'I owe a huge debt of gratitude to South Africa. At times I have been deeply frustrated by its provincialism, its small-mindedness, its hostility and shame in relation to blacks from elsewhere;the pipe dream it still nurtures of not being part of Africa.'
South Africa has been your home for many years. When you went there , it was still a country full of hope. At the end of apartheid, the project of a rainbow nation was seen to open up to a happy future.
As we speak, the country is unfortunately at great risk of finding itself in an intellectual and cultural cul-de-sac, unable to conjure up new imaginaries for itself, for Africa and the world. This atrophy of the mind worries me the most. But when you are confronted with students at the university, black students who still feel disprivileged, who still believe much of apartheid is still in place, what do you tell them? Do you tell them what you just told us?
We need to assemble diverse capabilities and learn how to intervene at multiple scales simultaneously. Demonising, vilifying and scapegoating opponents and those we disagree with, or calling for their blood, literally or figuratively, is not particularly “radical”. Visceral politics is but a form of witchcraft thinking.
Because of the kind of intellectual work I have accomplished, I am in a position strong enough to disagree openly with those who pretend that South Africa today is exactly what colonial Algeria used to be under French rule. From such a position, it is also easy to dismiss the politics of kinship and blood in all its forms or to unapologetically condemn the burning of libraries as a means to contest Western knowledge regimes.
But to call for a meaningful fight and for constitutive antagonism is not the same as advocating a politics of kinship and blood or even bloodshed itself. There is no choice but to deepen democracy, to recognise our entanglement with Africa and the world. Anything else is quasi-suicidal. By the end of the 21st century, Africa will have finally compensated for what it lost during those early centuries. It will have more younger people than any other region of the planet. Not all of them will be running away to Europe. We simply need to open the continent to itself and engineer a new historical cycle of repeopling it.
Whatever the case, were Europe genuinely determined to close itself off from the rest of the world or from Africa, the consequences would be colossal, of almost a genocidal proportion. Europe would have to implement deadly policies, which by the way are already experimented with in those laboratories the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara Desert have become.
Europe and America’s violence abroad is a key reason why people are forced to run away from places where they were born and raised, but which have become uninhabitable. And I doubt building walls around one’s nation-state is the most intelligent way of resolving the many crises we have contributed to fomenting around the world.
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