On the Power of the False

Achille Mbembe
Translated by Judith Inggs

II

n the essay African Modes of Self-Writing (Public Culture 14 [winter 2002]:

239 73), I develop the idea that Marxism and nationalism, as practiced in
Africa throughout the twentieth century, gave rise to two narratives on African
identity: nativism and Afro-radicalism. I contend that the objective of these two
discourses was not only to pronounce once and for all the truth on the issue of
what Africa and Africans are (theory), but also to chart what might or should be
the destiny of Africa and Africans in the world (praxis).
I state that when analyzed closely, these two orthodoxies are revealed to be
faked philosophies (philosophies du travestissement). As dogmas and doctrines
repeated over and over again rather than methods of interrogation, they have led
to a dramatic contraction and impoverishment both in the modes of conceptualizing Africa and in the terms of philosophical inquiry concerning the region.
Nativism, everywhere actively lamenting the loss of purity, is a form of culturalism preoccupied with questions of identity and authenticity. Faced with the
malaise resulting from the encounter between the West and the indigenous worlds,
nativism proposes a return to an ontological and mythical Africanness in which
the African subject might once again say I and express him- or herself in his or
her own name. Drawing its fundamental categories from a Marxist political economy, Afro-radicalism claims to have founded a so-called revolutionary politics,
which seeks to break away from imperialism and dependence.
Despite their differences, these two accounts share the same episteme. I show
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that, on the one hand, both rely on an idea of good and evila moral economy whose power of falsification derives from its opaque ties with the cult
of suffering and victimization. On the other hand, both consist of superstitions
that function to persuade us that nothing is happening in Africa because history
(the slave trade, colonization, and apartheid) has already happened, and anything
more would be nothing but a repetition of these originary events. Further, the
African subject cannot express him- or herself in the world other than as a
wounded and traumatized subject. In the essay, I demonstrate that these two narratives falsify the event itself (whether slavery, colonization, or apartheid) in the
very act in which they claim to name it and to decode its significations. What I am
being asked to explain (Vergs, Quayson, Segall) and what seems to be denied
(Guyer, Jules-Rosette) is that such superstitions continue to beleaguer the African
discourses of the self, turning them into discourses that are both possessed and
haunted.
The above argument can be further expanded. It can be argued that the idea of
good and evil on which nativism and Afro-radicalism are based so strongly
resembles the slave morality described by Nietzsche that the two are virtually
indistinguishable. For Nietzsche, this was a morality produced by weak individuals perfectly satisfied with the limits of their own existence. Drunk with malice, endowed with teeth and stomachs to digest even the most indigestible
meat, they are seduced by servitude and its hidden lures: frivolity and hollow
vanity, gluttony and envy, the excesses of the flesh and of the senses.1 No doubt
it would be inappropriate to describe our nativists and Afro-radicals in this way.
However, the question of whether or not there is a fundamental relationship
between the slave morality described by Nietzsche on the one hand and the
nativist and Afro-radical vision of history as sorcery on the other is a legitimate
one, and it has to be asked. If there is a relationship, then it is regrettable that
these indigenous forms of thinking continue to profit from a general sense of
complacency a situation Guyer seems to defend with the worn-out pretext of
miserabilism (lack of resources, state and market oppression, and poverty).2
The way out of this dead-end is not to be found in ethno-philosophy, this
impoverished form of orientalism criticized many times by Africans themselves
and which Guyer surprises me by espousing no doubt in a moment of distrac1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Par-del bien et mal: Prlude dune philosophie de lavenir, trans. Cornelius Heim (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 61.
2. This argument is used too often by African scholars themselves, which obviates the need for a
rigorous sociological analysis of the actors and institutions of knowledge production. See, e.g., Mahmood Mamdani and Mamadou Diouf, eds., Academic Freedom in Africa (Dakar: CODESRIA, 1994).

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tion.3 Nor is it to be found in so-called African feminisms and womanisms as

Jules-Rosette seems to hope. The philosophical poverty of these discourses is
notorious, and several isolated attempts to correct this shortcoming have not succeeded. The essay shows that both as a political weapon and as a system of
knowledge, Marxist and nationalist catechisms today are no more than hollow
constructs of dead elements. The statues are now corpses from which the enlivening soul has flown, as Hegel wrote.4 The questions that permeateexplicitly or
implicitlyall the critiques of the essay suggest that this corpse continues to rise
after each burial.
Of these questions, five in particular merit attention: If there is no Africa in a
natural state (Quayson, Diagne, Jewsiewicki, Gilroy), what then is Africa the
sign for? How can we avoid speaking of or representing this sign as if it were a
thing that roams the world in the form of a monstrous and terrifying mask
Afro-pessimism (Jules-Rosette, Vergs)? What is the status of philosophy in
such a work of representation (Vogler, Jewsiewicki, Vergs)? How can we decode
the world after slavery and colonialism, and how can we interpret contemporary
struggles taking place on a global scale (Gilroy, Dirlik, Jules-Rosette, Vergs,
Quayson)? And how, in this decoding of the world, can we rethink the status of
the African subject (Jewsiewicki), not in its generality (the nunc stans), but from
the experience of uncertainty (Guyer, Segall)not an abstract concept of uncertainty, but a radical uncertainty instantiated in my opinion by the omnipresence
of death and the predominance of politics as the work of death (necropolitics)?
The Three Systems of Knowledge

Despite what nativism and Afro-radicalism have led us to believe, the replies to
these questions are not obvious, and most require a detour into history. To a great
degree, what is called Africa is first and foremost a geographical accident.5 Moving from the sphere of geography to the sphere of representation, this accident is
3. Read the critiques by authors as diverse as Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, La crise du Muntu: Authenticit africaine et philosophie: Essai (Paris: Prsence africaine, 1977); and Marcien Towa, Lide
dune philosophie ngro africaine (Yaound: Editions CLE, 1979). Souleymane Bachir Diagne suggests going beyond ethnophilosophy by investing in linguistic philosophy and cognitive anthropology. See Revisiter la philosophie bantoue: Lide dune grammaire philosophique, Politique africaine,
no. 77 (2000): 4453.
4. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phnomnologie de lesprit, trans. Jean-Pierre Lefebvre
(Paris: Aubier, 1991), 489.
5. See Martin W. Lewis and Kren E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

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subsequently invested with a multitude of significations, diverse imaginary contents, or even fantasies, which, by force of repetition, end up becoming authoritative narratives. Along the continents Atlantic coast, these imaginary contents are
formed around narratives, legends, and stories that, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, were transformed into genuine systems of knowledge and institutional practices whose effects have endured until today.
Taking a rather different path, but based on occasionally similar repertoires
(especially commerce and religion), the same process was to affect the Islamic
belt from the ninth century onwards. The systems of knowledge referred to above
claim to grapple with not only the physical contours of the continent but with its
very essence: the morals and customs of its inhabitants, its genealogy, and, more
generally, what might be called its cultural and symbolic attributes. In the process,
a grammar is invented that would make explicit the differences between this continent and the rest of the world.6 This grammar of difference not only sets Africa
apart, it also claims to state the conditions under which Africa could become part
of the universalizing project of modernity.
Three of these systems of knowledge in particular have endeavored to establish their authority over what Africa signifies. The first is Islam, itself a cosmopolitan project avant la lettre. As one of the most ancient repositories of African
identity, at least in some regions, Islam far predates the colonial moment in
Africa. It is made up of different traditions organized into brotherhoods at whose
core the religious elites reinterpret the Koran, teach it, and translate its protocols
into a juridical order that can be imposed on believers and nonbelievers alike.
Thus Islam operates as a formal technology of governance, as a figure of sovereignty, and as a fabric of subjects.7
Despite their diversity, these traditions have one thing in common: the central
role they give to faith in defining identity, politics, and history. In many respects,
they are bearers of an authority characterized by a desire for mastery and the
potential for conquest. The rules of governance, the rituals of belief, and the
modalities of trade are all linked to one another. Indeed, if anything distinguishes
Islam from other religions in Africa, it is the way in which the rituals of piety
echo the rules of war. In seeking to impose itself, the Islamic faith does not
6. See Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 209 43. For a recent study of this process, see Johannes Fabian, Out of Our
Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000).
7. See Nehemia Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels, eds., The History of Islam in Africa (Athens:
Ohio University Press, 2000).

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eschew the use of force or even a certain aesthetics of violence. Holy wars and
forced conversions are legitimized by the need for moral righteousness. Where
forced conversion takes precedence over voluntary membership, a master-slave
relationship is superimposed on the relationship between believer and infidel.8
While the laws of religion define the modalities of belonging and exclusion,
the observance of religious precepts is the condition for admission into an imaginary nation whose physical and symbolic boundaries extend far into distance:
the umma. Outside this domain consisting of the community of believers, its
towns, caravans, merchants, and scholars, there is only impiety. Everything and
everyone located beyond the limits of the world of the Revelation (the dar alIslam or the empire of Islam) can therefore be plundered or is in principle destined for slavery. The new lands that have to be opened up to Islam constitute,
strictly speaking, the dar al-harb, the land of war. Notwithstanding this belligerent impetus (along with the desire for wealth and the materialist brutality that is
its corollary), Islam, in its penetration of Africa, presents itself to the converted
as an ethical project in and of itself.9
The second system of knowledge is Christianity. Right from the beginning,
the Christian narrative of Africa is dominated by the motif of darkness. Theologically speaking, darkness constitutes a primordial tragedy if only because, in
the state of darkness, the truth is shrouded in all kinds of superstitions. According to the Christian narrative, Africa is the metaphor par excellence of the human
fall into a state of sin. Inhabited by human figures bound in the shadow of night,
Africa is seen to live at a distance from the divine.10 Indeed, this is the essence of
paganism: disguise and masks, a lack of discernment, a corruption of being.
Christianity replaces the belligerent impetus characteristic of Islam with
another figure of violence: that of mercy and of pity. The Christian project of
deliverance involves throwing off the chains, that is, separating the world of
appearances and falsity (sin) from the truth (redemption). For appearances feign
a presence. And it is this presence that must be awakened. Christianity thus
rejects a material life, empty of all moral and aesthetic content, and an unchang8. Martin A. Klein, Social and Economic Factors in the Muslim Revolution in Senegambia,
Journal of African History 13 (1972): 41941.
9. See John O. Hunwick and R. S. OFahey, eds., Arabic Literature of Africa, vol. 1, The Writings
of Eastern Sudanic Africa to ca. 1900, comp. OFahey (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994); vol. 2, The Writings
of Central Sudanic Africa, comp. Hunwick (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995).
10. Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, Christianisme sans ftiche: Rvlation et domination (Paris:
Prsence africaine, 1981).

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ing world, populated by masks and fetishes, a multitude of profane objects and
crude human forms.
The proposed alternative is an initiation into the truth, a key to happiness, and
a promise of a new life. In doing so, however, the world of allegory characteristic
of pagan existence is not simply eradicated. Christianity establishes a new relationship between that world and the world of the event. The event is the promise
of redemption. Redemption consists of a set of ideas that, because of their ability
to enchant, could be defined as magico-poetic. This is true of the resurrection of
the dead a sublime dream dominated by the desire for absolute time, the infinite expanse of both the time and space of immortality. For this promise of
redemption to be fulfilled, a dissolute existence (tradition and custom) must be
abandoned. Conversion to revealed truth entails, in turn, a genuine work on the
self (travail sur soi), the erasure of any distinct and separate identity, the abolition of difference, and the adherence to the project of a universal humanity.11
Colonization is founded on a similar universalizing project. On a rhetorical
level, colonization is the daughter of the Enlightenment. As such, colonial rule is
supposed to operate as a regulating mechanism that ultimately leads to the triumph of universal reason. In this instance, universal reason presumes the
existence of a subject by the same name, whose universality is embodied in his or
her humanity. The recognition of this common humanity is what enables each
individual to be considered as a juridical person in civil society. The colonial
order formalizes two mechanisms that organize society and politics, both justified by reference to reason: the state and the market. The state appears first in its
primitive form, that of commandement, before turning into a device for civilizing
morals. The market first enters into the indigenous imaginary in its most abject
form: the traffic in human beings.12 It then gradually transforms into a machine
for the production of desires. Soon after the Second World War, the colonial system presented three other kinds of goods to the colonized citizenship, civil
society, and the nation-state to which, however, it denied access until its final
phase. Like Islam and Christianity, colonization is a universalizing project. Its
ultimate aim is to inscribe the colonized in the space of modernity.

11. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: La fondation de luniversalisme (Paris: Presses universitaires de
France, 1997).
12. Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730
1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).

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The Power of the False

On the Power

Since the second half of the nineteenth century, African discourses of the self
have challenged the legitimacy and the truths of the narratives proposed by these
three systems of knowledge and have sought to dislodge the canon instituted by
them. And yet, in attempting to delegitimize these orders, nativist and Afro-radical
narratives still subscribe to the postulate of difference, even if they distance
themselves from the most crude and most brutal aspects of the Western grammar
of alterity. Indeed, it is in the name of difference that they oppose the thematic of
the universal, even the thematic of modernity, regarding these as no more than a
series of subterfuges intended to disguise the violence of imperialism.
Nativist and Afro-radical discourses of the self are both projects of self-regeneration, self-knowledge, and self-rule. Self-knowledge and self-rule are justified
in the name of autochthony. According to the argument of autochthony, each spatioracial formation has its own culture, its own historicity, its own way of being, and
its own relationship with the future and with the past. Each has, as it were, its
own certificate of origin and its own telos. In all cases, the idea is that the
encounter between Africa and the West resulted in a deep wound: a wound that
cannot heal until the ex-colonized rediscover their own being and their own past.
How to explain this fixation on the past and this frenetic claim to the status of
victim? One reason is that as a dominant trope of nativist and Afro-radical discourses, the past is imagined as not only the home of the truth of the self but also
the site of its falsification through the violence committed by the Other. To summon the future, one must first unlock the past, or more precisely, break the
chains that link that past to a demonic lie: the supposed existence of a hole at the
very heart of the African being.13 A horrific thought, the hole invokes the contested humanity of the African on the one hand and the apparent meaninglessness of his or her life, labor, and language on the other.
However, for African criticism to accept the filling of the hole as the ultimate
taskthat is, to designate as African thinkers only meaningful task the denial of
the originary negationis to be inhabited by and spoken by the demon of the
Other. The task today is therefore to think for and from oneself. Despite what
nativism and Afro-radicalism and have led us to believe, thinking for and from
oneself cannot be separated from thinking about and for the world. To think for
and from oneself means abandoning a practice that restricts intellectual and
philosophical inquiry in Africa to being nothing more than the repression of a
13. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell,
1997).

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fantasy written on ones own consciousness by someone else and internalized to

the point of compulsive repetition. As the essay suggested, thinking for and from
oneself in the world requires two approaches. The first is political philosophical.
Indeed, the fact is that the history of continental Africa does contain in its
midst an element of terror, a cavity, which is not that which Hegel and the others
call ontological. The cavity in question consists, over the longue dure, of a collection of dead things and masks, a litany of horrors which, taken to their extreme,
almost always produce half-human, half-animal figures that have the particular
characteristic of devouring themselves. This auto-devoration is the absolute signifier. It is the power of the negative near which a truly radical thought must
dwell. While not the only language, philosophy might allow African criticism to
radically confront the material nature of this power, its brutality, and its familiarity with death. It might allow us to get to the roots of things and to ask ourselves
why, in Africa, the struggle for human sovereignty and the satisfaction of biological needs almost always seem to go together with orgiastic participation in different forms of human destruction.
Asking this kind of question is not, strictly speaking, Afro-pessimistic a
red flag waved by those afraid of radically confronting the abyss at those wishing
to escape the dead end of developmentalism and populist romanticism. Indeed,
the urgency today is to restore a separation on an intellectual level between the
desire to know and to think and the urge to act. The two moments are both legitimate, but there needs to be a line of autonomy between them. Perhaps we can
then avoid those simplifications (who is the victim? who should be blamed?) that
are always stressed at the cost of critical thought. It might eventually be understood that there are several figures of the struggle, and not all can be colonized
by those whose single aim is the satisfaction of biological needs.
Multiplicity and Proliferations

The other approach to thinking for and from oneself is historical. In fact, if
nativism and Afro-radicalism fixate on the past and envisage a correlation between
geography (an accident) and destiny, the effective practices of social actors proceed according to the principle of composition. The nativist thesisthat an eternally open wound resulted from the encounter between Africa and the world
does not withstand examination. Contemporary African cultural formations have
not emerged out of peoples experiencing the past as a fate set in stone; rather,
they often derive from an ability to treat the past both as open-ended and as an

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interlude a negotiation of those aspects or fragments of the past necessary for

life to go on in the present.
Likewise, Africans have responded to the Islamic project by means of creative
assimilation. In these cultures marked by orality, the hegemony of the Book is
made relative. The doctrinal core is reinterpreted and recited in a way that largely
leaves open to negotiation the question of what constitutes an Islamic society or
government. Leaving such a question open may in itself be regarded as a refusal
to bring closure to the encounter. Muslim Africa also produces its own reformers.
Many are healers, others are warriors or merchants. Scribes, scholars, jurists, and
even slaves build the terrestrial polis and reinterpret the texts inherited from the
Prophet, their eyes fixated on earthly commodities and, in some cases, lured by
sex, luxury, guns, and power. Paying attention to the myriad details of the location
and the situation, they rewrite Islam itself as well as African identity, often in
unexpected ways, in a daring commerce with the world.14 Several varieties of
Islam and political cultures of the religious emerge from this process.
At the core of several of these traditions of Islam, the state is only one example of the possible forms of social organization legitimized by the Prophet. In
other traditions, it is the political authority itself that is shrouded in suspicion.
Does it not risk corrupting the religious? Elsewhere, the Islamic organization of
the polis is not based on inherited status but on spiritual submission to the sheikh.
Elsewhere again, voluntary membership of the brotherhood takes precedence
over religious conscription. In all cases, the plurality of doctrinal responses is
evident both from a theological point of view and from the point of view of popular practices. Ultimately, a pedagogy based on memorization gives birth to a
religious and profane culture in which a complete mastery of the Arabic language is unnecessary and where esoteric signs carry as much, if not more, weight
than do objective realities.15
Two factors explain this fluidity. The first involves the ability to extend and
disperse across space and thus negotiate long distances. In West Africa, for
example, several networks link the Arab-Berber and the Negro-African worlds.
The brotherhoods are dispersed around geographical poles from which they can
expand outwards. Migrations and long-distance trade are therefore organized
across borders and even across continents. However, whatever the degree of

14. Mamadou Diouf, The Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Making of a Vernacular
Cosmopolitism, Public Culture 12 (2000): 679702.
15. Louis Brenner, The Esoteric Sciences in West African Islam, in African Healing Strategies,
ed. B. M. Du Toit and I. Abdalla (New York: Trado-Medic Books, 1985).

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estrangement and mobility, the bonds of remembrance are always linking the
migrant to a place of origin. Hence, identity is formed at the interface between
the rituals of putting down roots and the rhythms of estrangement, in the constant
passage from the spatial to the temporal, from geography to memory.16
The second factor is the mimetic spirit. The cultural history of Islam in Africa
is marked by an extraordinary power of imitation and an unparalleled ability to
produce resemblances between different signs and languages. African Islamic
cultures are formed by assembling signs, symbols, and artifacts that mean different things in various languages and contexts and by organizing them around multiple central tropes that then function as both an image and a mirage, as a parable
and an allegory. As a result, because it succeeds in weaving onomatopoeic relations between the religious dogma and what denies it in the practice of everyday
life, Islam is the most perfect archive of resemblance in the history of contemporary African cultural formations.
Compared to the longue dure of Islamic presence on the African continent,
the osmosis between Christianity and indigenous symbolic forms is relatively
recent. African responses to Christianity as a universalizing project are, however,
no less complex. African Christian theology has, since its beginnings, crystallized around the notions of loss, division, and the obliteration of identity that supposedly resulted from the encounter between Christian dogma and the indigenous universes of meaning. History and recent anthropology, however, reveal a
very different picture. Far from leading to the erasure of the self as feared by
African theologians, Christianity, without being divested of its principium rationis, was turned inside out, deconstructed, and then recovered in the ancestral
masks and bric-a-brac. As an event, it first emerged in the Africans consciousness as a field of signs that, once decoded, opened the way to numerous unorthodox practices.17
Africans used Christianity as a mirror in which to view their own pasts, presents, and futures. This to a large extent explains the apparent ease with which
Christianity was domesticated and translated into local systems of intelligibility.
At the same time, Christianity presented itself to Africans as allegory and aesthetics, hence the immense work (travail) on forms and languages to which it was
subjected. One of these languages is that of the Holy Spirit. The other is embod-

16. Sophie Bava and Cheikh Gueye, Le grand magal de Touba: Exil prophtique, migration et
plerinage au sein du mouridisme, Social Compass 48 (2001): 42130.
17. Compare Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 2, The
Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

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ied in the idea of the resurrection of the dead. The power of the latter metaphor
lies in its tragico-poetic depth, its dreamlike violence, and its capacity for symbolization. On the one hand, it became the manifestation, in all its splendor and
misery, of the limits of the divine principle itself: the story of a god whose existence ends on a cross. On the other hand, it expressed in its absolute force the
power of enchanting human life in that which is most intangible: the triumph of
a man endowed with all the attributes of divine sovereignty, whose omnipotence
bursts forth on the night of his death, as he leaves the sepulchre (resurrection). In
most charismatic movements in contemporary Africa, these powers of enchantment and of symbolization are used as an inexhaustible resource. They are powers that enable the believer to think of his or her existence not in a purely politicoinstrumental way but as an artistic gesture and an aesthetic project open as much
to action as to meditation and contemplation.18
Conclusions

Three conclusions explicit and implicit can be drawn from the above argument. First, the examples quoted are enough to demonstrate the limits of nativist
and Afro-radical writings of the self. They show that there can be no discourse on
identity formation in contemporary Africa that fails to take into account the
heretical spirit at the heart of the encounter between Africa and the world. It is
this heretical spirit that enables the subject to inhabit several worlds and to place
him- or herself on two sides of the image simultaneously. This heretical spirit
operates by encasing the subject in the event, by splitting, dividing, multiplying,
and converting things into their opposite (or their fake), and by the excessive theatricality accompanying all manifestations of life. It is also this heretical spirit
that, taken to its extremes, produces situations of extraordinary instability,
volatility, and uncertainty. If, as the nativists and the Afro-radicals contend,
Africa has been falsified in its contact with the world, how do we explain the falsification to which Africa subjected the world, in its attempt to ingest it?
Second, these examples suggest that the experience of radical uncertainty is at
the heart of contemporary processes of identity formation in the continent. In
fact, in Africa today, life may suddenly take unbearable turns (war, extreme infla-

18. Compare with Michel Foucaults discussion of the Christian techniques of the self (disclosure
of ones faults and desires, exhibition of humility and modesty, renunciation of bodily pleasures, and
cure of the soul through confession and other sacraments) in Michel Foucault et al., Technologies of
the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (London: Tavistock, 1988).

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tion, pandemics, etc.). The starkness of the violence and the crudity of the brutality may, on occasion, assume a nightmarish appearance, as reality and fable
reflect each other, thereby transforming the very identity of the original and its
referents. Each time, reality is erased, recreated, and duplicated. It is this power
of proliferation (and its ability to obliterate the notions of truth and falsehood, of
the real and the unreal, of the visible and the occult) that characterizes contemporary African experience, which is at least original, if not unique. These characteristics are threefold: an absence of sharp ruptures, a nonlinearity, and everywhere the swirling chain of fragmented events in which everything else is
engulfed.
I should make it clear that, in such contexts, the debt between the rulers and
the ruled is rapidly transformed into a debt of blood. Therefore, politics understood as the manipulation of the fear of dyingor the manipulation of the desire
to live at any cost represents the most radical vector of uncertainty. Politics
becomes the means by which this fear and desire assert themselves in each individual. From this point of view, politics is a work of death since a relationship of
relative equality is established between the capacity to kill and its corollary, the
possibility of being killed in return.
This being the case, what relationship is there between language and what is
called truth? What coefficient of truth can be granted to the sign that is Africa,
which I said, right at the start, was above all a geographical accident? The examples quoted above indicate that there will always be a part of the sign that
escapes the prison of our discourse. How, then, do we enrich the discourse so that
this accidental sign can be represented as closely as possible? This requires
developing a technique of reading (lecture) and writing (criture) that would also
be an aesthetic of opening and encounter.
But these are fragmentary encounters ephemeral, disjointed, and occasionally unsuccessful encounters with fields of knowledge and discourses outside
of social sciences stricto sensu. This criture must itself be closely linked to a
way of reading (lecture) the archives of the present. The latter include not just
philosophy, economics, or sociology but also visual, sung, painted, and narrated
texts. These texts form part of the present memory of African societies. They
come out of a particular practice of everyday life and constantly feel and nurture
that life. Reading them means understanding the power of falsification at the
heart of the memory of yesterday and of today. This memory includes in its
diversity the experience that contemporary African subjects have of power, language, and life.

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Achille Mbembe is a senior researcher at the Institute of Social and Economic

On the Power

Research at the University of the Witwatersrand. His latest book is On the Postcolony (2001). African Modes of Self-Writing appeared in the winter 2002
issue of Public Culture.

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