The Pessimist’s Optimist

Achille Mbembe’s​ On the Postcolony, first published in French in 2000, changed the direction of postcolonial studies. Since then, he has gained a loyal readership across the political spectrum (his admirers include Emmanuel Macron and Judith Butler), and his concepts – the postcolony, necropolitics, Afropolitanism and more – crop up everywhere from the Venice Biennale to newspapers and advertising briefs. It is perhaps surprising that such widespread acclaim has been given to a writer who is notoriously difficult to read. Mbembe has been accused of writing at a ‘frustrating level of abstraction’ and performing ‘language acrobatics’. But those who stay the course are rewarded. In Mbembe’s world, figures as disparate as the French anthropologist Claude Meillassoux, the Congolese novelist Sony Lab’ou Tansi and Hannah Arendt are employed to discuss anything from the depiction of autocrats in Cameroonian cartoons to Christian eschatology to posthumanism. We may not be sure where all this leads us, but Mbembe has never been interested in supplying easy answers to difficult questions.

In Germany and France, Mbembe has (against his will) become the public face of an ill-defined ‘postcolonial left’. This isn’t always a pleasant role. In April 2020, a few months before he was due to deliver the opening lecture at the Ruhrtriennale, Mbembe was told that he’d been accused of antisemitism. The festival is funded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which – like most German states – has in recent years cancelled funding for organisations and individuals with ties to the pro-Palestinian BDS movement. Mbembe’s case made headlines. Even some of the more conservative German papers found it hard to believe that a historian who’d recently been awarded the Geschwister-Scholl Prize – named after the founders of the anti-Nazi resistance group White Rose – had suddenly become an antisemite. The accusation, it transpired, had little to do with BDS activism and was based on a wilful misreading of Mbembe’s 2016 essay ‘The Society of Enmity’, which argued that Israel is a settler colony and that the practices it uses to police and control Palestinians in the occupied territories ‘recall the reviled model of apartheid’. This was enough for Germany’s antisemitism commissioner, Felix Klein, to charge him with ‘Israel-focused antisemitism’.

More than thirty cultural institutions signed an open letter defending Mbembe. It argued that Germany’s historical responsibility should not be used to dismiss other histories of oppression. This call for a comparative approach to historical memory owes a great deal to the work of the historian Michael Rothberg. For Rothberg, placing memories of the Holocaust in dialogue with memories of colonial violence advances our understanding of both. It also reveals the centrality of ideas about race to European identity and, by extension, Europe’s dealings with peoples considered ‘other’. In the early 20th century, Papua New Guinea, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Namibia, Togo and parts of Ghana were all under German control. Cameroon, where Mbembe was born, remained a German protectorate until the end of the First World War. Eugenics research programmes in African colonies formed the basis for Nazi race science (skulls from Namibia and Tanzania ended up in the collection of German museums and universities).

Mbembe’s historicisation of the Holocaust drew unwanted attention to Germany’s colonial amnesia. Germans often insist that the Holocaust has no historical precedent, and that anyone who says otherwise is guilty of ‘relativising’ a singular horror. This has allowed the country as a whole to avoid addressing its colonial crimes, and to ignore a tradition of Jewish and anticolonial writing that has tried to understand the Holocaust as a product of the European imperial tradition. Arendt argued as early as 1951 that the concentration camps in German South-West Africa (now Namibia) served as a model for the Third Reich’s bureaucratic organisation of forced labour and systematic murder: to suppress an anticolonial rebellion, the Germans had killed a hundred thousand Ovaherero and ten thousand Nama. Both Arendt and Aimé Césaire, whose Discourse on Colonialism was published a year before The Origins of Totalitarianism, used the metaphor of the boomerang to describe the way violence that was once reserved for colonial subjects was turned on Europeans. For Mbembe, too, this history shows the West’s need for some racialised other – ‘a Negro, a Jew, an Arab, a foreigner’ – to make sense of its own subjectivity.

In Homo Sacer (1995), Giorgio Agamben argued that in the Nazi death camps the state of exception became the norm. People were reduced to the condition of ‘bare life’: destitution, hunger, the ever-present threat of death. Extending this idea, Mbembe argues that Foucault’s concept of ‘biopower’ – technologies for regulating the biological life of large populations – can’t account for situations where life is subjugated to ‘the power of death’. The plantation, the colony and the camp are all forms of what Mbembe calls ‘necropower’ or ‘necropolitics’. Necropolitics, as he puts it, describes ‘the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximally destroying persons and creating “death-worlds” – that is, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions conferring on them the status of the living dead’. As a technique of power, necropolitics invokes the permanent state of exception to justify its curtailment of rights and freedoms, or its destructive and deadly wars. Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty as the power to decide on the state of exception applies most of all to the colonies, Mbembe argues, where ‘sovereignty consist[ed] fundamentally in the exercise of power outside of the law.’ But he warns us that the condition of the colonies is rapidly becoming the condition of all of subaltern humanity.

Mbembe’s Politiques de l’inimitié (2016), published in English translation three years later as Necropolitics, describes a world ravaged by ‘increasing inequality, militarisation, enmity and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist and nationalist forces’. The recent far-right turn in European politics, refugee crises in Africa and the Middle East, Israel’s assault on Gaza and wars in Sudan and the DRC all seem to confirm this bleak vision of contemporary politics. Normative accounts of democracy claim that the arbitrary use of force stands in opposition to democratic rights. For Mbembe, however, necropolitics isn’t democracy’s opposite but its dark underbelly. Liberal democracies have always relied on brutality that took place out of sight – or at least out of mind. In the United States, democracy was considered compatible with slavery. Today, according to Mbembe, the ‘most accomplished form of necropower is the … colonial occupation of Palestine’. In Gaza, even before the war, Israeli policy was not just to subjugate the population but to establish a regime of terror and death. Only a minority have held this to be incompatible with Israeli, or American, democracy.

Mbembe was born near Otélé in central Cameroon in 1957. Raised in a francophone Catholic family and educated at a boarding school run by Dominican friars, he joined the International Young Catholic Students movement and developed an interest in liberation theology. The organisation was committed to social change and encouraged its members to ‘follow in the steps of Jesus Christ’ by advancing peace and justice. Mbembe’s interest in liberation theology didn’t turn into a commitment to class struggle, however. ‘Catholicism helped me to avoid Marxism,’ he said in 2008. Marxism, he believes, doesn’t pay enough attention to the spiritual dimension of human existence. As the theologian Vincent Lloyd put it, Mbembe sees popular religiosity as a site where ‘power relations are navigated or contested.’ Christianity wasn’t just the religion introduced by colonialism and adopted by African elites to discipline their subjects. In the hands of the people, as he argued in Afriques indociles: Christianisme, pouvoir et État en société postcoloniale (1988), it could become a political theology that challenged the institutional power of church and state. In conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in 2006, Mbembe said that his project was ‘to look into ways in which we can render politically fruitful the critique of religion while taking very seriously religion itself as critique – especially a critique of the political’.

Mbembe’s interest in the history of political violence began with his postgraduate work on colonial Cameroon. After Germany’s defeat in the First World War, Cameroon was handed to Britain and France under a League of Nations mandate. When French Cameroon gained independence in 1960, British Cameroon was split. The mainly Christian south joined francophone Cameroon in a federal republic while the majority-Muslim north was absorbed into Nigeria. The state that emerged from this process was far from coherent. Large parts of Cameroon retained legal, financial and educational institutions based on the French model; anglophone regions remained institutionally British. Today, Cameroon is a member of both the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie and the Commonwealth; English and French are both official languages. But anglophone separatists claim that the government in Yaoundé represents only the interests of francophone Cameroonians. In 2017 the demand for their own state escalated into an armed conflict which caused the death or displacement of thousands.

Mbembe had experienced the effects of colonial violence first-hand: his uncle, an aide to the secretary general of the Cameroonian Peoples Union (UPC), Ruben Um Nyobè, was killed by French troops in 1958, only seconds before Um Nyobè himself was shot dead. Félix-Roland Moumié, who took over the party leadership, was poisoned by an agent of the French secret service in Geneva in 1960. Um Nyobè and Moumié’s murders were part of a campaign against the UPC, which called for a total break with France and expressed solidarity with the FLN in Algeria and the Viet Minh, both of which were engaged in armed struggle against the French. Alarmed by the prospect of a communist Cameroon, the colonial authorities cracked down on UPC activists, forcing many into exile. When independence finally came, power was transferred to those – including Cameroon’s first president, Ahmadou Ahidjo – who had either played no part in the nationalist struggle or actively opposed it. Um Nyobè, Moumié and Ernest Ouandié (a UPC activist executed in 1971) were erased from official memory. Until the 1990s, it was dangerous to mention their names in public. Mbembe’s master’s thesis at the University of Yaoundé was on political violence and anticolonial insurrections in southern Cameroon in the 1950s. He was allowed to graduate, but his thesis was never examined.

Mbembe moved to Paris in 1982 to study for his doctorate at the Sorbonne, supervised by the French historian and Africanist Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch. The big names in structuralism, poststructuralism and psychoanalysis – Foucault, Derrida, Castoriadis, Lacan and Deleuze – were among his influences. In 1985 he published Les Jeunes et l’ordre politique en Afrique noire, which focused on the marginalisation of young people in postcolonial African societies. (It was one of the first studies to take seriously ‘youth’ as a category of social scientific analysis in Africa.) A decade later, he returned to the subject of his master’s thesis with La Naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun, 1920-60: Histoire des usages de la raison en colonie (1996), which analysed the underground resistance to colonial rule in southern Cameroon and used the case of French Cameroon to examine the nuances of the ‘colonial relationship’ in Africa.

While it was true for Mbembe that colonialism governed through violent subjection, this wasn’t the full story. Attempts to change or subvert colonial rule took place in many spheres (economic, political, symbolic), so the confrontation between coloniser and colonised could never be reduced to political revolution alone. La Naissance discussed the experience of colonialism as it played out in the imagination, behaviours and attitudes of Cameroonians, challenging the conventional idea that colonial subjects could be neatly divided into ‘resistance fighters’ and ‘collaborators’. Cameroonians could join the colonial state or accept positions in the colonial administration without consenting or submitting to colonial power. Mbembe complicated the idea of ‘resistance’ by showing that collaboration sometimes made it possible for Cameroonians to hold positions of power that undermined rather than upheld colonial subjection: ‘One could “resist” while participating in the coloniser’s cultural horizon.’

The question​ of what came after the colony – and whether it differed from the colony – occupied Mbembe in the following years. De la postcolonie (2000) broke entirely with the conventions of social science research on Africa, mixing French theory, psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory. But Mbembe also wanted to distance himself from postcolonial studies, which was becoming increasingly popular on Western campuses. In his view it reduced the complex history of subaltern societies to one traumatic moment – colonisation – thereby transforming postcolonial subjects into mere victims of colonial power. When they did engage in political acts, these were celebrated as examples of subversion or resistance when, in fact, they ‘often produced paradoxical situations’. With its narrow focus on the relationship between coloniser and colonised, postcolonial studies risked obscuring the conflict between the people and the postcolonial state, or between the people themselves. As Mbembe writes (in typical register), the ‘intensity of the violence of brother towards brother and the status of the sister and the mother in the midst of fratricide’ were of far greater importance than ‘the struggle between father and son’. What bothered him most was the emphasis on ‘alterity’, which valorised the radical ‘difference’ between Europe and its other. Postcolonial studies offered a politics of closure when what was needed was the opposite: a politics of cultural ‘openness’ that asserts a common humanity.

Mbembe insisted that postcolonial African experience can’t be captured by terms such as ‘development’ or ‘underdevelopment’, or by ‘lazy categories of permanence and change’ which rely on a simplistic understanding of time. Africa didn’t need to ‘catch up’ with Western modernity. For Mbembe, decolonisation didn’t simply mean the passage from one stage (colonialism) to the next (postcolonialism). None of these countries was truly ‘postcolonial’, after all, since each relied on forms of power – and financial relationships – inherited from the coloniser. The time of the postcolony is ‘an interlocking of presents, pasts and futures that retain their depths of other presents, pasts and futures, each age bearing, altering and maintaining the previous ones’. The postcolony combines many different temporalities, each with its own influence on the modern African subject.

De la postcolonie’s pessimistic portrayal of postcolonial politics was shaped by Mbembe’s experience of the failed nationalist struggle in Cameroon as well as the autocratic regime that emerged in its wake. He wanted to do away with grand narratives of social change – especially Marxism and dependency theory – that prophesied a revolution which failed to materialise or reduced African subjects to passive victims of the capitalist world system. ‘If the book deliberately avoids the rhetoric of redemption,’ he explained to his critics, ‘it equally distances itself from the nihilism of despair and surrender.’ Consciousness wasn’t, for him, merely a reflection of material conditions, and politics couldn’t be reduced – as it so often was in postcolonial studies – to questions of ‘representation’. The symbolic – in the Lacanian sense, the register that structures the unconscious and allows us to recognise ourselves as subjects – was as important as the real.

This attempt to uncover the psychic life of subjection and domination, or what Mbembe calls the commandement (which has both religious and political connotations), has precedents in the work of Frantz Fanon and others. Mbembe wanted to show that subjection – the dominant mode of power in colonial regimes – had transformed into something more ambiguous in the postcolony. The postcolonial state inherited the colony’s tendency to arbitrary violence and impunity, but did away with the need for productivity. The same bodies that had once been required to labour were now used ‘to entertain the powerful in ceremonies and official parades’. In Cameroon, spectacular displays of state power were introduced under President Ahidjo, who relied on mass arrests, torture and extrajudicial killings to remain in power. Politics was replaced by an endless series of spectacles: public holidays, sports events, concerts – bread and circuses for the 20th century. These practices were inherited and refined by Cameroon’s second president, Paul Biya, who came to power in 1982 and continues to rule today. Biya encouraged Cameroonians to hang his portrait in their homes, churches and places of work and to wear clothes bearing the party logo.

Mbembe noticed that postcolonial politics shared an aesthetic with Bakhtin’s carnivalesque – the grotesque and obscene – but to different effect. ‘The posts and palaces and public places have been filled with buffoons, fools and clowns at various levels, offering a variety of services,’ he writes in De la postcolonie. ‘Their function is to preach before the fetish the fiction of its perfection.’ In Bakhtin, the people’s celebration of the body (and especially its orifices and excrements) was a way to debase the ‘spiritual’ or ‘higher’ values of church and state. But in the postcolony, the mouth, the belly or the phallus became part of an ‘aesthetics of vulgarity’ shared between the people and their autocratic leader. (The autocrat is always a man. He represents ‘the unconditional subordination of women to the principle of male pleasure’, which is inscribed in the social fabric of the postcolony.) The carnivalesque was no longer an escape from authority, but the mode of official parades or ceremonies, where the public gathered to enjoy themselves and affirm the power of the state.

There are counterexamples to this trend. In Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcolonialism (2020), Rahul Rao cites the Ugandan academic and activist Stella Nyanzi as an example of the way participation in the ‘aesthetics of vulgarity’ can undermine the power of the autocrat. Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, has been in power for almost four decades and his period in office has been marked by widespread repression of opposition activists. (He plays up his past as a guerrilla fighter in the Ugandan Bush War to bolster his masculinist image.) Since the introduction of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in 2009, Ugandan public discourse has been rife with graphic descriptions of queer sex. Nyanzi’s vulgar (and very funny) interventions on social media – including ‘references to menstrual blood, shit, masturbation, farting, fucking and ejaculating’, as well as the president’s ‘buttocks’ and his mother’s ‘cunt’ – turn this discourse on its head, exposing the vulgarity of the state by turning its queerphobic vocabulary against it. In Mbembe’s vision of postcolonial power, the shared ‘aesthetics of vulgarity’ serves to prevent any social upheaval or revolutionary rupture. But Nyanzi’s vulgarity seems to have rattled Museveni. In 2017, she was arrested and charged with ‘cyber harassment’. She now lives in exile in Germany.

Fanon described the colonial subject as having no share in the system and so nothing to lose: revolution wasn’t a choice but an act of necessity and refusal. This is the opposite of the power relations described in De la postcolonie. For Mbembe, the postcolonial commandement is a relationship of ‘mutual corruption and conviviality’, with power relations reinforced by common participation in a shared symbolic order. The public laugh at their leader, but they also hope one day to sit at his table, or at least to ‘eat from his hands’. Mbembe’s use of ‘eating’ as a metaphor for postcolonial politics was inspired by the work of the political scientist Jean-François Bayart, who used the Cameroonian phrase ‘the politics of the belly’ to show that the usual interpretive categories aren’t easily applied to the study of postcolonial African states. They fail, for example, to understand that social struggles for hegemony in postcolonial Africa were shaped by a ‘rush for spoils’ in which both rich and poor participated, whether directly or indirectly.

Bayart argued that in the early decades of the postcolonial era African regimes were able to maintain public order and gain social acceptance by distributing spoils according to political loyalty. But with the coming of austerity and mass privatisation in the 1980s, dictated by the structural adjustment programmes enforced by international financial institutions, even this modicum of social compromise was no longer possible. Structural adjustment was an ideological project masked as an economic necessity, and it came at the expense of working people in the Global South. Poverty and inequality soared. And with less to distribute, African governments lost their only real source of legitimacy. By the late 1990s, Mbembe writes, state capacity in Africa was so weak that governments were unable to ‘determine the social compromises vital not only to any significant shift to a market economy, as envisaged by international financial agencies, but also to the very production of public order’.

In the two decades since De la postcolonie was published, little seems to have changed. As the economist Peter Lawrence wrote in 2023, the ‘combination of rising indebtedness and a slowdown in global growth … has seen the return of structural adjustment programmes’. The language of free trade and privatisation has lost any appeal it once had. There has been widespread anger among young people across Africa over the inability or unwillingness of many states to provide even the most basic public goods while politicians are (often illicitly) enriching themselves. The demonstrations led by young people last summer against corruption and ‘bad governance’ in Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria gave a sense of the changing mood.

Frustrated​ with France’s refusal to engage with postcolonial thought, Mbembe left for the US shortly after finishing his doctorate. In France, he later complained, ‘postcolonial theory was not the object of informed critique nor of any debate worthy of the name.’ French theory had its roots in the colonial project, but French intellectuals rarely reflected on their complicity with colonialism or acknowledged its influence on their work. Questions of race or racial discrimination featured still less: ‘Except for in Sartre, de Beauvoir and a few scraps of Derrida, neither of the two great movements to deconstruct race in the 20th century – the civil rights movement in the United States and the global struggle to end apartheid – left any salient marks on the leading lights of French thought.’ Black leftist writers such as Césaire were accepted by ignoring their anticolonial past. And later francophone intellectuals who wrote about colonialism and race – Maryse Condé, V.Y. Mudimbe or Édouard Glissant – didn’t get the recognition they deserved. Like Mbembe, they moved to America, where there was a more open and enthusiastic audience for their ideas.

In 1996, however, Mbembe was appointed director of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa in Dakar, where he remained until 2000. From there, he moved to Wits University in Johannesburg, where he is now a research professor at the Institute for Social and Economic Research. Since moving to South Africa, Mbembe’s work has taken a global or even planetary turn, but the starting point is always Africa. The reversal of Western-centrism is, of course, deliberate. In colonial discourse, the African represented everything that was ‘unmodern’. This notion persisted after decolonisation and in many ways shapes our self-understanding. ‘In several respects,’ Mbembe writes, ‘Africa still constitutes the metaphor through which the West represents the origin of its own norms, develops a self-image and integrates this image into the set of signifiers asserting what it supposes to be its identity.’ But what if we considered Africans as the modern subject par excellence? And what if ‘Africa’ didn’t stand for a backward past but a new modernity in the making?

Johannesburg became Mbembe’s model for ‘Afropolitanism’, an identity that emphasised the ‘entanglement of the modern and the African’. As Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall, his wife and frequent collaborator, explain in Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (2008), African cities are too often characterised as a ‘failed or incomplete example of something else’. Johannesburg wasn’t in the process of transforming itself to meet some arbitrary ideal of urban development. Like other African megacities, it had to be understood on its own terms. Its residents had adapted and reimagined cultural forms imported from elsewhere and created their own, with their own polyglot urban slang and hybrid genres of music. ‘Their way of inhabiting the world,’ Mbembe wrote in Sortir de la grande nuit: Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée (2010), ‘has always taken place under the sign of cultural métissage.’ Because this urban identity seemed to reflect an ethics of cosmopolitanism, Mbembe made Johannesburg central to his vision for a new African subjectivity. Afropolitanism pointed to an African future that broke with the traumas of the past and fulfilled the Fanonian promise of self-invention.

If Afropolitanism seems removed from reality – African migrants are often targets of xenophobic violence in Johannesburg as in other South African cities, and the country is far from overcoming the legacies of apartheid – this was precisely the point. The failure of Desmond Tutu’s ‘rainbow nation’ of united races led Mbembe to rethink African identity outside racial terms. Inspired by Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia (2004), Mbembe’s Afropolitanism strives to find a way of living together in a heterogeneous world. Like Gilroy, he wants to break the hold that ideas of race and racial difference still have on society and, as Gilroy puts it, to ‘imagine or invent political cultures capable of ending racism’. Both see glimpses of such cultures in the everyday life of urban spaces, where the essentialisms of race, ethnicity and nation are subverted. However, unlike Gilroy, whose focus is on the legacies of colonialism in post-imperial Britain, Mbembe sees Africa as the ‘planetary laboratory’ for the future. ‘The construction of spheres of horizontality must replace the quest for a centre,’ he writes: the aim is to encourage an ‘ethics of mutuality’ not only among Black people but among all of humanity.

The term Afropolitanism is seductive. Coined by the writer and photographer Taiye Selasi in the mid-2000s, it appealed to an African middle class and became the official aesthetic of the ‘Africa rising’ narrative championed by Western media. But critics including Emma Dabiri and Binyavanga Wainaina have criticised its ‘rapacious consumerism’ (Dabiri) and commodified view of cultural hybridity (Wainaina). In their desire to be seen not as victims but as active participants in globalisation, Afropolitans had mistaken assimilation for resistance. Worse still, because of their status as African ‘voices’ who speak for the continent in Western media, Afropolitans had done precisely the opposite of what they intended: they essentialised African identity. Mbembe refuses the essentialism of middle-class Afropolitanism but likes its non-parochial ethos. He has said that his focus on the ‘worldliness’ of African identities reflects his own experiences of transnational mobility and movement: he is a proud ‘citizen of nowhere’. But to claim that he is writing from ‘nowhere’ obscures Mbembe’s position as a professor at an elite South African university, something that shapes how, and how widely, his work is read in Africa and the Global North. And the tension between, on the one hand, his desire to overcome the essentialisation of Africa, and on the other the power that he derives from it – as a well-travelled, cosmopolitan intellectual – is never fully resolved.

After the #FeesMustFall protests, which spread across South African campuses in 2015, Mbembe said that he often returned to a 1969 debate between Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno to reflect on the way intellectuals might ‘bear witness to the main events of [our] time’. As public discontent with post-apartheid South Africa spilled over from the townships into the universities, some faculty were shocked by the students’ radical tactics. #FeesMustFall protesters occupied buildings and set university libraries on fire. Mbembe responded by arguing that ‘violence as such, whether that of institutions or that of those who contest the policies of the institutions, is never a solution’ and ‘almost always denotes a failure of the moral imagination’. (He was also deeply suspicious of #FeesMustFall’s identity as a self-consciously Black movement, which treated white South Africans as ‘settlers’ not fellow citizens.) Like Adorno, he felt the students’ methods were crude and short-sighted. Their ‘impossible demands’ – free education – turned ‘politics into a zero-sum game, a deadly fight in a tunnel that will only end with the capitulation and the humiliation of one of the protagonists’. (For Mbembe, an ‘impossible demand is … wilfully made to the wrong authority or institution, in the full knowledge that the latter will never be able to satisfy it, and therefore the conflict will never end’.) Because the struggle within and against the university is a ‘surrogate fight’ – the real struggle is against the South African state, the only authority capable of delivering free education – the student protests could never achieve their aims, no matter how radical or disruptive the methods. But while dismissing the politics of ‘brutal practicism’, Mbembe had little to say about how good-faith negotiations would be possible in a situation where power relations between students and the university (or the state) were so unequal.

Mbembe’s theory of Afropolitanism grew out of his disdain for ‘cultural authenticity’. In the second half of the 20th century, some African philosophers had embraced what Paulin Hountondji called ‘ethnophilosophy’. Léopold Sédar Senghor’s ‘négritude’, which subverted the claim that Africans lacked reason by embracing the intuitive nature of ‘traditional’ African cultures as well as the ‘Indigenous’ philosophical systems described by Alexis Kagame or John S. Mbiti, was one example. As Senghor put it in 1939, ‘emotion is Negro, just as reason is Hellenic.’ (Souleymane Bachir Diagne has argued that this quote, from Senghor’s essay ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’, is widely misunderstood, and refers not to philosophy but to the practice of sculpture.) Ethnophilosophy’s most controversial proponent was the Belgian missionary Placide Tempels, whose La Philosophie bantoue (1945) claimed that Bantu-speaking peoples had a unique worldview which could be discerned in their customs, traditions and institutions. Tempels wanted to counter Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s racist view of the ‘primitive (African) mind’, which saw Africans as essentially ‘pre-logical’. In fact, he argued, the Bantu conception of the universe was a systematic philosophy, which should be understood on its own terms. The implications of Tempels’s argument were revolutionary. By showing that there was such a thing as ‘Bantu philosophy’, he challenged Hegel’s claim that Africans stood outside history, or didn’t deserve to be free because they lacked the capacity for reason.

Senghor celebrated La Philosophie bantoue as ‘a book everyone should have in their library’. But, as Césaire and other critics were quick to point out, Tempels had written a colonial manual. Like countless ethnographers before him, he treated the Baluba – a Bantu ethnolinguistic group – as an object of study not as an interlocutor. The book wasn’t addressed to Africans but to Europeans, and its aim, Césaire concluded, was to explain to Europeans how Bantu-speaking people thought, so that they could more effectively colonise or evangelise them by redescribing domination in terms of ‘Indigenous’ forms of understanding. As ‘Bantu philosophy’ became increasingly popular among African intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of thinkers engaged with Césaire’s critique. For Hountondji and the Cameroonian philosopher Marcien Towa, ethnophilosophy was designed to appeal to Western readers, since it confirmed what the West thought African philosophy should be. There was no such thing as a ‘collective’ African philosophy, they pointed out, only individual ethnophilosophers who imposed their views on entire societies. Hountondji and Towa rejected the fiction of a ‘traditional’ African identity which set them apart from modern subjects, and sought to challenge the depiction of Africans as ‘the paradigmatic subject of absolute difference’.

Mbembe’s critique of essentialism is grounded in these debates. It is no surprise, then, that he has distanced himself from ‘decolonial’ scholars, such as the Argentine linguist Walter Mignolo, for whom the path to decolonisation lies in a return to ‘Indigenous’ knowledge systems. As the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has explained, Mignolo ‘tends to represent Indigenous thought systems, movements and practices as exemplars of a pristine and desirable model for decolonial thinking and European religious ones as alien and oppressive’. Here, modernity is presented as synonymous with the Western model of civilisation, which has destroyed not only Indigenous knowledges but entire ways of life. The problem, for Mbembe, isn’t modernity itself but the ways in which race, power and technology are understood to exclude Black people from it: one aspect of what he calls ‘Black reason’. We have to envision a politics of the future that doesn’t lapse into Eurocentric modernity or nativism. The ‘Afropolitan’ comes to replace the African nationalist or the assimilated African as the paradigmatic subject of Africa’s coming modernity.

While Hountondji and Towa’s universalism is based on a Marxist and anticolonial politics, Mbembe’s critique of the idea that Africans are in any way ‘other’ is inspired more by the Black theology of Christian thinkers such as the American minister and missionary Alexander Crummell and the Cameroonian philosopher Fabien Eboussi Boulaga (who was a sharp critic of Tempels). As Mbembe writes in Critique de la raison nègre (2013), Crummell and Boulaga represent a future-oriented way of thinking about liberation that is both ‘political and existential’. Crummell made a distinction between ‘the memory of slavery and permanent reference to a history of misery and degradation’. Boulaga similarly argued that certain forms of difference ‘represent a negative paradigm … that opens the door to the forces of dehumanisation’. He called instead for the creation of a ‘vigilant memory’ that moved beyond the alienation of slavery and colonisation. The issue wasn’t difference itself, but the definition of Black or African subjectivity in relation to a negative and traumatic moment. ‘Positive difference,’ Mbembe writes, ‘is an opening onto the future. It points not to an apologia but to the recognition of what each person, as a human, contributes to the work of the constitution of the world.’

Critique de la raison nègre argues that we are currently experiencing the universalisation of the Black condition, a process Mbembe describes as the ‘becoming Black of the world’. Since the second half of the 15th century, with the rise of the plantation and later the colony, a negative form of planetary consciousness has emerged, and systems of oppression and control that were once reserved for enslaved people or colonial subjects have now come to define the lives of people across the Global South. As with most of Mbembe’s concepts, ‘Black reason’ remains indeterminate. On one level, it describes the modern system of knowledge which, through the logic of race, has placed Black people either outside, or uneasily within, the universal categories of humanity. At the same time, it is also ‘a model of extraction and depredation’, ‘a paradigm of subjection’ and ‘a psycho-oneiric complex’. To understand ‘what race does’, Mbembe traces the emergence of Black reason through the Atlantic slave trade, which marked Black people as modern subjects, but ‘incomplete’ ones. ‘The transnationalisation of the Black condition was therefore a constitutive moment for modernity, with the Atlantic serving as its incubator,’ he writes. He acknowledges that ‘not all Blacks are Africans, and not all Africans are Blacks.’ But as these two images were fused together in the modern imaginary, they came to signify ‘difference in its raw manifestation’. Mbembe has set himself the task of deconstructing this fiction.

The book asks a good deal of its readers. Mbembe moves confidently (and sometimes rather chaotically) from Christian theology to historical studies of slavery in the American South to reflections on the political thought of Fanon or Nelson Mandela, via copious citations of 19th and 20th-century European literature and philosophy. ‘What began on the surface,’ he writes, ‘became stratified, transformed into a framework and over time a calcified shell – a second ontology – and a canker, a living wound that eats at, devours and destroys its victim.’ This doesn’t mean that Black people should create a shared ontology based on their common exclusion from humanity. As the South African scholar Nasrin Olla explains, seeing Blackness ‘as apart from humanity-in-general or the name for a socially dead population is to be blinded by the logic of Black reason, which we must attempt to move beyond’. Instead, Mbembe wants to revive Blackness – a term he describes as belonging ‘to another era, that of early capitalism’ – in order to question its supposed unity. There is, for him, no shared Blackness, only a ‘Black identity in the process of becoming’, which recognises the differences within Blackness.

Why had Black people failed to overcome ‘race’ despite centuries of struggle against racism? Mbembe argues that the discourses Black people developed to challenge their supposed inferiority emerged in response to, and from within, Black reason. Black people themselves played an important role in upholding Black reason – and, most important, the fiction of race. In the early 20th century, Black activists used the language of négritude or Pan-Africanism, which sought to reclaim the idea of cultural difference and use it against Europe. These discourses used race as the foundation for their ‘imagined culture’ or ‘imagined politics’: their conceptions of the nation, of political community and of solidarity relied on it. African nationalists after the Second World War incorporated race and other categories of 19th-century anthropology (the belief in progress, for example) into their vision of a postcolonial future. These discourses, and the political movements they spawned, always stopped short of truly ‘refashioning’ the African subject precisely because they were unable to think about African subjectivity beyond the boundaries set by colonialism. ‘Even when the discourse of Afro-radicalism or Afro-nationalism pretends to consider African-life-for-itself, its obscure object is always … the great Other, the West,’ Mbembe complains. Because the political projects that emerged out of these discourses – anticolonial nationalism, African socialism, Pan-Africanism – failed to break with this history, they became stale and institutionalised and, finally, collapsed.

As a student​ , Mbembe travelled across the African continent and visited, among other places, Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania. Like Cairo, Accra or Algiers, Dar es Salaam had been an intellectual and political capital of African liberation in the 1960s and 1970s. Here, exiled anticolonial activists from Mozambique (Eduardo Mondlane) and South Africa (Ruth First) crossed paths with radical intellectuals – Walter Rodney, Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi and John Saul – whose research was shaped by the intense debates about African socialism, Third Worldism and underdevelopment that were taking place in Dar es Salaam at the time. Black activists and writers from America found their way there too: Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and Gwendolyn Brooks all visited the university in those years. These debates were all the more urgent because Tanzania was actively trying to build a socialist state. Students and intellectuals often challenged Nyerere’s policies, questioned his commitment to socialism and reacted against increasing government repression. Their proposals went beyond what Nyerere’s ujamaa (‘fraternity’) socialism had to offer and were never fully incorporated in the project. But at least Nyerere and his party paid attention.

Issa Shivji, who was a student in Dar es Salaam at the time, remembers it as ‘the age of liberation and revolution’, when imperialism seemed to be on the retreat. But by the 1980s neoliberalism was sweeping away the remnants of radicalism, and the language of ‘development studies’ and NGOs replaced anti-imperialism in public discourse and on university campuses. Tanzania’s decline prompted Mbembe to re-evaluate the merits of African socialism. He became a critic not only of Nyerere’s ujamaa socialism but of the intellectual traditions that came out of Dar es Salaam in those years. While much of the criticism of Nyerere’s policies emerged from within the tradition of national liberation, Mbembe dismissed ‘Africanness’, which had provided the discursive basis for Nyerere’s socialism, as ‘nativism’. Theories of development and underdevelopment, like Wallerstein’s world-systems theory or Amin’s dependency theory, were based on a linear conception of time that failed to account for the way people experienced their lives and the legacies of the past. African socialism was a synthesis of nativism and Marxism, trapping African subjectivity between the desire to identify with essentialist ideas of ‘tradition’ and a full embrace of modernity. Neither, for Mbembe, offered a viable path forward, as the example of Tanzania showed.

Critique de la raison nègre dismisses a wide range of political and intellectual traditions that allowed Black people to articulate their struggle against racial capitalism and assert their right to self-determination. Mbembe’s sweeping claims about these discourses – which are often in conflict with one another over identity and race – prevent us from appreciating their complexities and contradictions. Not all anticolonial activists were ‘nativists’, as Mbembe often seems to suggest. Lusophone activists such as Amílcar Cabral and Mário Pinto de Andrade were attracted to négritude as students, but later abandoned it on account of its lack of radicalism and its essentialist depiction of race. Eduardo Mondlane, who would become the first president of the Mozambican Liberation Front, treated race as a social category, which helped him better understand the way racial hierarchies had emerged both in America and in colonial Mozambique. It seems disingenuous to say that Mondlane, or the national liberation movement he helped found, were only capable of reproducing the categories of 19th and 20th-century anthropology instead of undoing them. Could at least some of the African anticolonial archive be seen as attempting to envision a world where whiteness was no longer a prerequisite for being human – that is, a world beyond ‘race’?

Mbembe is more interested in the symbolic power of Black reason than the social reality of ‘race’. He often starts with scenes drawn from history or sociology, but his analysis extends far beyond these disciplines. He has described Critique de la raison nègre as ‘an attempt at confronting the fact of African-American history and [its] archive from a continental perspective’. This archive, for Mbembe, centres on the questions of what it means to be human and whether Black people can ever fully overcome their dehumanisation. He takes it for granted that a unitary and coherent idea of ‘humanity’ exists. (Mbembe rarely interrogates such assumptions. As Ayça Çubukçu noted in a review of the revised and expanded English translation of Sortir de la grande nuit in 2021, ‘“humanity itself” is not an apolitical fact but a contested idea and ideal’ whose use in ‘struggles for justice, including racial justice, needs careful examination’.) And he wants to overcome ‘race’ precisely because it is a form of difference, which has divided humanity into those who reap the benefits of modernity and those who suffer under Black reason. We can think of Mbembe as part of a long tradition of Black thinkers, including Césaire, Fanon, Senghor, Glissant, Gilroy and Sylvia Wynter, who, in his own words, ‘point up the deadlocks of the Western discourse on “man” with the aim of amending it’. For Mbembe, the becoming-Black-of-the-world does not describe a dystopian future where all of humanity is subjected to Black reason. Rather, it asks how Black people have been able to survive their dehumanisation, and what the creative forms of survival they have developed can tell us about how we might abolish Black reason and the racial logics it perpetuates.

In​ Brutalism, first published in French in 2020, Mbembe redescribes his political and philosophical project in the context of neoliberal capitalism. Readers who haven’t encountered him before will find the book confusing and disorienting: this is Mbembe at his most self-indulgent. The writing is often enigmatic and there are so many layered metaphors – ‘fracturing’, ‘fissuring’, ‘exhaustion’, ‘depletion’ – that Brutalism might seem to be doing theory for theory’s sake. (The book also feels rushed: passages from earlier books are repeated almost verbatim.) Still, despite its abstract prose, Mbembe reveals a deep concern with the humanitarian and ecological disasters capitalism has unleashed. The concept that gives the book its title relies on an analogy between architecture and politics. Both ‘concern the orderly arranging of materials and bodies’; brutalism, in Mbembe’s sense, describes the large-scale ‘demolition and production of stocks of darkness, in addition to all sorts of waste [and] leftovers’. (Brutalist architecture relies on the mass production of concrete, a major contributor to climate change.) Like the raw and masculine aesthetic of the architectural style, political and metaphysical brutalism reduces everything to matter. Brutalism in the 21st century is a product of Western technical reason: it’s the way ‘the wretched of the earth’ experience Black reason in the neoliberal age.

Mbembe argues that brutalism is part of a global process of spatial reorganisation, which began with the age of discovery and was followed by the industrial revolution and the colonisation of Africa. Innovations in computing and finance have led to an ever more connected world, where the mobility of data and capital contrasts with the rigidity of national borders. Poor and migrant populations are transformed into ‘border-bodies’, forced by poverty, war or environmental catastrophe to migrate across the globe. Such ‘surplus populations’ are neither needed nor wanted by the Global North; they are part of capitalism’s waste, which is evacuated ‘from the ordinary spaces of life’. The ‘extreme’ case of racialised and unwaged surplus populations – who are ‘unable to be exploited at all’ and inhabit peripheral spaces such as refugee camps, detention centres, slums or prisons – tells us something about our common future.

The historian Michael Denning has used the term ‘wageless life’ to describe the situation of the dispossessed global poor who exist on the margins of formal, waged labour, those who are willing to sell their labour-power but can’t always find a willing buyer. The category of the ‘wageless’ can include ‘microworkers’ in refugee camps, who are not exploited as wage labourers but are nonetheless exploited by capital. ‘Many peoples of this earth have already known the reality of this emergency, fragility and vulnerability,’ Mbembe writes. His warning is that much of humanity will be reduced to the status of surplus population, as capitalism ceases to need us as ‘exploitable’ subjects.

Neoliberalism, Mbembe argues, initiated an unprecedented transformation of human nature. As we become ever more closely fused with digital technologies – smartphones, social media, AI chatbots or augmented reality gaming – a new animism is emerging, which has a precedent in the animisms of precolonial Africa. Animist metaphysics endows all things with a spirit or soul. Under European colonialism, animism was considered a primitive worldview that would be superseded once Africans entered into modernity. But in the era of neoliberalism, Western technical reason and animism have become fused. ‘Brutalism is based on the deep conviction that the distinction between the living and machines no longer exists,’ Mbembe writes. (This merging of humans and technology can also have liberating effects. Here, the phallus – and masculinity in general – is ‘symbolically deprived of its sovereignty’ as our desire moves ‘steadily in the direction of connected objects, vibrators, ersatz humans and other anthropomorphic figures’.) When we project human-like properties onto our electronic devices, the human and the machine begin to resemble each other in ways not unlike the animism theorised by 19th-century anthropologists. As Mbembe puts it: ‘Africa was digital before the digital.’

The desire, or rather the need, to escape the limiting power of ‘identity’ explains Mbembe’s turn towards the planetary. In an interview in 2022, he described planetary thought as a way of seeing the world ‘in its multiplicity, in its animate and inanimate forms, as it undergoes its endless process of transformation’. For Mbembe, the planetary has no teleology. There will never be a moment when everything in the universe aligns and unifies, but only an ‘endless process of transformation’. Following Dipesh Chakrabarty, another postcolonial scholar who has pivoted towards the planetary, Mbembe sees the global perspective as limited and humancentric. The planetary perspective, by contrast, allows us to give less importance to humanity – or, more specifically, the figure of ‘the human’ – in our thinking about history and politics. As Chakrabarty explains, the planetary ‘is a history to which humans belong, but it is not their history’. ‘More than at any other time in our brief history on Earth,’ Mbembe said, ‘we are experiencing a clash of temporalities’ – geological time, historical time, experiential time. As these temporalities become entangled, we can no longer rely on our linear conception of time to offer diagnoses or solutions to contemporary crises. It’s not entirely clear how Mbembe’s thinking here differs from that of Chakrabarty or the posthumanist feminist Donna Haraway, who has also questioned the categories of human, animal and technological, and emphasised the planetary scale of ‘extraction’. Mbembe is a master synthesiser: he is interesting precisely because he arranges familiar information in new and provocative ways. But in Brutalism, this method is more frustrating than insightful. There are so many different ideas and references that it’s hard to discern a coherent vision.

Mbembe has been criticised for refusing to offer a practical path to resistance. But for him this would be merely an ‘attempt to rehabilitate one of the master-tropes of late 20th-century social theory’. So where does this leave us? The conclusions Mbembe draws from his survey of modernity in Brutalism are infuriatingly simple. ‘The truth is that Europe has taken things from us that it can never give back. We will learn to live with this loss. Europe, for its part, will have to bear responsibility for its actions, this shadowy part of our common history that it seeks to get rid of.’ Mbembe knows all too well that Europe – and the Global North in general – continues to extract resources, especially raw materials, from Africa. And without revolutionary rupture or military coups (or other forms of resistance that go beyond diplomacy), this looting is unlikely to end. I was astonished by the extent to which Mbembe’s political and philosophical project relies on the goodwill of the West. How can we speak of a revised multilateralism when the most powerful nations refuse to adhere to even the most basic principles of international law?

In 2021, leftist activists and scholars accused Mbembe of furthering French neocolonialism when he accepted Macron’s invitation to help plan an upcoming France-Africa summit. Wasn’t Mbembe, a sharp critic of France’s neocolonial policies in Africa, supposed to be on the side of the anti-imperialists? That was the view of Roger Esso-Evina, who tried to make sense of Mbembe’s new role as Macron’s ‘ambassador for Africa policy’. The aim of the first summit, held in Montpellier in October 2021, was to give young Africans an opportunity to address Macron directly and to redefine the relationship between Africa and France. Mbembe travelled the continent, conducted interviews and compiled a report describing the issues that were to be raised at the summit; twelve young people were selected to lead the plenary session. But to Esso-Evina (and many other critics) the summit looked more like a publicity stunt aimed at maintaining French influence by restoring the country’s image among young Africans and voters of African descent in France. (The project’s close ties to the French Development Agency raised further questions.) Was Mbembe’s involvement, as Esso-Evina has suggested, ‘more about defending so-called liberal democracies’ and their imperialist interests than ‘promoting democracy as an ideal’?

Reading Mbembe, I too struggled to reconcile his theoretical writings with his political commentary and his diplomatic role. Despite his reputation as a ‘radical’ intellectual and critical theorist, Mbembe is more Habermas than Lenin: for him, the norms and institutions of liberal democracy are to be valued and preserved. Deliberation, not force, must be our guiding principle if we want to reimagine democracy in Africa. Because colonial violence was responsible for the disenchantment of politics, any re-enchantment can’t be based on the principle of oppositional violence by the oppressed. Here, Mbembe’s relationship with Fanon comes into closer view. He has said that his thinking developed ‘with and against Fanon’: with Fanon, in the sense that he agrees with Fanon’s call for a new universal humanism, and against Fanon, in that he doesn’t believe that to become a subject the colonised must kill the coloniser. Death – even in a rhetorical or metaphorical sense – should not be a necessary condition for becoming human. His own politics, he says, is a ‘politics of life’.

So what does Mbembe make of the revival of anti-imperialism in Africa? In the Sahel, the recent cycle of military coups was in part a response to rising anger at neocolonialism and the expression of a desire to reclaim sovereignty. France has maintained control over its former African colonies through a mix of economic arrangements and political and military interventions. Before the coups, Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali had done the EU’s bidding as part of the G5 Sahel project alongside Mauritania and Chad. The scheme was set up to help the Sahel states deal with Islamic insurgencies on their peripheries and foster development co-operation with EU countries. But it was also a way of establishing the EU’s border in Africa, designed to curb ‘irregular’ migration to Europe. The EU’s ‘security-migration-development nexus’ reinforced Europe’s border regime while allowing European companies access to the region’s abundant natural resources – gold, diamonds, bauxite, zinc, copper and uranium. Citing the G5 Sahel Joint Force’s failure to make the region any safer, and its prioritisation of ‘foreign’ (French) interests, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger withdrew from the pact. Chad, too, has ended its defence agreement with France, stating that it wishes to ‘assert its sovereignty and redefine its strategic partnerships according to national priorities’.

Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso have since left the French-aligned Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) and formed the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). In Niamey, Bamako and Ouagadougou there is widespread support for the military juntas, especially among the young. Since taking power, AES leaders – including Burkina Faso’s interim president, Ibrahim Traoré, who has modelled himself on Thomas Sankara – have become beacons of Pan-African resistance. And France’s efforts to destabilise these new regimes by mobilising Ecowas to impose sanctions or threaten invasion have come to nothing. Removing French and US troops or denying mining concessions to multinationals are more than just symbolic gestures: they are symptomatic of a new anti-imperialist mood that is spreading across the continent. This mood is by no means limited to the countries Western policymakers have called ‘the coup belt’: in Senegal, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, a protégé of the popular anti-establishment firebrand Ousmane Sonko, has called for a ‘left-wing Pan-Africanism’ and demanded that France close its military bases. Even Alassane Ouattara, the president of Côte d’Ivoire, who came to power with the help of France and has been a reliable ally, celebrated the withdrawal of French troops. (He failed to mention that a 1961 military agreement, which gives France the option to carry out military training and interventions, was never terminated.) Ouattara’s is an ‘anti-imperialism’ of convenience: with an election on the way, it would be unwise to ignore the rising anger against France.

Despite their decades-long presence, EU and UN peacekeeping forces were unable to bring stability to the Sahel. This may be why some countries in Francophone West and Central Africa have embraced mercenaries, including the Russian-backed Wagner Group (now restructured in the region as the Africa Corps). The Wagner Group is only one of the countless ‘security’ firms which have been deployed to protect extractive projects or provide other services across the continent. ‘Many African states can no longer claim to hold a monopoly on violence or on the means of coercion within their territory,’ Mbembe writes in Politiques de l’inimitié. Irregular armies composed of mercenaries, privateers and non-professional soldiers thrive in areas where state capacity is weak. Parts of the Sahel and northern Mozambique have been transformed into what Rahmane Idrissa describes as ‘double peripheries’. With the increasing concentration of the state in capitals and cities, communities further removed from economic and political power have developed a psychological distance from the state, which itself exists on the periphery of the capitalist world system. In these double peripheries, irregular armies clash with ‘Islamic insurgencies’, often dominated by young people who have been abandoned by the state and lack prospects for a better future.

Some scholars​ celebrated the return of Pan-Africanism, but Mbembe was less enthusiastic. Writing in Le Grand Continent in September 2023, he complained that the juntas represented a form of ‘neo-sovereigntism’, which rejects the idea of liberal democracy and calls into question its usefulness in the African context. Beneath the rhetoric of self-reliance, Mbembe saw the end of a cycle of democratisation and the return to a darker period of postcolonial history, when force and brutality were the only means of exercising power. The Sahelian juntas, Mbembe writes, ‘operate by identifying a scapegoat that they erect as an absolute enemy against which everything is permitted’. He continues: ‘Even if it means replacing them with Russia or China, neo-sovereigntists believe that it is by pushing out the old colonial powers, starting with France, that Africa will complete its emancipation.’ Mbembe concludes that African countries now face a zero-sum choice: neo-sovereigntism or democracy. For a philosopher and public intellectual so intent on deconstructing binaries, this seems too simple. Yes, the military regimes that have emerged across the Sahel represent a top-down process of social change, and their claim to sovereignty is, of course, complicated by the shift towards Russia as a geopolitical ally and their reliance on China as a trade partner. But the ‘democratic’ alternative, which implies the continued domination by France and the francophile elites it has recruited to its cause, is for many less desirable still.

Mbembe’s warning that neo-sovereigntism could lead to the revival of an anticolonialism that offers political but not social revolution should be taken seriously. We might be concerned, for example, about the emphasis on heteropatriarchy as the foundation of the postcolonial state. As the Nigerian critic K.J. Abudu has pointed out, this affects not only women, but queer people too, whose presence is considered contrary to public morality and ‘traditional’ or ‘national’ culture. Here, Mbembe’s critique of the postcolonial state is invaluable. The success of the new ‘Pan-African’ governments will depend on their ability to maintain popular support – by addressing, for example, the problems of their most marginalised citizens. But Mbembe has already made up his mind. For him, neo-sovereigntism has little to do with Pan-Africanism. In fact, it represents its opposite: a retreat into a limited and parochial vision of the world. Mbembe insists that France still has a role to play in the reconstruction of democracy in Africa if it can rid itself of colonial attitudes and ‘illusions of greatness’ (this is wishful thinking). But why should France, whose actions have directly contributed to the political crisis in the Sahel, be allowed to shape, or influence, African institutions and policy?

Mbembe is the pessimist’s optimist: he delivers a devastating analysis of the contemporary moment while never losing sight of the possibility for a better future. This explains his disdain for actually existing political movements that strive for a different – and better – postcolonial future but fail to live up to his lofty standards. ‘When past and present seem unpromising as vehicles for liberation, it can be tempting to turn towards the future,’ Rao writes in Out of Time. ‘Yet the future is not an empty slate, easily amenable to the inscription of our deepest desires.’ Mbembe longs for a non-violent or even non-confrontational way of addressing the injustices caused by the ‘colonial relation’. And he admires anticolonial activists who believed in the power of diplomacy, including Um Nyobè and Nelson Mandela. Arjun Appadurai has pointed out that Mbembe’s prose ‘is suffused with the vocabulary of repentance, sacrifice, redemption and renewal’. This isn’t simply because of his Catholic background; Mbembe’s entire politics is based on a desire to learn from the ‘colonial encounter’. France committed colonial crimes, but these shouldn’t override the possibility of a more equal future. Um Nyobè’s plea for a negotiated solution to decolonisation was ignored; this was France’s original postcolonial sin. But Mbembe sets out to take its confession and deliver absolution. There is no sin that can’t be forgiven.