Post-Covid-19 Africa: The Great Transition

In a column that we are publishing, Achille Mbembe, professor of history and political science at the South African University of the Witwatersrand, calls on Africa to “a great transition” that is social, economic and political in order to ensure its survival and the safety of its inhabitants.

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This column - as well as other points of view of experts, thinkers, artists or sportsmen - is published within the framework of special days “  After the Covid-19, a new world?  », On May 8, 9 and 10, on RFI's radio and digital antennas.

At this time, no one can say exactly how this tragedy will end. What will come out of it is even more vague. Uncertainty notwithstanding, we know at least one thing.

It is another ordering of the world and other power struggles that are taking place. Other geopolitical faults will soon crystallize. Africa must organize a "great transition" as soon as possible if it is to ensure its survival, its security and the prosperity of its inhabitants.

Still it must be understood that the current drama is more than a health crisis. Many researchers, scientists and other authorized voices have been sounding the alarm for a very long time. Humanity has reached a critical point, and the planet is on the verge of a major disturbance. 

This deregulation, they have continued to predict, will not be a simple crisis, similar to those that we have known before. It risks appearing to run out of fuel, because what is now in jeopardy is the balance of the planet's natural processes.

And here we are. Or almost.

During the weeks of confinement, we had the leisure to observe it: it is the engines of the world themselves which are this time affected. These engines are not only factories and factories, infrastructures and logistics, in short the abstract economy to which the living must be opposed. It is first of all human beings, the human population. But it is also the whole of the biosphere, from living species to metals of all kinds, from forests to oceans, pathogens to all kinds of microbes. These are all the engines of life, starting with the air we breathe, whose indicators are red.

The most serious, no doubt, is the speed with which humanity is destroying the ozone layer. It is the concentration, in the atmosphere, of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane. And what about extremely held dust, toxic gas emissions, invisible substances, fine granulations and particles of all kinds? Soon there will be more carbon dioxide in the air than oxygen.

With regard to Africa in particular, it is the depletion of fishing stocks, the degradation of mangroves, the increase in nitrate flows and the alteration of coastal areas. It is also the sale of forests, agricultural spreading, artificialisation of soils, loss of rare species, in short, the destruction of the biosphere.

None of this is a coincidence. On the contrary, it is the inevitable outcome of a model of extraction and waste of the riches of the Earth which only survives thanks to the constant and uninterrupted combustion of fossil fuels, in a planetary technical and industrial device made up of globalized interconnections.

However, humanity will not survive if it continues to function on the basis of a continuous combustion of gigantic masses of energy which it is necessary more and more to go to seek in the bowels of the Earth. Such a model has only one purpose, namely an increased artificialization of existence. The virus is just a symptom of this mad dash to nothing.

So we need to pause, open our eyes, let ourselves be shaken and take some distance. Tomorrow cannot be just a repeat of yesterday. What Africa needs is a “great transition”.

We must radically attack the social, political and economic logic of extraction and predation. Prosperity is not synonymous with indefinite drain on human bodies and material wealth. It is about the quality of social ties, sobriety and simplicity.

The imperative today is deceleration and disaddiction. Such a program assumes that we work together, on a small scale, to relocate the economy. This new economy must be oriented towards local needs, those of basic necessity. Because, it is through the satisfaction of basic needs that we will restore lost dignity to all. Rehabilitating the locality, for its part, requires supporting the territorialized resilience practices that abound on the continent.

Africa has developed, particularly since the 19th century, hybrid forms of organization, whether in production or trade. This is not a weakness, but rather a strength.

To a large extent, it has escaped total domination both by capital and by the State, two modern and powerful forms which it has never ceased to defeat.

We must therefore return to communities and their institutions, their memories and their knowledge, their collective intelligence. In particular, it is necessary to learn from the way in which they used to distribute, still today, the resources necessary for human self-reproduction.

Because, alongside the official society, made up of internal hierarchies, benevolent or predatory, and the result of colonization, societies of peers have always existed. In these areas of the common and the in-common, resources are managed in a participatory manner, through open contributory systems, which are not limited to taxes.

These peer societies are governed by the double principle of mutuality and social negotiation. What can be said, for example, of multiple associations with social benefits? The so-called informal economy shows that many are driven by the desire to create something that is directly useful to those who contribute. They thus earn their living by producing added value for the market. Beyond exchange, it is therefore the development of productive communities that is important to foster.

Africa must enter, of its own free will, into a “great transition”. The objective of this transition would be to create the conditions for strengthening societal investment. It is necessary to reconfigure the balance between the market and the State, then the State and society, with a view to mutualisation. For a very long time, the state has been and still is dominated by a class of predators who use their positions of power within the bureaucracy to maximize personal profits. In its current formula, the State hardly reinvests in the maintenance and reinforcement of the generative capacities of the communities. 

We have to get out of an exclusively extractive and predatory relationship with the State and imagine a generative relationship, one that enriches the social. This rebalancing must be done in favor of all the productive strata of society, to the detriment of the bureaucratic strata and of the formal or informal armed force. In other words, speech, argument and persuasion must replace force.

In order to reverse the balance of power for the benefit of the productive strata of society and at the expense of rent-seekers, it is possible to rely on the generalized communication capacities released by new technologies and on the universal digital medium, provided that this instrument serves to increase critical faculties and capacities for self-organization, as well as the capacities to create and redistribute value.

Finally, governing now means ensuring, in our ecological environments, the most harmonious interaction possible between all living things. This must be the basis for refounding a new contract which would not only be social, but which would involve the other non-human inhabitants of the planet, individuals as much as species.

To a large extent, it is the very idea of ​​sovereignty that should be reinvented. The biotope (or even the ecosystem) should henceforth be the sovereign in the last instance. This was, moreover, the case in pre-colonial African societies.

The government of humans consisted in constantly ensuring the balance of the biotope. Human societies were those which knew how to welcome all other environments. Where they existed, the primary function of States was to provide social coverage for populations, particularly in the face of crises and risks of all kinds.

The crisis we are facing is not only health, but it is the symptom of a civilization crisis (…) I call for a great transition in Africa.

Achille Mbembe, professor at the Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg

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