Who are the Wretched of the State?

Cetshwayo Mabhena

“The Devil, it must be remembered, is an import that came to Africa with missionaries and colonialism, before that he is a character that was totally unknown to us.”

There was bewilderment and a lot of scratching of the heads when in one of his public lectures at the University of the Witwatersrand Achille Mbembe made this allegation.

Africans had their definitions of evil and evil spirits before colonisation.

The Devil as a personification of evil was indeed not a known personage in African social and spiritual cosmology.

Importation and imposition of evil things in Africa and onto Africans is a historical and political business that colonialism did in Africa and in the larger Global South.

Multiple other devilish individuals, institutions, organisations and systems that have now been naturalised and normalised in Africa are actually colonial imports and impositions that need to be decolonised if the continent is to manufacture liberated futures and happy political and historical destinies.

Exporting and imposing evil in other parts of the planet is what the Euro-American Empire has done with perfection over the centuries.

Western imperialism and empire-building in the planet has itself been an epically devilish project of the centuries. Unlike the Devil, however, who from the start was named and known for evil other devilish imports and impositions of Empire have been constructed and circulated as public goods.

Coloniality of the State

It is Aristotle that deposited into political philosophy the notion that the State represents the highest form of good and happiness and should therefore be given ultimate power.

Further and much later than Aristotle it was the influential sociologist Max Weber who gave weight to the understanding that the State is the “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence within a given territory.”

Rememberably, Aristotle’s high and happy State excluded women, slaves and children that were considered outsiders to real human society. Weber’s powerful and hegemonic State also, in its right and might, excluded foreigners, immigrants, exiles and refugees that he considered pollutants and irritants that corrupted pure German society.

As soon as states are constructed and institutionalised they have always created, among the populations of the world insiders and outsiders, what Mahmood Mamdani canonically called “citizens and subjects.”

From their origins in the ancient West states were created by powerful people and groups for the purposes of governing, excluding and managing weak and peripheral individuals and populations.

It is in that way that states were not created for human liberation and happiness but for the conquest, domination, oppression and domination of peripheral persons.

The Violences of the State

We are by now used to what Thomas Hobbes influentially described as the “State of Nature” which was a barbaric state where life for unfortunate individuals that did not enjoy power and privilege was “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

It was the state of the survival of the fittest and the law of the jungle. We have also gotten used to what are called “states of emergency” where states allow themselves and are allowed within the world system to assume “full powers” and arbitrary use of these.

States of siege and martial law are known throughout the world as those times and places where, in the description of Judith Butler, life becomes “bare” and powerless people become disposable.

States are allowed and they frequently allow themselves to use the law itself to commit violences for the protection of power.

An interesting example is how such a heinous crime against humanity as apartheid was legalised, constituted and committed upon an entire black nation. Yes, apartheid was legal.

The other example is provided by the Nazi state.

As soon as Adolf Hitler assumed power he quickly, on that fateful 28th of February, claimed the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State which suspended the liberties of some people.

For a good twelve years the Third Reich used its legal stativity to commit mass murders.

It is a colonial paradox that state laws that claim to protect rights are actually the same laws that are used to commit wrongs.

Apartheid, for instance, was beautifully called “separate” development when in actuality it was the separation and discrimination of blacks for the purposes of under-developing them.

The State of Exception

We owe it to the artisanal Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben that peace is not the rule but an exception of the State. Agamben theorised the “State of Exception” as the ultimate and true quality and identity of the State as we know and experience it worldwide. The State of

Exception is a historical and political situation that occupies the “no-man’s land between public law and political fact.” It is the political legality of the illegal.

According to Agambeni the State of exception naturally arises from a State of Necessity where the law uses the law to suspend the law and commit illegalities and wrongs.

True it is also that not only states deploy the State of Exception but insurrectionists and resistance movements frequently get outside of the law in order to fulfil the law, which is to adopt unconstitutional means in order to ultimately defend constitutions, and turn themselves into the new states.

Contrary to the modernist, neo-liberal and postmodern pretensions that the nation-state is a modern and civil state that saved us from the primitive State of Nature and barbarism.

The present nation-state is not for the protection but for the attack of weak and powerless people.

The true nature of the state is the State of Exception where weak and vulnerable individuals and populations are rendered dispensable and “bare” bodies that can be disposed of. States as they are in the present world system are colonial and are here to harm and not help the weak and the powerless.

The Colonial unconscious and the Wretched of the State

The idea of “the state and the colonial unconscious” belongs to Professor Peter Hudson, the illustrious Wits political theorist who passed on a couple of weeks ago.

While the states, wherever they are found in the world claim to be in existence for the rule of law, order, peace and the protection of good, deep in their psyche, their unconscious, they stand for the opposite.

This is so throughout the globe even among the so called mature democracies of the world.

States of the Global South are even more colonial in that they are exports of the slavish and the colonial order that violently landed in the Global South.

I have previously written of The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 where western nations made peace among themselves and by international law bound themselves to eternal respect for each other’s sovereignty.In Berlin 1884-5 the same states agreed to violate the peace and sovereignty of peoples and communities of Africa by imposing colonial states and administrations on them and looting their labour and resources.

So, if the states in the West are states of “exception” the states in the Global South are states of the exception of the exception.

Western states are true nation-states because western nations, that is populations, enjoy protections, rights and privileges supplied by their states. States of the Global South are State-nations in that they remain colonial relics that were created to manage and discipline populations on behalf of Empire.

Salutes to Agamben and Mdala Hudson, may his intelligent soul rest in power, states in the Global South unconsciously advance an exceptionally colonial agenda where they are not managed by nations but manage nations and discipline them on behalf of the world system.

Peoples and nations of the Global South, refugees, exiles, immigrants and foreigners, paupers and peasants, and racial and ethnic minorities of the world are the true wretched of the states that live what Walter Mignolo called “dispensable bare lives.”

Like Lucifer himself that was imported into and imposed on Africa by missionaries, merchants and Empire builders, the State in the Global South is a colonial artefact that Empire imposed on us. There is no going back from the states, in truth.

They are here to stay but they can be decolonised, that is exorcised of the colonial habits and tendencies for which they were originally created and imposed on us by Empire.

The first step at decolonising the states and recovering them from their colonial origins is to ensure that state laws, institutions and systems are hammered and chiselled towards service to peoples and communities not political and economic elites that are easily the elected prefects of Empire that bully and discipline their people on behalf of the modern colonial world system of the present.

Africa and Asia can, with intellectual and political will, turn around their states to make them liberated Nation-Sates, and not the State-Nations that they presently are.

The decolonial gesture is not to imitate the West or to desperately seek to catch up with Euro-America but to give to ourselves and our populations what the slavish and colonial conquerors took away from us, that is liberation, power, privilege, prosperity and happiness.

We must be done being the wretched of the States!

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes for the University of the Free State: [email protected]