Thomas M Blaser
Africa is a country | November 20th, 2013
Within a short period of time, the global, corporate discourse on
Africa has swapped a refrain of hopelessness with a near eschatological
discovery of a new el dorado — a place of gold from which global capital
hopes to regain its lost mojo. Africa is a Country has debunked the
discourse of an ‘Africa Rising’ in several postings,
and collectively they make it quite clear that a future in Africa worth
striving for is beyond the growth of the GDP, the rise of the
ill-defined African middle class or the increase in return on
investment.
In the following interview, Achille Mbembe
reflects upon the category of the future for Africa, the consequences
of global capitalism on the continent, and on Africa’s contribution to
an emerging world in which Europe has provincialized itself.
Since 2008, when you initiated the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC),
you were very much concerned with thinking about the future — why and
why now? Is there something about our current epoch that requires us to
think about the future?
Mbembe: There were two reasons. The first was that the
category of the future was very central to the struggle for liberation
if only in the sense that those who were involved in it had constantly
to project themselves towards a time that would be different from what
they were going through, what they were experiencing. So the political,
in that sense, was about a constant engagement with the forces of the
present that foreclosed the possibility of freedom, but it was also the
political, closely associated with the idea of futurity. And what seems
to have happened after 1994 [in South Africa since the first democratic
elections after apartheid], is the receding of the future as a temporary
horizon of the political, and of culture in general, and its
substitution by a kind of present that is infinite and a landing. This
receding of the future and its replacement by a landing present is also
fostered by the kind of economic dogma with which we live; to use a
short term, neoliberalism. The time of the market, especially under the
current capitalist conditions, is a time that is very fragmented and the
time of consumption is really a time of the instant. So we wanted to
recapture that category of the future and see to what extent it could be
remobilized in the attempt at critiquing the present, and reopening up a
space not only for imagination, but also for the politics of
possibility.
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