The Politics of Time: Imagining African Becomings - Edited by Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr
Translated by Philip Gerard
English edition published in 2023 by Polity Press, Cambridge, UK and Hoboken, NJ
Originally published in 2019 in French as Politique des temps by Editions Jimsaan, Dakar, Sénégal
308 pages
ISBN: 978-1-5095-5110-1
As the first quarter of the twenty-first century looms just over the horizon, the world finds itself in a perpetual mode of crisis. Rapidly accelerating social and economic inequality, the erosion of democracy amidst a rise in authoritarianism, declining standards of living, and the oncoming threat of climate catastrophe are only a few of the defining features of our current milieu. The West, reeling from the effects of its declining influence around the world as a result of neoliberalism’s failure, finds itself slipping into right-wing authoritarianism and reactionary impulses. Accordingly, the Western archive of philosophy has found itself inadequate to fully address the current moment.
Africa, long considered by the West to be an external and detached world only useful for exploiting its vast resources and expropriating its people for cheap labor, finds itself now at a crossroads. The forms of art, literature, social and economic organization, and philosophy developed on the continent can no longer be ignored by the rest of the world. Instead of standing apart from the world, Africa is one of the primary places where the future of humanity will develop.
Discussing these themes during the second session of the Ateliers de la pensée – Workshops of Thought – held in Dakar, Senegal in 2017, fifty African and Afro-diasporic philosophers, writers, novelists, and artists gathered to interrogate Africa’s current place in the world, as well as its path for future possibilities. Translated from French by Philip Gerard and edited by Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr, The Politics of Time: Imagining African Becomings gathers the essays from the 2017 Workshops of Thought and presents them to the English-speaking world.
Overview:
Comprising twenty essays from a wide array of African scholars and artists, The Politics of Time continues the threads of thought on decolonization, economics, literary theory, temporality, and universality that began in its preceding volume, To Write the Africa World. Writing across a litany of disciplines, the authors consider the issue of temporality in building a cogent political vision for the future. As such, they discuss topics such as the narrativization of African history, decolonization, the possibility of different modalities of knowledge from an African perspective, the demographic shifts occurring within the continent, leftover monetary policies from the colonial era, the delicate relationship between politics and religion, and how Africa can create new and innovative solutions for the problems that will soon face the world.
Uniting these essays is the theme of temporality as a politically charged category of thinking as the imminent threat of crisis looms ahead. As opposed to apocalyptic strains of thought that diagnose our ills and plan for the end of the world or techno-utopic idolatry that places its hope for the future in the hands of technological development, the authors of this volume consider what the future could entail through an African framework. Pushing back against colonialist narratives that place the African continent outside of the normal flow of time and history, they work to repoliticize time and utilize history as a transformative force that can open up novel ways of living and being in the world.
Each essay is suffused with a sense of urgency and immediacy, as they call us to reconsider our relationship to the African continent and its foundational role in the future of the human species. The authors address timely questions, such as the necessity of pluralism, the reality of emigration, and the economic possibilities that postcolonial critique can open up for the people of Africa. These discourses extend into fields such as religious studies, philosophy, economics, political theory, and even law, as Abdoul Aziz Diouf writes, “Owing to its economic precariousness and the instability of some of its governments, Africa is a continent of emigration. Despite the fact that many of its citizens live in the West, Africa can nonetheless use the conception of personal status advanced by international private law to restore cultural ties between its local subjects and those living in diaspora” (59).
Other essays draw on creative inspirations for their content and form, such as utilizing a creation myth to narrativize the future of the continent or placing the human (in one essay referred to as “Biped”) as an integral part of the natural world. Other essays look to common forms of life and activities on the continent to center Africa within global discourse, such as when Jean-Luc Raharimanana employs the metaphor of weaving when he writes,
African thought is not dead. It is in languages, proverbs, tales, myths, literature, music, painting, in the arts, in the artisanate, in initiatory rites, in the philosophies and worldviews that nourish ceremonies, folklore, family bonds, social ties, etc….Africa is here; Africa is in us. It is also in others, in jazz and modern music, in painting, in food, in the imaginary, in the very blood of humanity. We have to celebrate this resilience, to understand how, in order to survive, our ancestors were obliged to invest the other and persevere intact in its clothes. Oppressors may harm their victims, but they do not escape untouched; the dye does not always pick what to color when multiple fabrics intertwine and tangle. (49-50)
These seemingly disparate discourses are connected by the various possibilities that they can open up for reimagining the human subject from an African perspective.
Commendations:
There are several aspects of this work that I wholly commend. First of all, this volume (along with its predecessor, To Write the Africa World) serves as a crucial intervention in the contemporary political and social discourse around the future of humanity. These essays compel the reader to consider examining our global issues through the prism of African modalities and ways of being. This work is imbued with a sense of urgency, as the authors call us to consider new ways of thinking and being in the world from the African perspective, which is essential for the future of humanity. This work presses us to contemplate new and innovative ways of thinking emerging from the Global South and for us in the Western world to take seriously the lines of inquiry and avenues for change that are brought up in this volume.
Additionally, The Politics of Time is much more accessible in its content than its previous volume, To Write the Africa World. While there are a few philosophically dense essays in The Politics of Time, this collection is much more focused on politics, religion, history, and economics, and the language is much clearer and easier to understand than its sister volume. Whether due to a greater clarity of thought from the authors or clearer translation, I found the language in this volume to be much more readable and understandable, which makes this work much more accessible to a wide audience. I gained so much insight and perspective from this work and enjoyed reading it significantly more than To Write the Africa World (though you should also read that as well if you’re up for the challenge).
In particular, Mbembe’s essay on the mobility and circulation of populations was distinctly well-written. He highlights the necessity for Africans to freely circulate throughout the continent and shed the colonialist concepts of borders and roadblocks. To do this, he argues, massive infrastructure must be constructed to connect people across the continent. We must also work to remove the various obstacles that forbid and restrict mobility, both geographical and institutional. Mbembe also rightly emphasizes the demographic shifts, both on the African continent and globally. Despite the myth of the Great Replacement, a very small percentage of Africans reside in Europe, and most who immigrate do so within the continent. In fact, more people are migrating to Africa and Asia as the populations of wealthier nations (US, Europe, Japan, and parts of Latin America) are aging rapidly while the centers of young populations are increasingly within Africa and Asia. This essay astutely ties together the themes of this volume and highlights both the present state of the African population and immigration as well as the massive demographic trends that seem to be solidifying Africa as a central actor in future global affairs.
Additionally, as a scholar of religion, I found Rachid Id Yassine’s essay “Rethinking Islam: Or, the Oxymoron of ‘Secular Theocracy’” particularly insightful. Yassine is careful to qualify his assertions and set the context of his argument, which is essentially that Africa offers a unique standpoint in which democratic and secular values can flourish if they maintain a careful balance between politics and religion. He writes, “If Islamism confuses them and Occidentalism isolates them, contemporary Africa finds itself at the confluence where religion and politics meet. Africa offers a promising stage for the joining of secularism and democracy in societies with Muslim majorities, upon the condition that one avoid the Islamist amalgam of religious and political orders and the Occidentalist insistence on their illusory separation” (71). There is an emancipatory potential within religion, and Yassine’s essay serves as a fascinating example of thinking alongside Christianity, Islam, and secularism in a politically productive manner.
Finally, I found Sylla’s essay on the CFA franc and its role in continuing colonialism in Senegal to be especially compelling. This was an area and debate that I had previously been unfamiliar with, and Sylla distills the essentials of the discourse around this monetary policy in an erudite and easy-to-grasp manner. He astutely highlights the colonial roots of the CFA franc and its persistence in the African economy, as well as how an alternative monetary policy could be enacted. To his credit, since this essay was written in 2017, it does not address more recent developments with the CFA franc, such as the end of French engagement with it in 2020 and the founding of the proposed West African “Eco,” which aims to give UEMOA states fiscal independence from France. I have found Sylla’s analysis to be quite compelling, so I would be fascinated to learn more about this development and his analysis of its impact on these West African nations.
Critique:
On the other hand, there are a few small shortcomings to this volume. The first small quibble concerns the organization of the essays. The book is divided into five parts, each containing a handful of essays. While this breaks up the essays into manageable groupings, the essays don’t seem to have any major relation to one another, apart from the overarching theme of temporality and African thought. The parts that the essays are organized into appear to be relatively arbitrary and don’t add much to the cohesiveness of the book.
Additionally, several essays are still a bit dense and can be intimidating to the average reader. While this work is much more accessible than its predecessor, one would still benefit greatly from having a background in decolonial thought, philosophy, political theory, and history to get the most out of this volume. However, even for the reader unfamiliar with these topics, The Politics of Time does a much better job of easing them into the subjects that will be discussed.
Finally, while the totality of the volume is strong, there are a few essays that are weak by comparison. A few essays seemed a bit strange, most notably “The Tree Frogs’ Distress” by Cameroonian writer and cultural critic Lionel Manga. He essentially attempts to give an expansive account of the natural world that decenters the human, treating the human subject as part and parcel of the natural world, rather than standing apart from it. While I did appreciate the sly humor and occasional directness of his writing, this essay came across as overly academic and a bit alienating to read. To be sure, this is more a question of taste and aesthetics than the quality of content, but I felt that his obtuse writing style hindered, rather than elucidated, his overall argument.
Conclusion:
Overall, The Politics of Time is an urgently necessary and accessible intervention of African philosophy and political theory into the discourse of global affairs. While a few essays are weaker than others, the totality is greater than the sum of its parts as the volume cogently argues for the importance of African thought in confronting the challenges of the near future. For anyone interested in African politics, philosophy, economics, and social theory, this book is a timely and essential work to understand the role and importance of the African continent and its people for the future of humanity. The problems that Africa faces are not contained to Africa alone. Rather, they are also global problems, and we must reckon with them and think in new and innovative ways if we hope to have a livable future for all people. The Politics of Time -- along with its companion volume, To Write the Africa World -- sketches out a few of the possibilities that African thought offers for such a hope.
Thank you to Polity for sending a free copy for me to read and review.