NATIONAL LIBERATION AND POPULAR EMANCIPATION

The truth which the event of Haiti 1804 opened up was that of the political emancipation of colonised African peoples, the idea of independence and the formation of African nations achieved by people themselves through their own efforts. It was indeed with the struggles for African independence in mind that C.L.R. James wrote his Black Jacobins (James, 2001: xvi). And it was the idea of the nation that lay at the core of independence and post-independence political subjectivities; in times of struggle it was understood as a pure affirmation, but with the advent of state formation it was to be proposed as a social category. The sequence of the National Liberation Struggle (NLS) mode of politics lasted approximately from 1945, the date of the Pan-African Congress held in Manchester, up to say 1975, 1973 being the year of the assassination of both Amílcar Cabral and Salvador Allende (Hallward, 2005). During this period a particular subjectivity developed through which national liberation and freedom were jointly thought in Africa in a specific manner. What makes the following investigation of the NLS mode necessary is that ‘nation’, the category through which freedom was thought is, in Lazarus's terms, a circulating category, a category of politics as well as one of social science. In my terms, ‘nation’ can either be an ‘excessive’ or an ‘expressive’ category. I propose to look at the relations between the idea of the nation and emancipation primarily through the work of Frantz Fanon and, to a lesser extent, of Amílcar Cabral.