Achille Mbembe has argued that ‘what we call “Africa” could well be analyzed as a formation of desires, passions and undifferentiated fantasies,’ constitutive of a ‘subjective economy that is cultivated, nurtured, disciplined and reproduced.’ How do we approach and read the multiple narratives of deflation, waste and “consumption” that characterize both popular and scholarly observations of the contemporary expressions and politics of this subjective economy? And what sorts of cultural archives might we draw upon to engage in the reading of such narratives that include but are not limited to the roles and lifestyles of African elites? Indeed, these narratives invoke waste and “excessive” consumption as the signs of the moral depravity, “failure”, and “corruption” of African elites, usually operating under the auspices of autocratic, dictatorial leaderships. As a young social anthropologist from the continent, my intellectual project so far has focused on understanding the character and expression of postcolonial power by “studying-up”, to examine the complex political relations within which African elites are formed and exists.
In his article entitled “Provisional Notes” and the subsequent book On the Postcolony, Achille Mbembe brings a tradition of critical social theory to reflect on postcolonial sovereignty in Africa. In this theoretical project, Mbembe mobilizes the body in terms of both violence and jouissance (full enjoyment of the body’s senses) – as cardinal principles for understanding the nature and expression of freedom and power. Today, in both expert analyses and popular commentary, this logic of jouissance and “wasteful” consumption of national patrimonies by African elites seems unmistakable as a major current of critical discussion of an African “predicament.” Yet, if jouissance appears to be an organizing logic of postcolonial sovereignty, the appeal of Mbembe’s work was its demonstration of its multiple genealogies in colonial sovereignty or any sort of sovereignty tout court. In doing so, Mbembe also demonstrated the fruitfulness of the African literary imagination through the works of authors such as Sonny Labou Tansi and Amos Tutuola.
In this essay I am inspired by Mbembe’s (2001; 2006) theory of postcolonial power through the concept of jouissance as well as his appeal to African literary productions as a cultural archive. Focusing on representations of African elites in the early postcolonial state (circa late 1950s onwards), the essay attempts to read contemporary developments around African elites and the politics of excess/consumption as framed ethnographically in the canonical anthropological accounts of politics in the early African postcolonial state such as those by Lucy Mair as well as through the register of African fiction by Chinua Achebe’s No Longer At Ease (1960) and A Man of the People (1966) and Ayi Kwei Armah’s (1968) The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Such literary representations of elites in the early postcolonial state, I argue, prefigure the character of postcolonial jouissance as the expression of elite freedom and power in a manner that is highly valuable and complementary to anthropological ethnographies of that moment. My aim throughout is to inscribe this reading within ongoing scholarly conversations about the value of a growing rapprochement between literature (especially of the fictional genre) and anthropology. Such early African literature on postcolonial jouissance, I will propose, must be read within an ethnographic imagination of the postcolony at a moment that anthropological ethnographies failed to recognise the multiple registers of jouissance in the political practices of elites.