Achille Mbembe
reviews the forms and malformations of state power in Africa from the colonial
times. In a post colony of this kind, then, he is concerned with the ways in which state power, creates, through its
administrative and bureaucratic practices, a world of meanings all its
own, a master code which, in the process of becoming the society's primary central code, ends by governing
the various logics that underlie all
other meanings within that society; attempts to institutionalize its world of meanings as a 'socio-historical
world and to make that world fully real, turning it into a part of people's common sense not only by instilling it in the minds
of the cibles, or target population, but also by integrating it into
the consciousness of the period.
Of the colonial period, Mbembe identifies four
main properties of commandment that still remain in today’s Africa and
argues that, the office should come from a heart-felt recognition of the
continent’s woes and should not coincide with a desire to entertain the West.
First, state power
is always a departure from the principle of a single law for all. Second, it
confers privileges and immunities on multinational companies and agencies,
privileged groups and individuals, n thirdly, it conceives of itself, on the
basis of an imaginary of the state as the organizer of public
happiness, and finally, its instruments and institutions are hardly designed to
attain any public good. The failure of civil society and the rise of lawlessness
in national life arise from this biasness in the relations of power and speeds the
process of decomposition of postcolonial African states through an implosion. He
weighs the available options and the abuse to which these remain prone because
of consequences such as dissociation of Africa from formal international
markets.
He refers to those
elements of the obscene and the grotesque that Mikhail Bakhtin claims
to have located in 'non-official' cultures
but which in
fact are congenital to
all systems of domination and
to the means
by which those systems are
confirmed or deconstructed. He demonstrates
how the grotesque and the
obscene are two
essential characteristics that identify
postcolonial regimes of domination.
We can come to
understand that the postcolonial relationship is not primarily a relationship of resistance or
of collaboration but can best be characterized
as illicit cohabitation, a relationship made fraught
by the very fact of the
commandment and its subjects
having to share the same living space, there
is the question of the absurd and
the obscene being used as means of
erecting, ratifying or deconstructing
particular regimes of violence
and domination.
