7.2 African Liberation Struggles (4/5)

Three successive scrambles have reorganized the African continent as a supply zone for imperial accumulation across five centuries: the proto-colonial transatlantic slave trade, followed by proper colonial conquest, then the neocolonial and extra-colonial debt traps and resource curses. Each successive scramble inherited and extended the infrastructure of the last: the warren built to export the enslaved was inherited and extended by the administrative grid of colonial rule which, in turn, was inherited and extended by the disarticulated economies of the neo-colonial and extra-colonial present.

The unique legacies of this series of scrambles, alongside the singular position of Blackness in the global analytics of raciality, inform the nature and character of African liberation struggles in ways that are of profound consequence to present global strugges. This lecture will take the interlacustrine region of Central Africa as a case study, on the frontiers of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds.

In addition to the anti-colonial nationalisms and postcolonial states often identified with African liberation movements, we will consider lesser known currents that have organized collective defense through dispersed networks and cosmological authorization precisely when centralized institutions claiming monopoly on legitimate governance have failed to protect the populations they claim to serve. We will examine how four regimes of modernizing power (colonial, nationalist, neocolonial, and extra-colonial) have confronted these formations across more than a century; how each has misrecognized them as primitive, criminal, or pathological; and how each has attempted elimination through combined military force and epistemic suppression. I will suggest that each has failed because each suppression reproduces the structural conditions ensuring reactivation: surplus extracted without accumulation, labor subsidizing capital, protection promised but withheld, indigenous cosmologies denigrated and denied.

Readings

“National Liberation and Culture,” from Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral

“The Development Discourse,” from Accumulation in an African Periphery, by Issa Shivji