 I'd like to welcome everybody back for the final session. We just had a fantastic two days of discussions, and this will be the culminating session of this tremendous symposium, or at least in my view it is. I've been enthralled to hear from our panelists and speakers. My name's Stephen Klingman. I'm Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Institute. I won't say too much more now except that I will call on my colleague from the program in French and Francophone Studies, Professor Patrick Mensa, to introduce keynote speaker Shillem Bembe, Patrick. Good afternoon. Yeah. Yeah, OK. Thanks, thanks. Well, OK, I also welcome you to this last event of the symposium. And it's also a particularly special privilege for me and a great honor for me to introduce Professor Shillem Bembe and to welcome it to the symposium and thank him for accepting to participate in it. Professor Bembe has developed in his work a critique of representations of African people of African descent in mainstream discourses of the human and social sciences that has many synergies with the themes advanced in the iconic essay of Achebe. That frames this symposium. But he has also carried out, carried the torch in the spirit of Achebe's vision further by developing important articulations between his critiques of these particular problems of representation and conceptions of temporality and history in a philosophical discourse of modernity. Between these critiques of representation and theories of contemporary governmentality, the logics of state structure, and related themes of sovereignty, democracy, power, and general question of the political. As many of us know, Acheem Bembe is a professor of history and political science at the University of Witz-Watersrand in Johannesburg and a senior researcher at the Witz Institute for Social and Economic Research, Weiser. He's also a convener of the Johannesburg workshop in theory and criticism. He was born in Cameroon and here in the doctorate in history at the Sorbonne in France. Now, as a public cosmopolitan intellectual whose work is known around the world, he shares his time mostly between his home institution in South Africa, Europe, and the United States. And in the United States, particularly at Duke University, where he is currently a visiting professor in the Roman Studies Department, as well as the Franklin Humanities Institute. He does maintain a very energetic and highly mobile and intensive regime of scholarship, teaching, research, and conferencing. Now, as a public and critical intellectual who maintains a keen engagement with pressing contemporary and social issues and political problems, he never shies away from relating his scholarship to real-time public events many times quite right. He has held positions at Columbia University, the Brooklyn Institute in Washington, DC, the University of Pennsylvania, the Council for the Development of Social, Science, and Research in Africa, which is located in Dakar, San Diego, the University of California at Berkeley, Yale University, Harvard University. I don't know whether I've listed all of them. But let's go on. As one would expect, he has published extensively on questions of African history and politics. But his writings do not treat these subjects of history and politics in the provincial way. They are always set in a larger framework of major currents of contemporary world history and part-breaking critical interrogations of philosophical and theoretical discourses, with which we make sense of such events. In his seminar work on the Post Colony, which was published in this country in 2001, Bembe explains problems of representation of the kind Achieve actually alludes to in his essay, which defines the theme of this symposium. I mean, he explains them as effects or by-products of long-standing difficulties that the idea of a common human nature or the idea of a humanity shared with others have posed for the West and its intellectual history throughout that. Now, it means, among other things, that this intellectual tradition has been unable to define itself in relation to non-Western societies, but especially Africa, without assigning simultaneously to Africa and people of African descent, the troops of absence, lack, otherness, difference, non-being, nothingness, among others that are kind of unknown, right? Now, one paradoxical consequence of this series of negations is that Western social theory and its related disciplines, Professor, in Bembe's head, right? They have rendered themselves unable to account adequately, am I right? These disciplines, social theory and its related disciplines have rendered themselves unable to account for the historicity and complexity of the life experiences of African societies in any debt, right? Even though, since the 15th century, at least, there is no longer, or there should be no longer, a distinctive historicity of these societies, which is not embedded in times and rhythms heavily conditioned by European domination. And even though Africa remains a figure of mediation which enables the West, according to Professor Bembe, to accede to its own unconscious in order to give a public account of its subjectivity. Now, in making such claims, Professor Bembe is not only referring to familiar histories of slavery and classical colonialism that one knows about, and the racialized thinking in which they were mired. In the same book, right, he refers to a certain state of arbitrariness that accomplishes its own work and validates itself through its own sovereignty. And thereby permits power to be exercised as a right to kill and invest Africa with debts, at once at the heart of every age and above time. This arbitrariness, in his words, is what distinguishes our own present age from previous ones. And that distinction consists of a type of existence that is contingent, dispersed, powerless, but reveals itself in the guise of arbitrariness and the absolute power to give death anytime, anywhere, by any means and for any reason. In short, he's referring to often murderous practices of exclusion, marginalization, instrumentalization, which he associates with various forms of late modern state structures. Somewhere he writes that late modern colonial occupation differs in many ways from early modern occupation, particularly in its combining of the disciplinary, the biopolitical, and the necropolitical. Now if I had more time, these reflections should normally lead me to a discussion of these practices of marginalization which he associates with late modern state formations and other less orthodox modes of governance. This should lead to a discussion of the concept of sovereignty which he redefines and relocates to a large degree in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die in another important essay which he calls what, necropolitics. This should lead me to explain why Mbembe thinks following Michelle Foucault that bio power as the power of life itself should also be thought in terms of the state of exception. In examining the relationship between politics and death, giving that such bio power is fundamentally about classifying populations into categories that are deemed worth saving and those subject to dying or killing. Now, today he argues many people live in occupied zones of militarized terror that are effectively as new colonies in conditions that recall the living death of life as a slave. Now, to my mind, this condition could be invoking the several things. I mean, that character I can tell very well. For example, I give two examples. Let's say a non-antiforner immigrant refugee comes in Europe, for example. Or he might also be, could be referring to displaced populations living in so-called stateless conditions or near stateless conditions under the control of polymorphous and diffuse organizations, such as militias led by warlords or various war machines that are linked to the geographies of resource extraction and their enclave economies and their peculiar methods of managing multitudes, et cetera, et cetera. And then this point is that in these conditions, and in these spaces of exception, nocturnal power of death, if you like, the nocturnal power of death is wielded as an ever-present possibility, creating a permanent terror that sometimes only finds its resolution in suicide. I could go into a discussion of politics of suicide and survival as what he calls back our holder from that. Now, since the constraints will not allow me to discuss the aforementioned issues, these constraints will not allow me to discuss the aforementioned questions in any significant detail. Let me just say this, right, one thing, that behind this analysis of necropolitics and necropower is ultimately, okay, now the point behind it is not ultimately to paint a completely bleak and pessimistic picture of the future for Africa, for people of African descent or the multitude of displaced populations whom he invokes in several of his studies of marginalized or marginalization in modern forms of governance. Now are they meant to suggest that nothing can be done to address these problems in a constructive way? Membe has explained that the problem of dream or dream underlying his book on the post-colonial is one of freedom from servitude and the possibility of an autonomous African subject. Emerging, focusing on him or herself or withdrawing in the acts and context of displacement and entanglement. Now the dream of a more recent book of his which is called Critique de la Raison Nec, which I might call the Critique of Black Reason, who doesn't resonate very well, but that's, there you go, right? The dream behind that is what he calls a world to come in which there is no neck. Because there's no race, a world without resentment and desire for revenge that all racism's inspired. Now with all that said, the time has arrived to ask Professor Membe, what his vision of Achebe and the African century might be? In any case, that's the title of his presentation. So let's all give a rousing, Pioneer Valley Five College welcome to Prof. I see that's it. I would like to thank Patrick for that comprehensive introduction, I have to say. I was very happy when I got an invitation to come here, an invitation from our dear Stefan and his colleagues, Joey Sabina, Britt Meijker and the sponsors of 40 years after. So I would like to thank them for their very gracious invitation. I think that the last two days have been a very singular opportunity to remember a man, many of us have only met through the living traces he left behind, he left them behind in writing, a man to whom we owe a debt of gratitude, we will never be able to pay back. We will never be able to pay it back precisely because what he gave us is priceless and immeasurable. So the question is how to think with and after him, how to think with Achebe after Achebe. It seems to me that in order to do this, we have to keep in mind a few things. The first is that like many of his generation and the generations before his, Chino Achebe understood his as a work of redress. The work of redressing, I quote him, needs to be done. It may appear too daunting, but I believe it is not one day too soon to begin. He proclaimed in the conclusion of his an image of Africa. Of course, he very, very knew this work had effectively begun long ago, well before his image of Africa. It was a daunting work because since the advent of modernity, Africa had been made to be the name given to the underside of our world. A reality that could only be spoken of from a distance, anecdotally, the simulacrum for an obscure and bland power warred in a time that was in essence pre-ethical. This Achebe understood very well. The work of redress was daunting because since the advent of modernity, when it came to the term or to the name Africa, when it comes to that name, everything flows from the extraordinary difficulty of producing a true image that can be associated to a world that is also true. Achebe knew that whenever Africa comes up in the Western logos, the correspondence between words, images and the thing matters very little. It is not necessary for the name to correspond to something or for a thing to respond to its name. At any moment, the thing can lose its name and the name its thing. Without this having any consequence whatsoever on the statement itself or on what is said, how it is said, who is saying it and why. That is why Achebe's obsession was to bring an end to that logic. To bring an end to the logic that made it such that the name Africa always seems to direct us not only to what no one is supposed to respond to but also to a kind of primordial arbitrariness, a kind of total abdication of responsibility he finds especially in the work of Conrad. So his point was not so much that Conrad was a racist, although indeed he was and Achebe is very clear about this. His point was that Conrad wouldn't be taken as a great writer because Conrad forgot that art is about giving form and giving life. Conrad forgot that image and form did not need to be separated. In fact they could be reconciled in the object and their reconciliation in the object is what endows them both with a singular animating power. In this Achebe was to a large extent relying on what has constituted over a long period of time the power or the magics of the arts of Africa in his diaspora. That power historically has come from an ambiguous recognition of the fact that the infinite cannot be captured in a form. The infinite exceeds every form even if from time to time it passes through form that is through the finite. But what fundamentally characterizes form is its own finitude. Form can only be ephemeral, evanescent and fugitive and to form, to make forms, to produce forms is to inhabit a space of essential fragility and vulnerability. This is the reason why caring and nurturing life are and have been the main functions of art in Africa in his diaspora. Achebe singled out Conrad because Conrad was an archetypical example of a certain kind of abdication of responsibility when it comes to Africa. But Conrad was not the first because he was going to be the last. He was not the first in writing about Africa in 1830, 1831. These were Hegel, the renowned German philosopher hard to see and I quote him, the peculiarly African character is difficult to comprehend. For the very reason that in reference to it we must quite give up the principle which naturally accompanies all our ideas, the category of universality in particular. In Negro life, the characteristic point is the fact that consciousness has not yet attained to the realization of any substantial objective existence. As for example, God or law in which the interest of man's volition is involved and in which he realizes his own being. Originally presented in a lecture series and later compiled in the philosophy of history, Hegel added and I quote him again, the Negro exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state. We must lay aside our thought of reverence and morality all that we call feeling if we would rightly comprehend him. There is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character. Hegel then promised himself not to ever mention Africa again. For I quote him again, it is no historical part of the world. It has no movement or development to exhibit. What we properly understand by Africa, he concluded, is the unhistorical and developed spirit still involved in the conditions of being a nature and of good. So Conrad was not the first. Nor was he going to be the last. More than a century after Hegel's reminiscence, Robert Kaplan, a US journalist and policy pundit, published The Coming Anarchy, a devastating portrayal of West Africa in the February 1994 issue of the US monthly magazine The Atlantic. The Cold War had just ended and most of the Western world was triumphantly riding on the peak of optimism. Celebrating this triumph of the West and of what he called the Western idea, Francis Fukuyama, writing in the 1989 issue of the National Interest an American by monthly international affairs magazine, suggested, quote, what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such. In his scenario for the 21st century, the post-historical century, if we are to stick for a moment with Kaplan's, sorry, Fukuyama's periodization, in that scenario, Kaplan argued that West Africa in particular was becoming, and I quote, the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental and societal stress in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real strategic danger. Disease over population and provoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, international drug cartels are now most tellingly demonstrated through a West African prison. In Kaplan's geography, just as in Hegel's a century earlier, West Africa became the epitome of those regions of the world where central governments were withering away, trouble and regional fiefdoms were on the rise, and war and corruption had turned pervasive. West Africa, Kaplan argued, was reverting to the Africa of the Victorian Atlas it consists now of a series of coastal training posts such as Freetown and Conakry and an interior that, owing to violence, volatility and disease is again becoming, I'm still quoting him, as Grand Green once observed, blank and unexplored. Kaplan invoked the English political economist Thomas Malthus describing him as the philosopher of demographic doomsday and a prophet of West Africa's future and West Africa's future eventually will also quote him, be that of most of the rest of the world in an age of cultural and racial clash, he concluded. This apocalyptic view of Africa's future was echoed in 2000 when building upon Hegelian tropes once again the influential UK Financial Weekly, the Economist declared that Africa was hopeless. In a famous editorial titled, Hopeless Continent it conjured up images of destitution, failure and despair, floods and farming, poverty and pestilence, brutality, despotism and corruption, dreadful wars and plunder, rape, cannibalism, amputation and even the weather to suggest that Africa's future was definitely doomed. Foreign aid workers, peacekeeping missions, humanitarian agencies and the world at large could well give up. Simply in a quote buried in their cultures where the reasons for so much human misery it concluded. So as we stand here to remember Achebi, poverty and unemployment are still widespread on the continent. In some instances more so than in other, any other emerging markets to use that term. In many quarters of the rich world Africa, with its apparently never-ending tales of disorder still inspires pity and disbelief when it does not elicit deeply held humanitarian and philanthropic impulses and of course the content that usually comes with it. People still struggle to make ends meet but these days where don't they? They still demand products that could be both cheap and reliable. Needs are still obvious. Schesity is still a fact. They don't always have enough to eat. They may lack education. They may despair or daily injustices and some want to emigrate. Many still fear a violent or premature end. But that's not all. Secondary school enrollment has grown by 48% between 2000 and 2008. Over the past decade malaria deaths in some of the worst affected countries has declined by 30% and HIV infections by 74%. Life expectancy across Africa has increased by about 10% and child mortality rates in most countries have been falling steeply. Over the past 10 years real income per person has increased by more than 30% whereas in the previous 20 years it shrunk by nearly 10%. Only 20% of the continent's 1 billion people are online. But that share is rising rapidly as mobile networks are rolled out and the cost of internet-capable devices continues to fall. As a matter of fact more than 720 million Africans have mobile phones and 100 million were on Facebook by 2014. Mobile telephony in particular has revolutionized the ways Africans interact and the way small and medium enterprises, farmers and informal traders operate. As a result mobile revenue is today equivalent 3.7% of African GDP more than triple its share in developed economies where there was an incremental innovation. It is calculated that in this leapfrog scenario increased internet penetration and use could propel private consumption almost 13 times higher than the current levels of 12 billion dollars reaching some 154 billion dollars by 2025. I could go on and on and give you such examples of the set of transformations unfolding in front of our eyes in the continent. What I want to say is that as we enter the 21st century the Conradian Hegelian Kaplan mythology and its multiple actualizations either manifestly no longer holds or is under severe juries. Something else is going on. It is being picked up both by Africans themselves and curiously enough but we shouldn't really be curious express curiosity in this by the world of high finance a tacit consensus is emerging around the idea that after China what is going on in Africa will have a huge impact not only on Africa as such but on our planet. The emerging tacit consensus is that the destiny of our planet will be played out to a large extent in Africa. If there is one single idea I wish you to take from this intervention this is it the planetary turn of the African predicament. This planetary turn of the African predicament I suggest will constitute the main cultural and philosophical event of the 21st century. It will take us far away from the Hegelian Conradian myths. I cited at the start of this lecture myths which as I also suggested Chino Achebe spent a huge part of his life trying to dispel. This planetary turn of the African predicament is the result of an ongoing, not yet entirely manifest but an ongoing conceptual shift about which I would like to make three comments. Firstly that Africa is gradually perceived as the place where our planetary future is at stake always being played out. This is due to the fact that all around the world and especially in Africa itself all the senses of time and space based on linear notions of development and progress are being replaced by newer senses of time and futures founded on open narrative models. And what strikes me about Chino Achebe's concept of the story which we have been speaking about a lot over the last since yesterday it is his attachment to the idea of an open story as opposed to a closed story where the Yama history is finished welcome to melancholia and boredom. If anything Africa is not a place where we are bought and we find in the work of Chino Achebe in his concept of the open story enough cultural, artistic political resources to make sense of these times of ours. Secondly, within the continent itself its artists its music its painting its professionals the younger generations of professionals most of whom have an acute sense of the world as well as an acute sense of their own location they have travelled abroad some of them are coming back others are moving to new locations in the planet especially Asia, China India, Turkey the Gulf countries within the continent itself Africa's future is more and more thought of as full of unactualized possibilities of would-be worlds of potentiality many increasingly believe that through self-organization and small ruptures we can actually create mere tipping points that may lead to deep alterations of the direction the continent is taking. This was not at all the case when I returned back to Africa in 1996. Thirdly in fact it has, of late been a matter of tacit consensus once again especially among international financial institutions that Africa represents the last frontier of capitalism whether this is good or bad of course we have to debate it but the fact is that many now recognize that the continent represents the last frontier of capitalism of course this last claim is contested in various quarters but there is nevertheless ample evidence to support it I'll give you two examples the first relates to an obvious fact Africa's economic pulse has been quickening during the first decade of the 21st century real GDP rose by 4.9% a year from 2000 through 2008 more than twice its pace in the 80s and the 90s of course when I say that I mean I am opening a Pandora box who benefits from it why is it that growth is not translated into employment why is it that in a country like South Africa inequalities have not stopped expanding over the last 20 years of course these questions are with us and yet the fact is that the amount of wealth created in the continent has expanded more crucial to the ongoing transformations is the resurrection of the middle class I say resurrection because historically we have had a middle class I would argue from the early colonial period up to the end of the 70s because of the structural adjustment programs of the beginning of the 80s and the last 25 years up to the beginning of the century we witnessed a quasi-decimation of African middle classes this decimation in the sense that many underwent a process of declassement kind of what the term is in English but instead of going up they went down in terms of their revenues and a lot of them left the continent but what we have been seeing since the beginning of the century is a reconstitution of a black middle class translated in terms of rising income capacity to consume the fact that 40% of the continents 1 billion people live in cities a proportion roughly comparable to to China's and larger than India's estimations being that by 2035 that share will rise to 50% and Africa's top 18 cities will have a combined spending power of 1.3 trillion dollars these might be controversial but it does matter so Africa is the last frontier of capitalism in another second sense it is against all odds that the revolution of our world where some of the most far-reaching formal and informal experiments in neoliberal deregulation have been taking place have a lot of friends in Greece you know what has been going on in Greece when read from an African perspective this is what we went through in the 80s it is in Africa that we have seen the most far-reaching both formal and informal experiments in neoliberal deregulation with the range of consequences this has until both there and elsewhere even more decisively this is the region of the world where the relationship between transnational extractive projects which underpin a huge part of Africa's economic growth during the late 20th and early 21st century and the transformations of contemporary global financial capitalism especially under the sign of enclave economies and offshoring have been the most perversely tested during the last decade Africa made its greatest ever contribution of illicit you mentioned it with the outflows and net income payments to the rest of the world could give you extended figures about this so the point is that as site of experimentation Africa's extractive economies have been deeply involved in and will keep contributing to the shaping of key aspects of contemporary financial capitalism the remaking, for instance of the corporate form at the global scale the structures and conditions of corporate activity and what it means to incorporate in the first years of the 21st century same with the monetization of risk, a key structural feature of contemporary futures markets all of this has been shaped to a large extent by experiments with new forms on the African continent so have been offshoring including of means of violence private contracting including of security services gambling other economically stigmatized activities and various invocations in the field of tax avoidance so the point is that all of this is murky is not a one way traffic it's murky but it's open ended it's open ended and what it ends up becoming will depend to a large extent on the quality of the new social struggles that are unfolding almost everywhere in the continent both in the urban form and even more importantly in the rural form so the current moment in the continent can be characterized as a moment of acceleration the question is acceleration towards what what are the forces behind this acceleration is such historical trajectory sustainable at what cost and who is likely to pay for it or to benefit from it acceleration I would say towards a kind of capitalism that is mostly disjointed in the sense that it consists of seemingly random collection of disconnected enclaves these enclaves are incongruously linked together in a contrived form that cannot be easily grasped within the conventional analytical paradigms it is a capitalism of multiple nodal points, scattered patterns spatial growth combined with neglect and decline and this form of capitalism is mostly extractive what is even more say striking is the fact that just as Africa is now is now a planetary question as I was intimating earlier on it is also more and more specifically a Chinese question China is externalizing its capitalism in Africa but what aspects of Chinese capitalism are being externalized in Africa it's precisely a capitalism of the kind I was describing a little earlier made up of enclaves basically extractive in nature and ecologically costly I mention the ecology because people across the continent have been living with and adapting to a high degree of climate variability and it's associated risks for centuries yet the accelerated changes in the climate and increasing incidents of climatic disasters during the 20th century have brought risks into sharper focus they threaten to cause natural assets land productivity livestock water and energy resources its capabilities health, nutrition, education while keeping the region in a low human development trap this scenario is exacerbated by the continent's natural fragility two thirds of its surface area is desert or dry land its terrestrial and coastal ecosystems are highly exposed to natural disasters the region's livelihoods and economic activities are very dependent on natural resources and rain fed agriculture I could go on and on with this but the continent is central to the global environmental crisis and holds some of the most important solutions the global ecological trap overshadowing the 21st century although its forest coverage has shrunk Africa is the home to the second largest mass of tropical forest in the world which means that the carbon storage capacity of African biotopes is considerable another time when global emissions are rapidly rising these gigantic carbon capture machines is like agricultural land one of the essential elements of climate control by which I mean that if we are to tackle what is arguably the biggest threat to human existence in our times we will have to deal with Africa now let me end where I started that is with race and racism and the future of the human species in this post-conradian age and the planetary turn of the African predicament as we speak race has once again re-entered the domain of biological truth viewed now through a molecular gaze a new molecular deployment of race has emerged out of genomic thinking worldwide we witness a renewed interest in terms of the identification of biological differences in these times of global migrations many are entertaining the dream of nations without strangers genomics has injected new complexity into the figure of the human we have been wondering about the figure of the human Achebe was grappling with and yet the core racial typology of the 19th century still provides the dominant lens through which this new genetic knowledge of human difference is understood and indeed is taking shape and entering medical and lay conceptions of human variation fundamental to these ongoing re-articulations of race and these recordings of racism are developments in the life sciences I already mentioned genomics I should add our renewed understanding of the cell neuroscience and synthetic biology the last quarter of the 20th century has seen the rise of a molecular and neuromolecular style of thought that analyzes all living processes in body and brain in terms of the material properties of cellular components such as DNA bases ion channels membrane potentials and the like this process continues to wield influence in the 21st century it is a process that has been rendered even more powerful by its convergence with two parallel developments the first is the emergence of the digital technologies of the information age and the second is the financialization of the economy these developments have in turn shaped two sets of consequences on the one hand there is a renewed preoccupation with the future of life itself something that is not really part of Achebe's critique of Conrad's racism future of life itself and on the other hand capital and the work it is doing under contemporary conditions so we now realize that there is probably more to the idea of race and racism than even Hegel or Conrad imagined because race thinking increasingly entails profound questions about the nature of the human species in general the need to rethink the politics of racialization and the terms under which the struggle for racial justice unfolds here and elsewhere in the world today has become ever more urgent it cannot be done uniquely through Achebe's lenses that's the point I'm trying to make we need to supplement Achebe if we are to address the new re-articulations of racism the recording of racism in the world of our times racism is still acting as a constitutive supplement to nationalism how do we create a world beyond nationalism behind the veil of neutrality and impartiality racial power still structurally depends on various legal regimes for its production how do we radically transform for instance the police even more ominously as I intimated race politics is taking a genomic turn in order to invigorate anti-racist thought and praxis and in order to reanimate the project of what we call in South Africa non-racialism we particularly need to explore the emerging nexus between biology genes technologies and the articulations with new forms of human destitution also at stake once again are the old questions of who is whom who can make what kinds of claims on whom and on what grounds who is to own whom and what do we owe anything to each other so in a contemporary neoliberal order that claims to have gone beyond the racial the struggle for racial justice must take new forms but simply looking to past and present will not suffice to tease out alternative possibilities for thinking life and human futures we need to connect in entirely new ways the project of non-racialism to that of human mutuality in the last instance and here draw from our experience in South Africa non-racialism is truly about radical sharing and universal inclusion it is about humankind ruling in common on behalf of a larger commons which includes non-humans and this is the proper name for the kind of democracy that is to come so let me end this presentation to reopen the future of our planet to all who inhabit it because that was the purpose of Achebe's critique of Conrad Conrad was closing the future to some while keeping it open only for some but to reopen the future of our planet to all who inhabit it we will have to learn how to share it again amongst the humans and the non-humans between the multiple species that populated it is only under these conditions that aware of our precariousness as a species in the face of ecological threats we will be able to overcome the outward possibility of human extinction opened up by this new epoch as far as Africa is concerned certain things might have fallen apart but many are emerging some have no name yet so we need to expand the dictionary to give them a name Africa's time will come this might not happen in our lifetime but it will come our task is to accelerate its advent and for this to happen a new anticipatory future oriented politics future oriented literature music and the arts is badly needed thank you very much my thanks to professor Mbembe for an invigorating talk now he'll gladly take questions from the audience a few questions the floor is yours hello thank you so much for your keynote speech I thought it was really I thought it provided a lot of really informative and relevant information I want to start by saying my dissertation chair, Percy Henson says hello so my question please excuse me for mumbling through it but my question kind of deals or is about the discursive formation of Africa contemporarily so you spoke about how Africa is now being positioned as the final frontier of capitalism it's been called the new Asia the bright continent Africa rising and I'm just wondering about if this kind of shift and discourse towards Africa might be two sides of the same coin with the construction of Africa as a dark continent and as much as it seems that it's constructing it seems to be rationalizing poverty in a particular way so for instance like the entrepreneurial spirit of the African that's been popular in kind of economic and business magazines is really kind of rationalizing the fact that there's a huge disparity in that these people don't actually need more because they're able to do these amazing things with so little so I wonder if kind of the naturalist discourse of Hegel and of Conrad is being reconstituted in a particular historicist discourse about Africa that you know now Africa is emerging from the waiting room and it presents kind of an anecdote to capitalism reaching its inexorable asymptote so yeah so there's a question somewhere in there but thank you there's a when it comes to Africa there's a polemical field out there Africa has always been part of a polemical field part of which is linguistic the rest is economic, political, symbolic so forth it's a arena of struggle how is it that it will be defined and that is the struggle people like and before him many that has been our struggle from the very advent of modernity who will have the power to define these entity which is a geographical entity which is at the same time a human entity so that struggle will keep going on so the discourse of Africa is rising is clearly part of that century long polemic and we have to be aware of that what that discourse does is that it celebrates Africa's renewed re-articulation with a global system that has now almost no outside a position which itself is a bit unhistorical because in fact Africa has always been part of it in fact Africa was there at the very moment when it was constituting itself and as a consequence of which there is no history of the world that is not African to some extent so it's a polemical field we have no choice we have to do battle in that field but more importantly Africa has to become its own project from the 19th century on in the writings of African Americans people from the diaspora the people from the continent itself our big preoccupation has been how is it that Africa becomes once again its own center and what I was suggesting is that the project of Africa becoming once again its own center is back on the agenda in the continent itself not only with the African Union the limits of which we know of but more importantly in the consciousness of our times and that seems to me to be a very important rapture so the question once again that is what it is how is it that Africa will become its own center for its own sake but also for the sake of the planet that our planet as it faces these tremendous threats some of them ecological others related to a rampant form of economic exploitation that has invested not only economic resources natural resources but life itself now that it might be that the pre-emergence of the continent as its own center is probably the condition for the year I don't want to use theological terms such as salvation or redemption but that the it has become somewhat the condition for rejuvenation of our planet as we enter these epochal change are called or many have called the Anthropocene so that was the historical let's say set of reflections a reading of Chinua Chebe's piece forces us to engage in with him but also after him and if necessary although I didn't hear too much of that since yesterday against him which you mischievously introduced but nobody seemed to follow you along those directions Professor Mbembe for very stimulating talk I want to return again to the metaphor that you use of a Chebe's open story can you tell us in your estimation what the place of infrastructure and new kinds of leadership are in determining determining a more a sanguine ending to this open story particularly when you we live in an era where the imperial supply chains for things like platinum and other strategic raw materials that reside largely in Africa are in a moment of I wouldn't call it stagnation but I mean there's huge stockpiles of platinum in your adopted country, South Africa and the auto industry is undergoing tremendous transformation as a result of that is a hastening toward electric cars as a result of all of that where would the sort of opening up expanding Africa's infrastructure and acquiring a new kind of leadership which could bring this sort of moment of stasis to an end where do they stand, where do they play how do they play in your the open story it has to be a point of serious debate the hypothesis I was I was praying for word is precisely that this is not a moment we can characterize as a moment of stasis I was suggesting that what is striking as far as I can see is the reopening of the question of the future as part of that political and economic struggles and cultural struggles I was suggesting that something is moving in the 80s we clearly were witnessing a historical moment of decline all the signs of decline in stasis were there that is no longer the case but maybe it might be more prudent or cautious to simply argue that Africa is going in multiple directions simultaneously in the 80s we knew where it was going backward today we cannot say that and we have to take it seriously so it's going in many different directions simultaneously which means that anything can happen anything can happen depending on the ways in which the social forces will what social forces will be able to organize themselves depending of course on what social forces are carrying what forms of leadership but as Chima was telling us in the early afternoon leadership of course is important but systemic things that is where we have to put our attention and you mentioned platinum in the case of South Africa and oh for that matter Kortan in the Congo the continent is a geological scandal in whatever form we want to take it and here again what is really important are the actual social struggles that are going on around these mineral resources in South Africa in particular you see I mean this will take a little bit of development for those of you who are not familiar with history of the place white people occupy something like kind of the exact figures but 100 minus 13 is 77% whatever of the land black people occupy 13% of the land early on they were relegated to those territories because they were deemed to be useless basically these were like reserves the banter stands, the homelands overpopulated, overgrazing people's struggles to reproduce themselves under those conditions these were territories that were basically like warehouses where cheap labor was it wasn't like here in America where prisons serve that purpose especially for black people in South Africa it was something else cheap labor that's how you managed it what has been discovered then is that recently is that in fact those territories are not as poor as it was thought that in fact underneath those reserves lie huge mineral wealth so these former reserves have become the new frontier for extractive forms of accumulation such is the case for instance the whole platinum belt in the Hauteng in particle so what you see is a new cycle of struggles as to who will control the process of extraction or the new process of accumulation rendered possible by the availability of these wealth so what the government is doing under Zuma is that since these territories were supposedly ethnic entities ruled by chiefs he is trying to give more power to the chiefs who control land who can then transact it with capital mineral capital so you see a whole set of things going on there which blow up once in a while some of you might have in mind what happened in Marikana where 34 miners were killed in broad daylight by the police an arm of a government that is controlled by black people killing black people so you see that was a moment of dramatization of those struggles but a lot of it is going on in rural areas as to who will control this wealth how will it be distributed who will lose from it what's the cost of exploiting it so the future will depend on who wins in these struggles so it's not no one can determine it right now it's open and the fact that it is open and it's not closed is a characteristic one sees almost everywhere else in the continent and that's a cause if not for optimism at least it prevents us from simply reproducing the Conradian or Hegelian mythology and for those who really want to make a difference make sure that our history is not simply a history of repetition but a real history of difference then it opens up an amazing opportunity I'm sure Achebe would have very much like to be part of sorry for that long answer let me ask you how far we can open it up in our own minds I've spent most of my professional life in and out of India and the idea of development economics was a big program in the US and Europe and India both China and India even the Soviet Union going back a little further their idea of development was more industrial development can Africa develop in an industrial way I don't know who you want to do capitalism to someone I don't know who the Africans are going to do it to so my question is is there in fact a way other than industrial and development what do you see that's concrete that really opens up in a different direction it won't happen without some form of industrialization that industrialization might not take exactly the same form as what happened either in Europe in the 19th century China recently but very clearly it won't happen without some form of industrialization and a number of people are working on it how far can we open up our own minds I think that's a question for you guys we have our own questions but it's probably not one of ours the Chinese for instance now seem to be embracing that question much more in a way that is much more dynamic than the west which as we know is trapped in these mythologies we have been talking about what strikes me I have been living in Johannesburg for 15 years I move around as Patrick suggested you see the difference when you travel for instance you catch a flight from Johannesburg to Shanghai there are two flights every day you see the difference between a flight going from Johannesburg to Shanghai and a flight going from Johannesburg to London or a flight for that matter going from Johannesburg to Lagos you should see you should travel from Johannesburg to Lagos all kinds of people Africans speaking people white businesses new black capitalists Nigerian business operators when you put together Africans and Nigerians you produce something really extraordinary which I haven't seen elsewhere so these things are happening and the geography is in the making most of it is eastern it looks east of course we still have traffic coming to the Atlantic seaboard and of that but the most dynamics are within the continent itself and in relation to China I was in Shanghai a year and a half ago to some conference and at the end of the conference look come I'll show you something I'll show you how Africans live in China he drove me 60 or 70 kilometers out of Shanghai into an entirely a city I had never seen before Nigerians, Ghanaians Ugandans, Kenyans Gambians people from the Cameroons Senegal owning shops business going on some of them students others doing all kinds of works mixing up with the Chinese we met some families begin to see the emergence of Afro-Chinese young people with eyes like this something I had not seen before and they the traffic is intensifying new trading colonies African trading colonies establishing themselves in major cities in China itself in Hong Kong and in some other parts of Asia so what's going on is that the map of our world is changing unfortunately we don't have the discourse on that those changes is lagging behind China Africa cooperation for the time being is mostly economic there is no cultural discourse that is accompanying it of course you have a huge anti-Chinese sentiment in most parts of the continent partly because there is no African metropolis today that doesn't have Chinese neighbourhood you see Chinese in for instance competing with locals in informal trade in addition to those who come under the banner of Chinese major corporations so the question of course is how is it that we harness enough negotiating power to make sure that the relationship with China does not simply reproduce the extractive model that was there under colonialism but in order to do that we need a systemic rearrangement of our own polities and the invention of new forms of leadership that can are responsive accountable to their own people which is bit hardly the case but all of that is exhilarating it is a kind of thing that a project that is it is something that gives content to the idea Achebe idea that Africa is above all a project if I take one thing from Chino Achebe's writings in relation to the continent it is that Africa is a project it's a geographical reality that has to be translated into an idea and translating it into an idea is the same as making of the continent once again its own center for its own sake but also for the sake of the human race at large this question because the last thing you said about Africa becoming its center and looking forward positive development away is something profounder to be reached but it takes to your speech confuse the hello to me I mean I'm a poor old man culturally deprived Caribbean Negro it's sound to me like you said you started out with a whole list of the denigration of Africa's character and possibilities and then you went on to that hasn't changed you went to modern you went to the economist and you went to various journalists recapitulate in the same thing and then you said but that's too swift a judgment because there's something happening in Africa and I'm trying to remember your term where you said it had a planetary implication and Africa was a center right and then when you list of the things that were happening it seemed to me that there are the same things that are oppressed and distorted and created a dismal circumstance in independent Africa you talked about extractive industries which are close to colonialism you talked about urbanization when we know that people are run off of the rural areas where agriculture becomes no longer productive and operative they run to the urban areas to the most dismal situation facing human beings on the planet today the urbanization is not progress extractive industries are not progress because they've run from they've moved from the Europeans to the Chinese that will strike me as being obvious progress and then you discussed the environmental degradation of the planet you talked about how vulnerable Africa was with two thirds of its land being grown and the climate the climate change created by the misuse of technology is like it had disastrous consequences they will displace huge populations they will create famines where rainfall comes where it doesn't come and when the usual rain doesn't come we're going to see crises on transatlantic proposals so it looks to me that Africa becomes a matter of planetary I know don't remember what the next word is because it is facing all the problems which project across the planet to Asia to Europe everywhere else caused by environmental degradation and social injustice and if the planet is to survive it seems to me you're saying Africa will be the model Africa is a planetary canary in the gold mine if Africa can survive if Africa can survive the planet can survive is that the planetary significant of Africa and that the destructive forces confront the planet are playing themselves in a more enhanced way in Africa but if Africa can find the resources intellectually human or whatever else to control and correct that Africa will center itself and it will survive that isn't the trustee argument can it be sir okay thank you very much look I live there I'm trying to make sense of what it is that I see it's not as if I'm not a visitor like Conrad I've been living there all this time of course I see the kind of terrible conditions that can be inflicted on those societies by all kinds of destructive forces we can spend the evening here talking about destructive forces in the continent and elsewhere I'm not sure that it will help us very much the challenge it seems to me is to take seriously the fact that the continent historically but even more so today because of all kinds of factors that are at play is history is open-ended and if we agree with the assumption that its history is not closed it's not simply a history of destructive forces but also of resistance and people organizing themselves to make something make a meaning out of the life they live and the constraints they have to face if we agree with that then the kind of discourse you are proposing doesn't seem to me to hold I agree with your critique of the kind of capitalism that is at work not only in Africa but worldwide I try to suggest that that was the case what I was interested in highlighting in response to Achebe and his critique of Conrad is a specific historical moment which are characterized as a moment of acceleration acceleration of everything of destructive forces but also of the capacity historical capacity these continent has shown in replenishing some what the forces of life but I accept that you can have a different take on this what else I think that's it that brings our proceedings to close I want to thank Professor Mbembe I want to say thank you very much to my co-organizers Equinmen Michael Felwell, Joy Bowman, Sabina Murray Britt Russet I want to thank my assistants at the ISI Amanda War-Laghi and Vata Van Aver who have done an incredible job I especially want to thank all our speakers today all our panelists today and yesterday we've had an amazingly expansive couple of days here I think sort of unprecedented on this campus it's been a pleasure for me to be involved I hope you've enjoyed it there's food out there, the discussion will continue the questions and the attempts at answers thank you very much for joining us