'Africa rising’: Hope or impossibility?

Introduction

The last decade or so has seen the emergence of the concept of ‘Africa Rising’. It broadly pertains to the idea that greater and better adherence by African states to western notions of liberal democracy such as peaceful elections and anti-corruption practices, will make them more attractive to foreign investment and therefore induce a sustained period of economic growth, itself leading to an emergent middle class and a corresponding rise in income levels.[1] Most of the critical engagement with the concept has so far been varied. Some, such as Vijay Mahajan, have been optimistic. They posit that Africa is indeed rapidly rising from the throes of economic impoverishment and will soon be in a position to comfortably provide public goods such as adequate health care, primary and secondary school education and paved roads to its populace. [2]

Others, such as Dambisa Moyo, have been more nuanced in their optimism and settled instead for an analysis that argues in favour of less foreign aid and more trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) where African states are concerned.[3] In addition to the argument in favour of trade and FDI by Moyo, she,[4] as well as some other academics such as Deborah Brautigam,[5] has argued that trade and investment specifically from China, as well as other non-western states should be sought as part of the strategy for Africa to rise above its economic development woes.

Development economists such as Ha-Joon Chang have argued that recent high economic growth rates in Africa due to profits from oil and other natural resources need to be invested using national investment funds. Chang has also argued that the high economic growth rates would become unsustainable if African states do not start adopting ‘interventionist’ industrial policies including import tariffs, export subsidies and establishment of state-owned enterprises, which countries like Japan and South Korea adopted in their quest for sustained economic development.[6]

In addition to the aforementioned arguments, Marxists such as Samir Amin have been more pessimistic about narratives of rapidly growing economies in Africa, and pointed out instead that the continent cannot enjoy sustained economic growth under the current global capitalist system. They argue in much the same vein as Walter Rodney did in his seminal work 'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa', that Africa is not developing and that it is instead being underdeveloped^[7] as a result of the parasitic relationship global capitalist state and non-state actors have with the continent. Amin argues that only when Africa is ‘delinked’ from the global capitalist system, and instead aligned to a new global system led by the global working class, can Africa be truly said to be developing.[8]

Although varied, these interventions relating to the concept of ‘Africa rising’ share two key foundational premises. The first relates to the normative belief that, although Africa’s economic development may have been disrupted by colonialism which came about as a result of the Berlin conference of 1884, the continent nevertheless possesses the capacity to ‘climb the ladder’ of economic development and become a central actor within the global political economy. The second premise concerns the insistence with seeking answers to the question of what it means for Africa(ns) to suffer, under conditions of economic exploitation, as opposed to that of anti-Blackness.

In light of these shared premises, this paper aims to contribute to the discussion around the concept of ‘Africa rising’, and more broadly African economic development, by positing that given the position of Blackness and Africanness within what Jared Sexton has called the Libidinal economy,[9] the notion of ‘Africa rising’ within the realm of political economy is an ontological impossibility. In other words, this paper aims to put forward the argument that global anti-Blackness, which structurally positions Africa within the psychic imagination of the world as ‘the very figure of what is null, abolished, and, in its essence… nothing at all’,[10] is unable to recognise Africa as a place and/or political subject where economic development such as that which is experienced by the so-called ‘developed nations’ or even ‘developing nations’, is possible or is even to be permitted.

In order to achieve the aforementioned aim, this paper will be divided into two sections. The first section will focus on examining on the one hand, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s notion of ‘The Symbolic Father’, and on the other hand, the concept of Black Social Death as developed by Frantz Fanon, Orlando Patterson and Frank Wilderson III. These concepts are examined in order to indicate two things: firstly, that the structure through which Human Subjectivity or ‘das Ding’ as Lacan referred to it, [11] is created, is incommensurable with the structure of open-ended violence which produces the slave, that is, the African/Black Subject;[12] and secondly, that the structure which produces Human Subjectivity is in essence parasitic and antagonistic towards Black subjectivity. Employing an Afro-pessimist framework,[13] the second section will use what Wilderson has termed the ‘three layers of Black Absence’ to argue for the irreconcilability of the concept of ‘Africa rising’ with the idea the world has of Africa as a place of ‘nothingness’ and a group of states to which ‘statehood’ is foreclosed.

The paper will go on to conclude by posing some questions with regards to what its thesis means for a) the notion of ‘south-south cooperation’, and b) the ever-burgeoning industry of ‘international development’, but also the academic disciplines of Development Studies and International Relations (IR). It is important to note at this point that this paper intends to use the words ‘Black(s)’ and ‘African(s)’ interchangeably. The reason behind this revolves around the fact that although those who see themselves as ‘Africans’ do not always necessarily consider themselves ‘Black’, they are nonetheless positioned in relation to the rest of the world as Black people. In essence, although continental ‘Africans may indeed still know themselves through coherent cultural accoutrements unavailable to the Black American, they are known by other positions within the global structure as… objects in a world of subjects’.[14]

The ‘Symbolic Father’ and the Lacanian Subject

The concept of the ‘Symbolic Father’ developed by French psychoanalyst and theorist Jacques Lacan in his ‘Ecrits’ was, according to Omar B. Ricks, ‘a structural position in the normative bourgeois [nuclear] family structure’.[15] The structural position of the ‘Symbolic Father’ allowed Lacan to make sense of the ontology of subjectivity, meaning the structure of relationality between Humans and the world they inhabit. Lacan understood the ‘Symbolic Father’ to be any individual or agency that separated the Mother from the Child; he did not think the gender of the ‘Symbolic Father’ was always necessarily male, since it was a structural position.[16] This agency could be the Mother’s job, and it could even be the person who occupies the position of the Mother in relation to the Child, if she is identified as pushing the Child away.[17]

What mattered most to Lacan in his theorising on the subject was the separation from the Mother which the Child experienced as a result of the former spending time with the ‘Symbolic Father’. Lacan was, however, quick to point out that the restrictive position occupied by the ‘Symbolic Father’ in relation to the Child should be understood not only as a negative, but also as a positive since it introduces to the Child the capacity to converse in the language of its specific social context. In other words, the ‘Symbolic Father’ enables the Child to relate to others at the level of the Human or the ‘Symbolic order’, which Ricks has described as the ‘realm of laws and language, broadly conceived, rescuing, in a sense, the child from a sole reliance on the imaginary bond with the Mother’.[18]

Once the Child is introduced to Subjectivity through language, Lacan argues she/he begins a process of trying to overturn the ‘lack’ she/he now experiences in relation to the Mother. Stated differently, the Subject seeks to fulfil its ‘desire’ for the Mother.[19] Lacan asserts, however, that although this ‘lack’/‘desire’ may not be possible to attain, the Subject must nevertheless strive to attain it until she/he dies.[20] ‘Jouissance’, meaning the short-term satisfaction of a desire/lack, emerges for Lacan as a concept that explains the way(s), such as purchasing a car or getting married, the Subject attempts to compensate for the lack which emerges out of her/his search for her/his true object of desire, which is the Mother.[21] In other words, ‘Jouissance’ specifies the Subject’s use of language in navigating the terrain of the symbolic order to achieve her/his true desire: reunification with the Mother. Moreover, this ‘desire’ or ‘lack’, which emerges from the Subject’s separation from hers/his Mother is what makes the Subject self-knowing.[22]

Slavery, Black Social Death and the Lacanian Subject

For subjects classified as African/Black, Lacan’s theorising on subjectivity is greatly called into question. One major question in this regard pertains to the dissimilarity between the nuclear family structure underwritten by language, i.e Symbolic Father, Mother and Child, which forms the Lacanian Subject, and the structure of Black Social Death underwritten by ‘gratuitous violence’,[23] which produces the African/Black Subject. Frantz Fanon asserted in his 1952 thesis ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, that ‘the Oedipus Complex is far from coming into being among Negroes’.[24] We can logically infer two things from this assertion that Fanon makes: that the ‘lack’ which produces the Lacanian Subject is not analogous with the ‘lack’ that creates the Black Subject; and that this ‘lack’, because it does not even exist in relation to Black/African people, might be more accurately denoted as ‘absence’.[25] In an attempt to make sense of this absence, Frank B. Wilderson III asserts that Slavery is its base. He posits that ‘slaveness is something that has consumed Blackness and Africanness, making it impossible to divide Slavery from Blackness’.[26]

Wilderson’s conception of Slavery takes its cue from Orlando Patterson’s seminal work ‘Slavery and Social Death’. For Patterson, what defines or structures existence for a slave, as opposed to the types of hard labour which they carry out in their daily lives, is Social Death, meaning ‘permanent’ violent domination’, ‘natal alienation’ and ‘general dishonour’.[27] The implication here is that, unlike the Lacanian Subject, the structure of open-ended violence, which Sexton calls ‘Black Social Death',[28] is what produces the Black/African. We are able to deduce from the above that not only is the African/Black the quintessential slave in the libidinal or collective imagination of the world, they are also in essence the yardstick for measuring suffering since the slave is the conceptual opposite of the non-slave.

In order to further evidence the differing structures which produce the Lacanian or Human Subject and the Black/African, let us focus briefly on the idea of the ‘family’. As stated earlier, Lacan’s understanding of the Human Subject is heavily dependent on the nuclear family structure (that is, Father, Mother and Child). If the Black however, as a result of the trade in Africans, has become the quintessential slave, and if one of the constituent elements of the slave is natal alienation, i.e. the absence of ties of birth to both preceding and successive generations, [11] the concept of the ‘Family’ in relation to the Black/African becomes an ontological impossibility.

An example of the unique relationship Black people have to natal alienation is exemplified by the killing of Philando Castile during a traffic stop in 2016 by a Minnesota police officer in the presence of his partner and her child. The lack of regard for Castile’s life shown to both the victim’s partner and daughter by not only the officer, but also the judicial system, which went on to acquit him of all charges relating to the killing, speaks to the unavailability of relational status for Blacks/Africans along the vectors of motherhood and fatherhood, and by extension Humanity, vis-à-vis non-Black people.[30] In essence, due to Black Social Death, which negates the capacity of the Black/African woman or man to embody motherhood and fatherhood because they are precluded from being able to claim a relational status with others who embody the same structural positions, speaking of the ‘Black Family’ conceptually falls apart.

An important conclusion that can be drawn from the analysis in this section is the fundamental necessity of the absence of the Black/African from the structure of relationality within the Symbolic order for the coherence of subjectivity itself. The exclusion of the Black/African from Human relationality ring-fences Human relationality because without the Black/African, there would be no foundation upon which the Human is able to cohere and know itself to be itself. Put differently, although those classified as Black/African have to be necessarily excluded from the fold of Humanity for Humanity to know itself, their presence (whether literally or allegorically) paradoxically guarantees the Humanity of those who classify themselves as Humans.

‘Africa rising’ in the global context of Black Social Death

The absence of subjectivity for the Black/African poses crucial ethical questions for the possibility of truly thinking through the concept of ‘Africa rising’. For instance, how can Africans ‘rise’ when they do not possess the thing which allows them to enter the world of homologous Beings that seek sustained economic development? How can Africans hope to successfully achieve sustained economic growth within the current context of global political economy when the very idea of ‘economic growth’ is counter-defined against their very existence? In essence, how can those who are the quintessential slave within the world’s collective imagination hope for a place at the table of economic development?

Normative notions of sovereignty and the nation-state act as placeholders for the shared insistence that not only does Africa have the capacity to enjoy the fruits of economic growth within the current global political economy, but that answers to the question of why Africa is economically impoverished lie in the rubric of economic exploitation, as opposed to that of anti-Blackness. Closer inspection of the notion of ‘African sovereignty’ in light of an understanding of Black Social Death, however, reveals serious limitations. Within the academic disciplines of Development Studies and IR, sovereignty is broadly understood to be the capacity of nation-states, which are political communities under a single government, to have full rights and domination over the cartographic spaces which they preside over.[31] Ontologically, the stakes with regard to sovereignty and the nation-state are high for African states.

Although he was not necessarily speaking at the level of nation-statehood, Fanon’s insistence that ‘the Black has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man’[32] is relevant here. Moreover, since the structure of Black Social Death which structures Black existence occurs not only in relation to those who are white, but also those who Wilderson describes as ‘junior partners’ of Whites i.e Asians, Arabs,[33] it becomes necessary to adjust Fanon’s assertion in relation to the issue of the sovereignty of African nation-states to read: ‘The Black/African nation-state has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the world’.

This impossibility of ontologically thinking ‘African sovereignty’ makes it difficult to speak or even think of an Africa that is ‘rising’. Wilderson’s designated ‘three layers of Black Absence’,[34] moreover, aid us in thinking through this impossibility using an Afro-Pessimistic framework. The first layer termed the 'Absence of Subjective Presence' enables us to cognitively understand the inability of the world to recognise Africa and its nation-states as nothing but ‘an ontological frieze that waits for a gaze, rather than a living ontology moving with agency’.[35] The fact that African states continue to exist in the world as archetypal symbols of abject poverty despite possessing natural resources and wealth which development economists tell us are essential for economic growth, is reflective of this first layer.

'Absence of Cartographic Presence', which is the second layer, allows us to think through the notion of the African ‘homeland’ which can be best described as ‘a fated place where Black bodies are domiciled… [a] nowhere of no one’.[36] In other words, just as the Black body is a priori, that is before the commission of any criminal act, marked out for death or mass incarceration as is the case in places like Brazil and the United States of America, the Black/African nation-state or continent is a priori ‘a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute… a world without spaciousness [where] men live... on top of each other…’.[37] The second layer of Black Absence is perhaps best reflected in the so-called ‘Failed States Index’ (recently renamed as the ‘Fragile States Index’), which is an annual report published by the American think tank, Fund for Peace, and the news publication agency, Foreign Policy.[38] Since the list began being published in 2005, African states have consistently constituted more than fifty per cent of what it deems the world’s least stable states. In the context of global anti-Blackness, deeming African states as the prototype of instability or more accurately, the prototype of a state in cartographic vertigo, should not come as a surprise to us.

The final layer of Absence which Wilderson identifies is the ‘Absence of Political Presence’. This layer articulates the absence of a Black grammar of suffering from the political discourse and thus the hegemonic structure of recognition.[39] This third layer, which is possibly the most important, enables us to think of the realm of global political economy as a time and space that always requires African nation-states to remain inconceivable as states capable of possessing statehood. The premise here is that if ‘statehood’ is the capacity of a state to perform its functions, African states have to necessarily be outside of statehood in order for non-African states to perform statehood.

Conclusion

In summary, this paper has attempted to re-orientate the reader's understanding of ‘African development’ by demonstrating the ontological impossibility of ‘Africa rising’. The paper has explored the analogous nature of the foreclosure of Subjectivity from the human classified as Black/African, and the foreclosure of economic growth from nation-states deemed Black/African. This thought exercise inevitably raises some questions, one of which pertains, for example, to the notion of ‘south-south development’. If the relational structure of Slavery and Black Social Death, rather than colonialism, is what positions African states vis a vis non-African states within the realm of the libidinal, how can ‘cooperation’ be conceived of in the realm of political economy? In other words, can we truly speak of a mutually beneficial union between a Socially Dead entity such as Angola, and a Socially Living albeit economically degraded entity, such as India?

Another question which this paper’s line of enquiry raises concerns the earth-shattering implications of a Blackened discourse for the discourse of Development and IR theory. Stated differently, are proponents of the various commentaries on the ‘Africa rising’ concept, and ostensibly the world, prepared to begin moving in a politically masochistic manner, that is against the concreteness of their very existence,[40] towards reconceiving economic development, as well as its various theoretical scaffoldings, as fundamentally antagonistic and non-homologous to, rather than complimentary to Africa? The day these questions truly begin to get answered is perhaps the day the world as we know it begins to end.

* Francis B. Alakija is an independent researcher of African descent and aspiring Ph.D. student. His research interests include Afro-pessimism, International Relations Theory, Development Studies, Black studies and Critical Theory

Bibliography

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Wilderson III Frank B., ‘Biko and The Problematic of Presence’, in Biko Lives!: Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko, eds. Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander, and Nigel C. Gibson, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 95 - 114

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Wilderson III Frank B., ‘Irreconcilable Anti-Blackness and Police Violence’, Interview by I Mix What I Like, iMiXWHATiLiKE.org, (October 1st, 2014), https://imixwhatilike.org/2014/10/01/frankwildersonandantiblackness-2/, [accessed September 19th, 2017]

Endnotes

[1] Vijay Mahajan, Africa Rising: How 900 million African Consumers Offer More Than You Think, (New Jersey: Pearson Education Inc., 2009), p. 24

[2] Ibid, p.7

[3] Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and Why There is Another Way for Africa, (London: Penguin,  2009), p. 9

[4] Ibid, p. 11

[5] Ibid, p. 103

[6] Deborah Brautigam, The Dragon's Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 11

[7] Ha-Joon Chang, 'Industrial Policy: Can Africa Do it?' in The Industrial Policy Revolution II: Africa in the 21st Century, eds. Joseph E. Stiglitz, Justin Lin Yifu and Ebrahim Patel, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 114 - 132

[8] Samir Amin, 'Revolutionary Change in Africa: An Interview with Samir Amin', Interview with Leo Zeilig, Review of African Political Economy, http://roape.net/2017/03/16/revolutionary-change-africa-interview-samir…, [accessed September 19th, 2017]

[9] Meaning the collective consciousness around abstract emotional and psychic variables such as fears, phobias and fantasies, of the world. See also Frank Wilderson on Libidinal Economy: Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 9

[10] Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p.4

[11] Daniel Tutt, 'Das Ding and the Impossible Good of the Subject', danieltutt.com, (December 14th, 2009), https://danieltutt.com/2009/12/14/das-ding-and-the-impossible-good-of-t…, [accessed September 18th, 2017]

[12] Wilderson, Red, White and Black, p. 38

[13] The 'Afro-pessimism' that I refer to here is not that which emerged in the late 1980s from within the International Relations discipline which perceived Africa as a region too riddled with problems to be saved from itself, but rather, it is a term which emerges from a 2003 interview conducted by Frank Wilderson with Saidiya V. Hartman where the latter embraces the description of her 1997 book 'Scenes of Subjection' by a reviewer, as 'pessimistic'. The Afro-pessimist framework broadly argues that Black/African existence today continues to be marked by the slave relation. Afro-pessimist thinkers like Saidiya, Hartman, Hortense Spillers, and Frank B. Wilderson argue that the advent of emancipation in the late 1800s did not signal a substantive break from the relationship that Black people had to White and non-Black people. More precisely, they argue that Blacks/Africans, as a result of the violence of the middle passage and the ever-refining technologies of ‘accumulation’ and ‘fungibility’, live in what Hartman calls the 'Afterlife of Slavery' which she defines in her 2007 book 'Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route' as 'skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration and impoverishment' that 'Black Life is still imperiled and devalued by'

[14] Wilderson, Red, White and Black, p. 96

[15] Omar Benton Ricks, On Jubilee: The Performance of Black Leadership in the Afterlife of Slavery, (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2014), p. 30

[16] Ibid

[17] Ibid

[18] Ibid

[19] Wilderson, Red, White and Black, p. 68

[20] Ricks, p. 31

[21] Ibid

[22] Ibid

[23] Wilderson, Red, White and Black, p. 38

[24] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, (Revised Edition, London: Pluto Press, 2008), p. 117

[25] Ricks, p. 23

[26] Frank B. Wilderson III, ‘Irreconcilable Anti-Blackness and Police Violence’, Interview by I Mix What I Like, iMiXWHATiLiKE.org, (October 1st, 2014), https://imixwhatilike.org/2014/10/01/frankwildersonandantiblackness-2/, [accessed September 19th, 2017]

[27] Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 13

[28] Jared Sexton, 'The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-pessimism and Black Optimism', in Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations, eds. Anna M. Agathangelou and Kyle D. Killian, (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 69

[29] Patterson, p. 5

[30] Wilderson, Red, White and Black, p. 85

[31] Jean-Germain Gross, ‘Towards a Taxonomy of Failed States in the New World Order: Decaying Somalia, Liberia,  Rwanda and Haiti’, Third World Quarterly, Volume 17, No. 3, (September, 1996), p. 456

[32] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, p. 83

[33] Frank B. Wilderson III, ‘Irreconcilable Anti-Blackness and Police Violence’, Interview by I Mix What I Like, iMiXWHATiLiKE.org, (October 1st, 2014), https://imixwhatilike.org/2014/10/01/frankwildersonandantiblackness-2/, [accessed September 19th, 2017]

[34] Frank B. Wilderson III, ‘Biko and The Problematic of Presence’, in Biko Lives!: Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko, eds. Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander, and Nigel C. Gibson, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 97

[35] Ibid, p. 98

[36] Ibid, p. 99

[37] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (Revised Edition, London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 30

[38] Luis Alberto Moreno, Pierre Schori, Eduardo Ferrero, Flovio D. Espinal, Andrew S. Nastois, and Lewis W. Goodman, ‘A Failed Index?’, Foreign Policy, No. 150, (September - October 2005), p. 4

[39] Frank B. Wilderson III, ‘Biko and The Problematic of Presence’, p. 99

[40] Ibid, p. 102

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