Commitment, Postcolonial Theory and Commodified Revolution

The following is an adaptation of a presentation I made at a conference organized in April 2007 by the French Graduate Students of the State University of New York at Albany. The conference's theme was centered on postcolonial theory and a concern that the "new" generation of African authors did not seem to be as politically "engagés" (the French term for "committed") as Jean-Paul Sartre urged his intellectual contemporaries in the late 1940's. I have adapted my concerns to the perplexing and exciting events which have led Pan-African thinkers to fumble in search for new paradigms of thinking: the election chaos in Kenya, the xenophobic murders and attacks in South Africa, Barack Obama's Democratic nomination and Robert Mugabe's fanatical mishandling of elections in Zimbabwe in the name of anti-imperialism.

- Wandia Njoya

I consider "engagement" and postcolonial theory more contradictory than synonymous. The common denominator of both is the idea that Western-trained intellectuals are endowed with intrinsic or acquired abilities as leaders in the march to freedom for the "masses" or for "the people." But while Sartre, Fanon and postcolonial theorists may address the same issues, what they actually accomplish is as different as reality is from reality TV.

Perhaps the most intriguing - or most annoying - characteristic of postcolonialism is that despite its popularity, no one claims to subscribe to it. Almost every scholar who uses it begins with a ceremonial disclaimer that recognizes the problems with the theory. In addition, as Lewis Gordon points out in Her Majesty's Children: Sketches of Racism in a Neocolonial Age, the scholars associated with it evade the attacks on the theory's failure to engage socio-political realities by pleading that they have been living in the West too long to be familiar with the pressing issues at home. However, Gordon argues, the question at stake is not their cultural authenticity but what side of the imperial divide they are on. Third world scholars who deny authenticity communicate an attempt to remain neutral, eventually signaling that they are comfortable with the global status quo.

It is this tragic position of the intellectual that Sartre's concept of engagement captures. Sartre was not demanding, as is popularly thought, that intellectuals should take a clear position against imperial or government oppression. Rather, he was saying that intellectuals should recognize that society interprets what they say or write by their social position and the issues that they address. In other words, the question is not whether a writer is committed but to what that writer is committed. Therefore, it is futile and in bad faith to deny commitment to a position in the hope that people will be blind to the implications of that position.

In contrast to Sartre, the postcolonial school seeks absolution from the social implications of their thought. Paradoxically, the scholars simultaneously proclaim that they are following in the footsteps of the "revolutionnaire du jour," a position to which Fanon has now been appointed. The Fanon phenomenon is characterized by the attempt to embrace Fanon's ideas without attracting the accompanying accusations of misogyny, homophobia and glorifying violence or, to use the academic lingo, of racist and sexist "essentialism." Thus scholars peddle ambiguous concepts such as "early Fanon" and "late Fanon" and twist Black Skin, White Masks to support the view that blacks are oppressed by their identity rather than by racism. Postcolonial theory therefore emerges as an attempt to inherit the legacy of revolutionaries but not the toil and suffering on which that legacy was built. It is for this reason that I consider postcolonialism to promote a commodified revolution, in other words, a revolution in appearance but not in substance.

The gap between what postcolonial theorists claim to do and what they actually accomplish resides in the assumption that criticizing colonialism or oppression necessarily means that one is on the side of the oppressed, or that one is "un écrivain engagé" (a committed writer). But while engagement and "challenging hegemony" use the same rhetoric, they do not function in the same manner or achieve similar results. For instance, Emile Zola's novel Germinal depicts mine workers as primarily compelled by mob psychology and by imported ideas which the protagonist Etienne barely understands, but about which he is passionate. By contrast, Ousmane Sembène's novel God's Bits of Wood, which may be considered thematically similar to Germinal, presents a community that is politically articulate and well organized. We encounter wives, mothers, prostitutes, workers and fathers as having rejected the superfluous logic that the only workers who deserve family subsidies are those that are French and monogamous, yet the employers were not interested in polygamy when they needed the men's labor. But while Zola's attack on the industrial class and the bourgeoisie may appear self-evident, Sembène does not offer - and to my knowledge rarely offers - an overt criticism of colonialism.

The point I am making is that criticizing oppression is a simple thing to do. Explaining the dynamics of oppression is not. It is simple to proclaim cultural pride. It is not as simple to portray Africans as human beings with experiences that are a complex product of history, economics, culture, personality and personal choices. It is simple to criticize colonialism since it is supposedly over. Mongo Beti found out that it was not as easy to publish Main basse sur Cameroun (The Plunder of Cameroon) that clearly indicated that colonialism had simply had a makeover. When François-Xavier Verschave wrote on françafrique, he rudely found out that it was taboo to implicate Mitterand and his predecessors in the assassination of Thomas Sankara or in the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda. It is easy to criticize Nicolas Sarkozy for his racist speech about Africa or his immigration policies. It is not as easy, in this "multi-racial" age of journalists, doctors, reporters and every other professional "sans frontiers" (without borders), to underscore the racist and capitalist foundations of human rights activism and Western philanthropy, especially when it is the poor African recipients who are rejoicing.

The contradictions of postcolonial theory demonstrate that it is possible for "progressives" and "leftists" to be oblivious to the gap between what they think they are doing and what they actually accomplish. But history proves that such disconnection is not new. The worst atrocities committed against human beings in the past century ironically took place while intellectuals of imperial countries extolled the humanist tradition and the Charter of Human Rights. It was after, and not before, the Enlightenment and the establishment of the "Rights of Man" that George Cuvier carried out a ridiculous experiment with Saartje Baartman, that Comte de Gobineau wrote Essay on the Inequality of Races and that Mannoni wrote The Psychology of Colonization. Charles Maurras and Céline were prominent writers who expressed anti-Semitic views before the Nazi regime proved to be more callous than they may have imagined, although Maurras remained unapologetic till end of his life. The Interahamwe used the ideas of anthropologists and the French Revolution as the model for peasants gaining power as integral components of its ideology for the genocide in Rwanda.

When millions of people are killed in the name of science, freedom and human equality, we cannot excuse the intellectuals concerned as lacking the benefit of foresight, a fate which famously befell Nietzsche whose ideas were appropriated by the Nazi regime, for this plea cannot console the victims of those ideas. Similarly, we cannot plead that the intellectuals concerned are exceptions to the majority of well-intentioned individuals in the academy, neither can African scholars plead that these events preceded our integration into the Western academy. Such attempts to deny our collective responsibility betray a self- righteous concern with our own innocence, rather than with the pain of others. We must account for the reason why the academy that we represent is implicated in the millions of lives lost over the last 150 years, even the lives lost in our own continent.

The fundamental problem of the Western epistemological tradition is rooted in the Enlightenment and the Revolutions which followed it. Intellectuals have since become for the state what the Church was for the monarchy - the vehicle through which political power gained moral legitimacy and an ideology. As Christophe Charle notes in Les intellectuels en Europe au dix-neuvième siècle (The Intellectuals in Europe of the 19^th Century), intellectuals even adopted the discourse of the church, imagining themselves to be "new messiahs." Therefore, it is not surprising that they justified the imperial policies of their governments by using science to prove that the conquered were inherently inferior and by baptizing imperialism as the promotion of freedom and the free market.

But what makes the Enlightenment and the Revolution more insidious than the European monarchies and the Church and, as history shows, more deadly, is the hypocrisy inherent in the concept of equality. While intellectuals flatter the victims of racism and exploitation that they are equal to those with privileges attached class and ethnicity, the victims often find that equality is argued both ways. According to this logic, Don Imus, who insulted the Rutgers women's basketball team, is comparable to a teenage black rap-star using similar vocabulary to describe a real or imagined girlfriend. The various situations and motives are discounted, and the different dimensions of the same problem - the degrading images of black women - are then excused in the name of protecting freedom of speech of both a middle-aged white male radio announcer and a black rap star in his early twenties.

Such heresies thrive because the academy and, by extension, today's global society, have condemned history as distant from progress, religion as reactionary, culture as racist and emotions as irrational. We have thus rejected important taboos and moral codes embodied in culture and religion that display bias towards the poor rather than the rich, the child rather than the adult, the aged rather than the youth, women rather than men and the weak rather than the powerful. This rejection has perpetuated a historical amnesia that is simply astounding. And intellectuals must accept the blame for this lethargy, for we are some of the strongest advocates for a secular state and for secular public education. When religion and customs excluded reason or logic from their perimeters in pre-Enlightenment Europe, they proved just as deadly as science and rationalism proved to be in the 20^th century, and as immorally a-historical as "multi-racial diversity" now is. But rather than re-establish the balance that religion had suppressed, the academy perfected dogmatism by excluding moral and sentimental issues from debate.

When we express concern that the new generation of African writers seems to deviate from the footsteps of their predecessors who attacked colonialism, I suspect that we are perplexed by the fact that African ancestry no longer clearly distinguishes the oppressed or excludes them from being part of the oppressive system, at least not in the way that it used to during colonialism in Africa and segregation in the United States. This blurring of race, as postcolonial theorists call it, forces us to confront the reality that we are implicated in the biggest problems that humanity confronts today. It is also possible that we are judging African literature from hindsight, forgetting that the respect that Ousmane Sembène and Mongo Beti now enjoy was the product of hard work and struggle over decades.

We need to be careful that we are not mimicking revolutionaries while remaining complicit in racism, as postcolonial theorists do. We may face the same challenges as our predecessors did during colonialism, but those challenges manifest themselves differently. Our history is being devalued by a Western world desperate to absolve itself of the guilt for the atrocities of racism and the failures of imperialism. Hollywood stars have insulted our intelligence and dignity by portraying our continent as a field for harvesting babies and by subjecting our sick and our poor to the voyeurism of Western spectators. Last year, a Virginia senator stated that black Americans should "get over" slavery and a French journalist attributed famines in Africa to the size of men's penises.

We are now confronted with the problematic implications of the world-wide respect among whites and blacks alike for the astounding achievements of Oprah, Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama. However, these and many other figures represent the commodification and rendering of revolution palatable for a capitalist world. These days, we can easily cite, make films about and market products with the names of Fidel Castro, Che Guevera, Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon, as long as we restrict their revolutionary ideas to the past, rather than make a contemporary interpretation of their ideas which advocated for the evolution of what Fanon called a "New [Hu]Man."

This new human being is anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist. S/he sees work as an expression of dignity rather than as labor to be sold. S/he advocates for money to be invested in social services instead of lamenting that s/he pays taxes at all. Rather than spend time invoking Western principles to criticize African governments, s/he, like Verschave, attaches faces, names and events to corruption and racism with which the West tolerates and abets injustice meted against Africans but hits the roof when whites are simply inconvenienced. S/he commits physical energy, working hours, professional duties and moral concern to providing for and protecting the vulnerable members of society such as the elders, the women, the children, the sick, the disabled and the poor. S/he respects the environment by reducing consumption and using public transport rather than by merely funding environmental projects in the third world or buying "fair trade" products. Moreover, s/he sees these tasks as a social and moral imperative, rather than as philanthropy or charity voluntarily donated by the rich who must be rewarded with endless accolades and overwhelming gratitude. S/he is also profoundly historical, for s/he remembers that today we receive acceptance and accolades from the Western world because yesterday blacks labored and struggled for their freedom and affirmed our dignity, not because Euro-American politicians and idealists now voluntarily accept our humanity or embrace a multi-racial global world.

This "New Human" cannot emerge without repentance and reparations for the sins of the past in the form of the dispossession, slavery and exploitation of third world peoples. Our forgiving Europe depends on Europe's repentance, and our peaceful coexistence as African societies and families depends on our coming to terms with the alienation and divisions left behind by racist slavery and colonial rule. Failing to atone for these sins leaves Africans venting their pain and anger on each other, African leaders using anti-imperial rhetoric to manipulate their own people, and African men becoming increasingly destructive to women and children, and ultimately to themselves. We have witnessed these pathologies in the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the ethnic conflict in Kenya in January this year, the continuing xenophobic attacks against African migrants in South Africa, Mugabe's victimization of his people in the name of anti-imperialism and the spread of rape in African countries as a tool of war and as a weapon of aggression against women and children, by men unable to cope with the contemporary destabilization of masculine and African identities.

Genuine commitment is not exhibited or proclaimed. It is self-evident when we meticulously study and articulate the social and historical issues that we confront today, when we put a human and historical face to the forces that oppress the most vulnerable members of society in the pursuit of their daily lives, and when we challenge the hypocrisy, commercialism and relativism that devalue what Africans worldwide have always treasured - our soul and our dignity.