Achille Mbembe’s ground-breaking essay ‘Provisional notes on the postcolony’ (Reference Mbembe1992a) (hereafter ‘Provisional notes’)Footnote 1 is the most cited article published by the journal Africa. Three decades later, the article continues to influence the ways in which scholars account for the contradictions of socio-economic and political formations not only in Africa but in other postcolonial societies. In this part issue, we reconsider some of the vistas opened up by the essay in the analysis of different socio-political formations in Central, Southern and West Africa.
Rarely does a single essay attain such significant influence as to immediately command the attention and critical response of colleagues and peers, enough to redirect debates and scholarship in a discipline or subfield. And yet, this is what Achille Mbembe achieved with his article. Remarkably, according to the entry in the contributors’ biographies in that issue of the journal, this was one of Mbembe’s earliest scholarly publications in English. Mbembe had already published very important books and essays on Cameroon’s history in leading French outlets, between the mid-1980s and 1991 (see Mbembe Reference Mbembe1985a; Reference Mbembe1985b; Reference Mbembe1988; Reference Mbembe1996). Furthermore, he had also been working for a few years as an academic at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania in the USA after his doctorate in history from the leading French university, the Sorbonne, in 1988. Yet, it was primarily ‘Provisional notes’Footnote 2 that first introduced Mbembe to the English-speaking audience with which he has now attained critical acclaim and global recognition. The essay has been described by Mikael Karlström (Reference Karlström2003: 57) as ‘a canonical contribution to the literature on postcolonial African politics’, despite the fact that it ‘proved difficult to digest and build upon’. Although Karlström’s observation is correct, many scholars have attempted to build upon the innovative line of inquiry opened up by this remarkable essay. This is yet another of such efforts.
This part issue emerged from a panel at the 2018 biennial conference of the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom (ASAUK). The panel was inspired by the impact that ‘Provisional notes’ has had in the field of African studies (especially in Africanist anthropology and political studies) and beyond. To date, this article has been cited more than 1,000 times, according to the Google Scholar citation index. This makes it the most cited article published by Africa in its ninety years of existence and one of the most cited essays in African studies more generally, alongside Jean-François Bayart’s notable essay on extraversion published in African Affairs (Bayart and Ellis Reference Bayart and Ellis2000) – another tour de force on historicity and the interpretation of contemporary developments in African societies.
Working with colleagues in France in the 1980s, Mbembe benefited from and expanded the methodological commitment to go beyond a common tendency in African studies at the time to analyse state and society as opposing – even competing – social forces. Instead, specifically in his collaboration with Jean-François Bayart and Comi Toulabor, both based at the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques (FNSP) and affiliated to the Instituts d’Études Politiques (IEPs) in Paris and Bordeaux respectively, Mbembe and his colleagues built on an intellectual movement in French African studies that had already emerged in the 1970s in which a research focus on ‘la politique par le bas’ or ‘politics from below’ had become an important priority.Footnote 3
In this new orientation to the study of African politics, rather than studying state and society as opposing forces in which domination and resistance were the central points of interest, the focus shifted towards the intimacies and complicities of power as well as to the variety and forms of discourses of power beyond those produced mainly by leaders and political authorities. In the end, this orientation tended to emphasize the ‘ambiguities of the relation between the state and society’ as evinced in the ‘popular modes of political action’ around and beyond the institutional contexts of state bureaucracies (Geschiere Reference Geschiere1988: 36). Undoubtedly, Bayart and Mbembe became the most prominent figures of this intellectual shift in the 1990s, particularly among an anglophone readership. However, Comi Toulabor was no less a pioneering figure in terms of his early attempts to shift attention towards the modes of popular political culture in the elaboration of the carnivalesque and grotesque in the life of power in Africa (see, for example, Toulabor Reference Toulabor1985; Reference Toulabor1986; Reference Toulabor1994). Achille Mbembe was partly inspired by Toulabor’s early interest in the carnivalesque in African politics and he acknowledges this debt to Toulabor extensively in his 1992 essay (Mbembe Reference Mbembe1992a: 5–6).
When our panel convened in Birmingham in 2018, we were marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Mbembe’s essay. Speakers were invited to engage with ‘Provisional notes’ as a ground-breaking essay that profoundly challenged extant approaches to the analysis of power and subjectivity in Africa. The essay later formed the basis of Mbembe’s On the Postcolony (Reference Mbembe2001), a book that also became one of the most influential theoretical reflections on postcolonial Africa.Footnote 4
As a heuristic device that has become an analytical tradition for mapping and examining the problem of subjection and the (re)production of violence in societies which emerged from colonial relationships, the ‘postcolony’ is no longer ‘provisional’. In fact, it has become one of the most critical, even if contested, ways of understanding the manifold challenges of the end of colonization in Africa, including the distinctive sets of cultural, social, economic and political (material and aesthetic) repertoires that defined, continue to (re)define, and have been (re)defined by the practices of past and current patterns of subjection. The article not only introduced the idea and concept of postcolony to the literature; along with the subsequent book, it also established the postcolony as an exploratory or experiential device for understanding and analysing ‘a given historical trajectory’ defined essentially by the ‘banality of power’ – which manifests (im)materially in contrapuntal chaos and coherence in the intertwined temporal and spatial continuum of state and society in Africa. Indeed, the concept of ‘the banality of power’ is a major idea in both Mbembe’s essay and the book that followed from it. Mbembe deploys it to ground the peculiarity of the routines and grotesquery of power and subjection, as well as forms of complicity, if not also resistance, in the postcolony. While striking in their modes of expression in the African postcolony, Mbembe demonstrates that the spectacularization of terror and enjoyment is the very definition of power and sovereignty tout court.
But why do students of Africa still find the idea of the banality of power in the postcolony offered by Mbembe inspiring and engaging? And how do the premises, arguments, themes or even approaches first iterated by Mbembe on the postcolony still inform how Africanists think about and engage their own field sites and themes of inquiry three decades later? In this part issue, four Africanist anthropologists and sociologists working on and in different regions of Africa engage with Mbembe’s perspectives in his seminal essay in analysing emergent realities in their own areas of scholarly interest. Our approach is to take Mbembe’s manifold speculations about the postcolony as productive keys to open up reflections on the multiple registers in which the dramaturgy of power unfolds in our different sites or thematic interests.
Postcolonial proclivities
As already noted, ‘Provisional notes’ was first published in Africa in 1992 and then, in the same year, an abridged and slightly revised version was published in Public Culture. Although the article’s publication in Africa resonated with many, judging by the citations that followed, it was in Public Culture that a set of responses were collected and published, again in 1992. These included comments from a number of leading scholars in African studies, history, anthropology, political studies and critical theory, such as Valentin Mudimbe, Judith Butler, David William Cohen, Michael Taussig, Fernando Coronil, Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Tejumola Olaniyan, among others.
Besides concerns about his methodological and theoretical orientations, including the now familiar question about his use of Western theoretical resources to frame his inquiry, a main concern with Mbembe’s argument about the postcolony was the ‘extravagance’ of his insights from Cameroon and Togo and the possibilities of their ‘theoretical generalization’ to other postcolonies in the manner in which he deployed these insights (e.g. Butler Reference Butler1992; see also Coronil Reference Coronil1992). Another query related to whether Mbembe’s claims about power and the grotesque, the vulgar and the obscene in the public space in the African postcolony, were not simply additional illustrations of ‘African decomposition’ that would be fodder for Afro-pessimists (e.g. Mudimbe Reference Mudimbe1992).
The latter is all the more important considering concerns about whether these obscene and grotesque realities are exclusive to Africa (see Adebanwi’s contribution in this issue), an issue that was raised by more than one critic in the comments on the essay. In his response to these and several other queries, titled ‘Prosaics of servitude and authoritarian civilities’, Mbembe remarked that, rather than merely the expression of ‘aesthetic or ethical prejudices’, his use of the notions of vulgarity and obscenity ‘was meant to allude to the cultural and political “work” [travail] by which state power “comes down to the level” of the greatest number of people [se met á la portée des gens], becomes “down-to-earth” [terre à terre]; spreads the knowledge of itself and its habits, rendering them accessible to a society’ (Reference Mbembe1992c: 129).
It is not possible here to fully take stock of the vast array of responses to and queries on Mbembe’s essay published in Public Culture (Reference Mbembe1992b).Footnote 5 Nor was this our ambition. Rather, the contributions assembled in this section try to respond to key aspects of Mbembe’s riveting analysis of power and subjectivity in the postcolony. Notable points of interests for us are not only his innovative focus on the notions of vulgarity and obscenity for the banalization of power in the postcolony; they also include the sources of inspiration in Africa and Africanist archives for his ideas. Accordingly, each contributor has elected to foreground one or two central ideas or aspects of the essay.
In her critical contribution, Katrien Pype surveys popular cultural materials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as well as the social and political analysis of Congolese society within Congo studies. Pype draws on these to offer a critical engagement with some of Mbembe’s central ideas and arguments, including his critique of the commandement as the ultimate modality of postcolonial authority. Central to Pype’s analysis are the multiple layers of conversation between Mbembe and Congo, underlining Mbembe’s debt to both students of Congolese society and popular cultural production from the region. As Pype argues, these layers of conversation between Mbembe and the Congolese context call for a more critical attention to the historicity of Mbembe’s ideas about the state, power and life in the African postcolony.
Rogers Orock reflects on how the African novel can work as an ethnographic interlocutor or as an ethnographic informant in the anthropological study of postcolonial politics in Africa. Examining the role of the literary imagination on the continent in decolonizing anthropology, Orock engages with Mbembe’s embrace of the literary archiveFootnote 6 in understanding African politics. Focusing on elites and corruption – which are often regarded, not always correctly,Footnote 7 as synonyms in popular imagination in Africa and in the West – the author investigates how literary accounts mirror what Mbembe has described as the dominant’s ‘tendency [for] excess and a lack of proportion’ (Reference Mbembe1992a: 3). However, Orock is interested not only in how the two lenses (the fictional and the ethnographic) for understanding the trajectory of power in early postcolonial Africa enrich each other, but also how fiction sometimes offers a useful corrective to ethnographic studies in the repertoire of political anthropology in the late colonial and early postcolonial moments. Based on an examination of Chinua Achebe’s novels in the light of Mbembe’s theorizing of ‘societies recently emerging from the experience of colonisation and the violence which the colonial relationship, par excellence, involves’ (Reference Mbembe1992a: 3), Orock concludes that African fiction, ‘[i]n both its ethnographic imagination and anthropological complexity … defined, and in some measure prefigured, a theory of power in the postcolony as we have come to know it’.
Ebenezer Obadare examines the dramas of power in what he describes as ‘the theologico-theatrical’ within Nigerian Pentecostal churches. Obadare shows that an emergent form of complicity exists between the leaders of Nigerian Pentecostal churches and leading popular entertainers, particularly those of Yorùbá extraction. Congregations in Pentecostal churches harbour multiple desires. Just as important is their need for the spiritual promise of prosperity and success as a reward for their radical Pentecostal commitment to forego the pleasures of the ‘carnal world’. Yet, their desire for prosperity and success must be negotiated and balanced against a desire for play, improvisation and release among the congregants. As Obadare shows, the ‘collaboration’ between church leaders and the popular artists invited to entertain and energize congregants during church services and other church-related events must be situated and understood within the dynamics of a ‘saturated’ and increasingly innovative religious marketplace. Although Pentecostalism is always defined by possible risks of disruption, Obadare draws inspiration from Mbembe’s idea of ‘the postcolonial dramaturgy’ to argue that the constraints of this highly competitive form of Christian religiosity underline its multiple openings for creativity and the unique convergence of spirituality and entertainment as another hallmark of postcolonial improvisation.
In the final article of this part issue, Wale Adebanwi focuses on ‘the carnality of power’ in extending Mbembe’s argument that obscenity and grotesquery constitute essential characteristics of postcolonial regimes of domination and subordination. Examining cases from Central, Southern and West Africa, Adebanwi reflects on the popular expectation that unites the dominant and the dominated: the necessity for the African man of power to display or exhibit his virility – particularly sexual virility. Following Mbembe, he shows that a ceaseless passion for transgressive sexuality as a condition of power has turned the African head of state from ‘His Excellency’ to ‘His Sex-cellency’, someone whose virility is constitutive of the operative logic of power.
While all the contributors recognize some of the challenges inherent in Mbembe’s theorizing of the postcolonyFootnote 8 – and point to a few of these in relation to the focus of each article – our major objective in this part issue is to draw on the strengths of the essay to broaden the analysis of postcolonial formations.
One last point. Since Mbembe unleashed the postcolony as a powerful heuristic term for a historical formation, the debris of which continues to litter the course of history in Africa, he has moved on to examine the location of this formation in wider contexts, particularly in global Africa. His thoughts on Africa are encapsulated in Critique of Black Reason (Reference Mbembe2017) and Necro-Politics (Reference Mbembe2019), and his reflections on Africa’s planetary entanglement and the formations of our collective humanity were recently published as Out of the Dark Night (Reference Mbembe2021). Taken together, these extend various strands of Mbembe’s early interest in power and historical struggles for the ‘in-common’ and the will to life (ibid.: 3) in the face of precarity, exclusion, violence, expendability and death. And so, despite this shift in the geography of his theoretical concerns, one of Mbembe’s earliest insights (the banality of power) continues to have both theoretical and empirical purchase for the analysis of social formation in Africa.
Acknowledgements
This part issue is based on a panel entitled ‘Provisional Notes on the Postcolony: Twenty-five Years After’ held at the ASAUK conference at the University of Birmingham, 10–13 September 2018. The panel was sponsored by the International African Institute (IAI). We thank Stephanie Kitchen, the managing editor of Africa, for her assistance in organizing the panel. We thank three other presenters at the panel, Ebenezer Obadare, Katrien Pype and Divine Fuh, as well as Francis Nyamnjoh, Birgit Meyer, Heike Becker and other participants who offered very helpful comments. We are also grateful to the journal’s two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
Competing interests
The authors declare none.
Wale Adebanwi is the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania. He is also an honorary research associate at the African Studies Centre, University of Oxford.
Rogers Orock is a senior lecturer in the Anthropology Department, University of the Witwatersrand. He also teaches in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Buea, Cameroon.
