On the ‘Postcolony’, the Order of Time and Living with Ghosts

I am delighted that parliamentarian Job Amupanda recently published an insightful article titled ‘Parliament in Space and Time: The Tyranny of Description Over Explanation’ in several local newspapers.

Amupanda’s article has internal coherence around Achille Mbembe’s construct of ‘necropolitics’ – that is, a mode of ‘commandement’ or governance and the ‘economy of death’.

In his ‘On the Postcolony’, published in English in 2001, Mbembe shows how the ‘postcolony’ cultivates and maintains its own fetishes, mythologies, and vulgarities of public power.

Moreover, the ‘postcolony’ appropriates to a greater or lesser degree European narratives, habits and representations of African experiences.

SPACE AND TIME

The heavy hand of the past is indeed present in our politics and in parliament, often in the form of what decoloniality scholars call ‘a postcolonial monstrum’ or the monsters and ghosts that haunt the present, of which Jacques Derrida wrote with commendable insight.

Derrida influenced Mbembe in special ways. In my opinion, Amupanda did not excavate the metaphysics of space and time, so as to construct a more compelling argument that might explain the shortcomings of parliament.

Although Galileo and Leibniz, not to mention various sceptics and idealists, have already raised the issue of whether there is an absolute frame of reference, there is no clearer paradigm of the absolute/relative distinction than Einstein’s work on space and time.

It makes clear how the absolute requires a single standard that holds good in all places and in all times, while the relative implies a standard that is context dependent. Building on Einstein, the best grammar for thinking about the world, politics and institutions, is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but of becoming. We should think of it as made up of events. Of processes that require human agency.

The basic units in terms of which we comprehend politics or the world is not located in some specific point in space. They are in a where (like the parliament), but also in a when and a how. They are spatially, but also temporally delimited: They are events.

We understand the world and complex processes, such as politics, institutions and power relations, by studying change brought about by human agency, not by studying things.

QUESTIONS

The fundamental questions to each and every one of us are: How did we end up with politics and a parliament that seemingly fails to transform our society in a structural sense so as to enhance the humanness of all?

Further, what forms should human agency take to achieve greater liberty, justice, fairness and equality for all?

A starting point for answering how our politics, political institutions and processes ended up where they have should be historically, socially and intellectually grounded (as Amupanda attempted to do with mixed success).

What were the chief colonial, liberation and post-independent legacies that have produced, over time, the morbid paralysis and despair in our body politics and society?

Why has Swapo as a former liberation movement failed to deliver a better life to all? How do we explain that the most unequal societies in southern Africa with former liberation movements in power happen to be some of the most unequal in the world?

How does the corrosive cycle of elitism exemplified by the circulation of political elites, the invocation of what Nguvitjita Meeja calls ‘struggle capital’, a claim to the ‘right to rule’ and the shortcomings of the politics of reconciliation feed into the type of pervasive political culture in parliament and society?

The tougher ethical question is what forms human agency should take to transform politics and parliament in the country? Perhaps, it is useful to return to Mbembe, when he reminds the reader that “because history is akin to witchcraft, many feel the need to wear masks and to blame everything on the past”.

Does Amupanda wear a mask? To live in the present, for Mbembe, requires the following: “A renewal of the virtue of intellectual curiosity has to replace the current syndrome of victimisation. Bridges have to be built between a new social science and the various domains of the humanities, including philosophy, the arts, music, architecture, film and design. Such would be some of the attributes of Afro-cosmopolitanism firmly rooted in the continent, but mindful of the wealth Africa’s multiple internal and external diasporas represent.”

Such a postcolonial imagination would build on past articulations that help illuminate the way forward.

Let us remind ourselves, that as Derrida opined, “no justice seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism”.

Without that sense of justice and responsibility – which comes from connecting the dark events of history to the shortcomings of the present, as well as building upon the inspiring moments of past struggles today – how can we know who we are, where we are going, and where we are coming from?

– André du Pisani is an emeritus professor at the University of Namibia. He is a writer, photographer, and advocate for Namibian arts and heritage.

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