (CBR 78).This does not, however, mean one shouldn’t bear witness to the past of Africa, to the history of colonization, the racist views that put Africa a world apart, a dark continent upon which no light could shine into its heart of darkness. He spends of much of Sortir de la grande nuit and The Critique of Black Reason doing just that. He is equally opposed to those African thinkers, too, who think Africa as a world apart, as non-diasporic, not tied to the world except as that which civilization continues to find its Other. He writes with Sarah Nuttall: Because Africa as a name, as an idea, and as an object of academic and public discourse has been, and remains, fraught. It is fraught in ways that go beyond even the paradigm of orientalism first introduced by Edward Said to speak to the staging of the difference of the non-West from the West. Indeed, Africa is not only perpetually caught and imagined within a web of difference and absolute otherness. More radically, the sign is fraught because Africa so often ends up epitomizing the intractable, the mute, the abject, or the other-worldly. So overdetermined is the nature of this sign that it sometimes seems almost impossible to crack, to throw it open to the full spectrum of meanings and implications that other places and other human experiences enjoy, provoke, and inhabit. The obstinacy with which scholars in particular (including African scholars) continue to describe Africa as an object apart from the world, or as a failed and incomplete example of something else, perpetually underplays the embeddedness in multiple elsewheres of which the continent actually speaks.What then is to be done? He writes movingly, by way of outlining his method of writing:To mourn what is lost in a way that does not dwell in the trauma, to escape the curse of repetition, to put together once again the debris and the fragments of that which has been broken and try somewhat to provide them with a space of rest, to return to life the harvest of bones that have been subjected to the forces of desiccation, to render the world habitable for all, again. That’s why I write in the way I do. (“RR,” 11)4. Moving on from identifying Africans as the eternal victim—though not blind to the past—means thinking the becoming nègre of the world. He writes: In fact, there is no better terrain than Africa for a scholarship keen to describe novelty, originality, and complexity. Those of us who live and work in Africa know firsthand that the ways in which societies compose and invent themselves in the present—what we could call the creativity of practice—is always ahead of the knowledge we can ever produce about them. Therefore, to think or to theorize from Africa implies an acute awareness of the existence of this rift—even a full embrace of this rift which is at the same time a risk, and the understanding that “the social” is less a matter of order and contract than a matter of composition and experiment; that what ultimately binds societies might be some kind of artifice they have come to believe in; the realization that societies’ capacity to continually produce something new and singular, as yet unthought, which is yet to be accommodated within established conceptual systems and languages—this is indeed the condition of possibility of social theorizing as such. Africa teaches us this and much more, yet we underestimate the power of Africa to renew contemporary social theory at our expense. Here, writing from Johannesburg but also thinking of the metropolises throughout Africa, Mbembe writes about something like what Gilroy has called “post-colonial conviviality,” that is, not just the negative relation of one race to another, but rather the constant and necessary intermingling of races, cultures, and so on in the new metropoles of Africa, so often seen in the street art and museum pieces of African artists. This mixing or mélange of cultures suggests that Africa, far from being a fixed signifier for the white liberal as eternal victim or the Pan-Africanist version that Africa is always a world apart is that arriving there of the building of the world for what is underway here, there, and everywhere in the world to come, a world that is coming today. Afropolitanism isn’t, then, a particularist adventure, one that cordons off Africa from the world; it is taking up the name of Africa, the very sign, as a metonymy of the sense of the world itself. Let’s listen as he defines Afropolitanism:Afropolitanism refers to a way—the many ways—in which Africans, or people of African origin, understand themselves as being part of the world rather than being apart. Historically, Africa has been defined in the Hegelian paradigm as out of history, as not belonging to the world—as being some region of the planet which has no significance whatsoever in terms of the real history of the human in the world. But of course, that is not true. Afropolitanism is a name for undertaking a critical reflection on the many ways in which, in fact, there is no world without Africa and there is no Africa that is not part of it. So that’s the philosophical inflection of the term. (“PAL,” 29, my emphasis).No doubt, some find in Mbembe’s works on Afropolitanism a view that can only be written by someone not in inescapable poverty, but even here, he’s clear that those in poverty are not living some more “authentic Africa” that has no relation to its outside. In this way, Africa becomes a synecdoche for the movement of the world itself, the movement of sense in, among, and between cultures that has always made history possible. This isn’t some facile claim that we are all African because of a common human descent out of Africa, but is up to the moment and calling on us to a future that would be African.The becoming Africa of the world is double-edged, of course: “Now, for the first time in human history,” he writes in Critique of Black Reason, “the term ‘Black’ has been generalized. This new fungibility, this solubility, institutionalized as a new norm of existence and expanded to the entire planet, is what I call the Becoming Black of the world (le Devenir-Nègre du Monde)” (CBR, 5). Mbembe writes:I would argue that, in fact, what is important is, at this point in time, that there is a planetary turn of the African predicament. And that planetary turn of the African predicament should be the starting point of any epistemological project. If only because, to a large extent, the future of our planet might be played out on the African continent. So as you can see, Afropolitanism is a non-ethnocentric reading of all of this. It’s a planetary reading of our predicament. And it is to be understood within that broader project, rather than from the perspective of Afrocentricity.Hence, far from being a particularist “philosophy,” Afropolitanism offers another thinking of the world—at the same time as Europe has become provincialized and provincial from its supposed status as the beating heart of world history.5. Lastly, then, his work has been a project in double gesture, one that sees that to be African, to have been and live under the shadow of an undeniable past, means a responsibility to share a new world with those “becoming nègre” day after day in the worst sense.The systematic risks experienced specifically by Black slaves during early capitalism have now become the norm for, or at least the lot of, all of subaltern humanity. The emergence of new imperial practices is then tied to the tendency to universalize the Black condition. Such practices borrow as much from the slaving logic of capture and predation as from the colonial logic of occupation and extraction, as well as from the civil wars and raiding of earlier epochs. (CBR, 4)However, he also writes that this also opens up the question of the open, of the opening of the world. Against Heidegger’s argument that the modern notion of the world began with Cartesianism, it was the thinking of le nègre under which the modern notion of the world appeared—the abstract calculation of bodies and things was anything but abstract. This all means rethinking justice and the human condition as it is lived in Africa—and an Africanized world. He writes:On the one hand, we must escape the status of victimhood. On the other, we must make a break with “good conscience” and the denial of responsibility. It is through this dual approach that we will be able to articulate a new politics and ethics founded on a call for justice. That said, to be African is first and foremost to be a free man, or, as Fanon always proclaimed, “a man among other men.” A man free from everything, and therefore able to invent himself. A true politics of identity consists in constantly nourishing, fulfilling, and refufilling the capacity for self-invention. Afrocentrism is a hypostatic variant of the desire of those of African origin to need only to justify themselves to themselves. It is true that such a world is above all a form of relation to oneself. But there is no relation to oneself that does not also implicate the Other. The Other is at once difference and similarity, united. What we must imagine is a politics of humanity that is fundamentally a politics of the similar, but in a context in which what we all share [partage] from the beginning is difference. It is our differences that, paradoxically, we must share. And all of this depends on reparation, on the expansion of our conception of justice and responsibility. (CBR, 177-8)This then brings him to another thinking of the world. In Sortir de la grande nuit, Mbembe describes this as a “creation of the world” made possible, using Nancy’s terminology for the ends of Christianity, as the déclosion or dis-enclosure of colonialism. This déclosion would call us to witness the radical open that is the world itself. He writes,One could summarize in a word the philosophical aim of decolonization and the anticolonialist movement that made it possible: the déclosion of the world. The idea of déclosion includes dis-enclosure, the surging forth [surgissement], the coming [avènement] of something anew. … The question of the déclosion of the world—of belong to the world, of the habitation the world, of the creation of the world, or again of the condition through which we make a world and we constitute ourselves as inheritors of the world—is at the heart of anticolonialist thought and the notion of decolonization. (SGN, 63)No doubt, the world looks more Schmittian in its fascist Apartheid states, given growing territorial borders, and as neo-colonialism’s shadowy grip grows darker by the hour. He writes about the increased quantification of the world through computerization and forces of what he calls “deglobalization,” noting:Ultimately, all roads lead back to the border, that ground zero of non-relation and denial of the very idea of a shared humanity, of one planet—the only one we have—that we all share and to which we are all bound by our shared itinerant condition. But perhaps, for the sake of accuracy, we should talk of ‘borderization’ rather than borders. But the profundity of Mbembe’s thought is to have us see the glimmer that a dis-enclosure of capitalist and necropolitical nihilism offers: the becoming black of the world. It always has been an African world, just one that was disavowed and always frozen outside the world in a freeze frame. This spirit of conviviality is here, there, everywhere one and the other makes a world occur and still occur despite the traumas of the most virulent colonialism and despite the forces of borderization. This is how history now will happen out of Africa—or at least the Africa of a certain imagination. That is the lesson the world needs—or there won’t be one. All that belongs not to the past of an African philosophy, but to thinking a future of what tomorrow for us all. ................
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