Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think
- Part 1 Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
- Part 2 Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
- Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2018
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think
- Part 1 Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
- Part 2 Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
- Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The tenacity, the wisdom and the courage of those who have been fighting for years, for decades, to bring change, or even the whisper of justice to their lives, is something extraordinary … There is something very disturbing about … [the] inability to credit ordinary people with being capable of weighing the odds and making their own decisions.
– Arundhati Roy, ‘The Trickledown Revolution’, 2010If you are serious about victory, about succeeding to humanize the world, even a little bit, then your struggle must be a living politics. It must be owned and shaped in thought and in action by ordinary men and women. If every gogo [granny] does not understand your politics then you are on the road to another top-down system. You also run the risk of being on your own in the face of repression.
– S'bu Zikode, Preface to Nigel Gibson's Fanonian Practices in South Africa, 2011Freedom is not identitarian; it is at the very least an inflexion of, at most a rupture with, the identitarian register, insofar as the latter is a prescription of the Other.
– Alain Badiou, ‘Séminaire 2011–2012’, 18 April 2012 (my translation)THE REBIRTH OF HISTORY IN AFRICA
The end of ‘the end of history’ was finally announced on a world scale in February 2011. That announcement took place in North Africa and subsequently in the Middle East. Popular upsurges of extraordinary vitality occurred, which brought back into stark relief what most seemed to have forgotten, namely that people, particularly those from the Global South, are perfectly capable of making history. The fact that this process was initiated on the African continent before it began to reverberate elsewhere is also worthy of note. The mass upsurge here was not of religious inspiration but quite secular, contrary to the thinking of the dominant perspective in the social sciences, which had been stressing the decline of secular politics in that part of the world since the 1980s. In fact, its closest predecessor had arguably been the mass movement in South Africa of the mid-1980s and not the revolution of the ayatollahs in Iran in the 1970s.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Thinking Freedom in AfricaToward a Theory of Emancipatory Politics, pp. 1 - 34Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2016