Africa rising - Hope or impossibility?
The concept of ‘Africa rising’ poses crucial questions. How can Africans ‘rise’ when they do not possess the thing that allows them to enter the world of Beings seeking sustained economic development? How can they achieve economic growth in the global political economy when the very idea of ‘economic growth’ is counter-defined against them? How can those who are the quintessential slave within the world’s collective imagination ‘rise’?
In summary, this paper has attempted to re-orientate the reader's understanding of ‘African development’ by demonstrating the ontological impossibility of ‘Africa rising’. The paper has explored the analogous nature of the foreclosure of Subjectivity from the human classified as Black/African, and the foreclosure of economic growth from nation-states deemed Black/African. This thought exercise inevitably raises some questions, one of which pertains, for example, to the notion of ‘south-south development’. If the relational structure of Slavery and Black Social Death, rather than colonialism, is what positions African states vis a vis non-African states within the realm of the libidinal, how can ‘cooperation’ be conceived of in the realm of political economy? In other words, can we truly speak of a mutually beneficial union between a Socially Dead entity such as Angola, and a Socially Living albeit economically degraded entity, such as India?
Another question which this paper’s line of enquiry raises concerns the earth-shattering implications of a Blackened discourse for the discourse of Development and IR theory. Stated differently, are proponents of the various commentaries on the ‘Africa rising’ concept, and ostensibly the world, prepared to begin moving in a politically masochistic manner, that is against the concreteness of their very existence,[40] towards reconceiving economic development, as well as its various theoretical scaffoldings, as fundamentally antagonistic and non-homologous to, rather than complimentary to Africa? The day these questions truly begin to get answered is perhaps the day the world as we know it begins to end.
By Frank Fanon