Thomas M Blaser of Africa Is A Country in conversation with Achille Mbembe:
What Africa needs to pursue is becoming its own centre, and putting its people to work for this. As I was saying, re-imagining a new policy of mobility which implies internal migrations, formations of new diasporas, linkages with old ones, and a redirection of energies in order to tap into energies coming from other places in the world, such as Brazil, India, and China.On the continent's contributions:
When we look at the cultural history of the continent, it seems to me it is characterized by at least three attributes that can be conceptually deemed creative. The first one is the idea of multiplicity. Look at any single thing on the continent, it always comes under the sign of the multiple: the idea of one God is totally foreign to the continent, there have always been many Gods; the forms of marriage; the forms of currencies; the social forms themselves always come under the sign of multiplicity. One of the tragedies of colonialism has been to erase that element of multiplicity which was a resource for social development in pre-colonial Africa and which was replaced by the paradigm of ‘the one’, the kind of monotheistic paradigm. So how do we recapture the idea of multiplicity as precisely a resource for the making of the continent, its remaking, but also for the making of the world? Another important concept that we haven’t explored much, but which comes from the African historical cultural experience is the modes of circulation and of mobility, of movement. Almost everything was on the move. It was not at all true as Hegel, and those who rely on him, intimated that Africa was a closed continent — not at all. It was always a continent that was on the move. So that concept of circulation is something that can also be mobilized to show what it is that can come from this experience. I spoke first about multiplicity, second about circulation, and the third concept is composition. Everything is compositional — in the way the economy is lived on an everyday basis. You mentioned Ubuntu: meaning the process of becoming a person, a certain proposition, not about identity as a metaphysical or ontological category as in the Western tradition, but as a process of becoming as a relation; a relation in which the ‘I’, meaning the subject, is understood as being made and remade through the ethical interaction with what or who is not him. In fact, the idea that other is another me, the other is the other only to the extent that he or she is another me. That the other is not outside of myself, I am my own other to a certain extent. So there are a whole set of areas where Africa’s contribution to the world of ideas and praxis can be highlighted for the benefit for the world with implications for all sorts of things: theories of exchange, theories of democracy, theories of human rights, and the rights of other species, including natural species, in this age of ecological crisis. It is work that has not been done, but it is time that we are doing it.More here