Eugene W.

Holland 173

Anthropology at the Limits:

A Geneaological Re-Appraisal of
Colonialism in the Time of
Contemporary Globalization
Sanya Osha
University of Ibadan, Nigeria

T
he work of John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff is no doubt unique
in the field of African studies due to its learned multidisciplinar-
ity, scope, depth, and startling freshness. It is difficult to cover the
grounds made by their corpus within a single article, but an attempt can
be made to explain their insights into the nature and ramifications of
colonialism within the context of South Africa and also to demonstrate
why these insights are unique within the field of African studies. In addi-
tion, focusing on their work on globalization and the relation(s) of parts of
Africa to that millennial process shows that the colonial encounter, with all
its disruptive, reconstructive, and transformative processes, can be read and
constructed along certain thematic lines. In this way, colonialism within
the African context can be read into and from the dynamics of global capi-
talism with a cogent theoretical and empirical point of view. Furthermore,
it is possible to pursue this course in a way not found in the work of V. Y.
Mudimbe, Mahmood Mamdani, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, or Kwasi Wiredu.
Those theorists have all been concerned in a profound manner with the
historical antecedents of the colonial encounter and also its enduring con-
temporary effects, but none has developed as elaborate theoretical models
as the Comaroffs, who offers us fresh ways of linking the event of colonial-
ism with the current wave of global capitalism. It is this theoretical expanse

Research in African Literatures Vol. 34, No. 1 Spring 2003: 173–86

174 Research in African Literatures

and continuity that allow us to read the African predicament within and
outside the matrix of the contemporary global system.
Theoretical readings of the colonial encounter are often decidedly
rigid and discontinuous, thus precluding a satisfactory engagement of
the African continent with the processes of contemporary globalization.
The Comaroffs turn this state of affairs around, so that the African con-
tinent, even its position of extreme marginality and continuing periph-
eralization, can be inserted in interesting ways into the age of virtuality.
The multifaceted dimensions of colonialism can be understood through
volumes one and two of their on-going opus, Of Revelation and Revolution
(vol. 1, 1991; vol. 2, 1997). Their theoretical reflections on the processes of
contemporary globalization span several essays in which their insights are
complemented by the work of theorists such as Achille Mbembe and Arjun
Appadurai. The coupling of processes of colonialism with those of contem-
porary globalization offer unexpectedly vast apertures for inventive theo-
retical reconstructions of the event of colonization beyond its immediate
historical limits. Those processes transcend their limits in a way that they
continually reinvent the African postcolonial subject not only as a product
of historical colonialism but also as a participant in the millennial moment
whose central features she has not actively created but whose evolving and
transformative dynamics she is always subverting, replacing, and displac-
ing in local terms. Thus, for the African postcolonial subject, the history
and event of colonialism remain key parameters for the apprehension and
transcendence of the millennial moment.
The first volume of Of Revelation and Revolution begins with a sustained
discourse on the colonization of consciousness and the consciousness of
colonialism, pointing out that “[c]olonizers everywhere try to gain control
over the practices through which would-be subjects produce and reproduce
the bases of their existence. No habit is too humble, no sign too insignifi -
cant to be implicated. And colonization always provokes struggles—albeit
often tragically uneven ones—over power and meaning on the frontiers of
empire” (1: 5).
Arjun Appadurai explains how cricket as a seemingly harmless sport
became an elaborate instrument of the colonial enterprise and subse-
quently became an indigenized medium of decolonization when the time
came. This situation only underscores the fact that no habit or sign was too
insignificant for the “civilizing” and transformative imperatives of colo-
nial event. Although the Comaroffs claim that their study is “a historical
anthropology of the Non-conformist mission to Southern Tswana,” there
are obviously deep lessons to be drawn from their wide-ranging analyses of
the effects of colonialism as a whole. Furthermore, their study establishes
fresh guidelines for constructing similar productive genealogies regard-
ing the antecedents, nature, and continuing impact of various forms and
events of colonialism.
Usually theorists of colonialism are unduly schematic or disappoint-
ingly manichean in their analyses. The Comaroffs compel us to discard
our explanatory binarisms in favor of deeper and more nuanced modes of
analysis. For instance, what was the background and general culture of the
 Sanya Osha 175

missionaries who sought to transform Tswana land and how did this affect
their work and general outlook? What role did their involvement play in
changing the socioeconomic landscape in traditional Southern Tswana? In
between and within these general questions are to be found several chal-
lenges that oblige us to modify our strategies of theorization so as to enrich
our discursive practices. We are forced to pay much closer attention to
issues of race, class, sex, and gender within a constantly mobile conceptual
landscape than we find in other studies concerned with the consciousness
of colonization.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o offers radical critiques of colonialism and also
somewhat truncated options of decolonization. Mahmood Mamdani
explains the civic and ethnic spaces the postcolonial subject has to negoti-
ate in order to meet the demands of post-Enlightenment modernity. For
his part, V. Y. Mudimbe focuses on the textual and disciplinary invention,
or otherization, of the African colonial and postcolonial subject. All these
approaches are valid, but none of them is sufficiently deep or broad. We
need to carry out our interrogations not only between various conceptual
schemes, but also beyond them. This is one of the most obvious lessons we
derive from the Comaroffs.
As anthropologists, the Comaroffs concern themselves with how a self-
chosen group of Britons elected to work upon and transform the “passive”
black people of Southern Tswana:
[T]he essence of colonization inheres less in political overrule
than in seizing and transforming “others” by the very act of con-
ceptualizing, inscribing, and interacting with them on terms not
of their choosing; in making them into the pliant objects and
silenced subjects of our scripts and scenarios; in assuming the
capacity to “represent” them, the active verb itself conflating poli-
tics and poetics. (1: 5)
Also of note is that African subjects and problems continue to ghettoized.
To deghettoize things African means we have to construct a universally
acceptable vocabulary in theoretical terms. If this cannot be done, then we
have to incorporate already existing theoretical models that have univer-
sal applicability into our “modes of self-writing” (see Mbembe). Thus the
Comaroffs suggest that there are numerous gains to be made from some
of the more acute practices of critical postmodernism. What this ultimately
implies is that established archeologies of colonialism can be productively
subverted in view of the latest theoretical developments to increase not only
our layers of interpretation, but also enrich our ways of understanding.
Thus we shall profit by taking cognizance of the fact that “[w]hile signs,
social relations, and material practices are constantly open to transfor-
mation—and while meaning may indeed become unfixed, resisted, and
reconstructed—history everywhere is actively made in a dialectic of order
and disorder, consensus and contest” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1: 18).
Another concept the Comaroffs focus on, which was unsatisfactorily
formulated by Gramsci, is “hegemony.” They note that “the construct
remains under-specified and inadequately situated in its conceptual con-
176 Research in African Literatures

text” (1: 20). However, they transcend Gramsci’s conceptual shortcomings

in two key ways. First of all, they reformulate the construct, which they
define as “that order of signs and practices, relations and distinctions,
images and epistemologies drawn from a historically situated cultural
field—that come to be taken-for-granted as the natural and received shape
of the world and everything that inhabits it” (1: 23). Next, they establish the
difference between hegemony and ideology:
Whereas the first consists of constructs and conventions that have
come to be shared and naturalized throughout a political com-
munity, the second is the expression and ultimately the possession
of a particular social group, although it may be widely peddled
beyond. (1: 24)
An understanding of hegemony and ideology is shown to be necessary in
order to come to grips with the full implications of the consciousness of
colonization and the colonized consciousness. They are never completely
mutually exclusive since hegemony as a construct is always unstable and
vulnerable. Similarly, the colonizer and the colonized in spite of the forces
of hegemony and ideology are conjoined in often startling ways to produce
meaning and value. The colonized as such is not always the passive subject
she is often presumed to be:
“[N]ative peoples” seek to plumb the depths of the colonizing
process. They search for the coherence—and sometimes, the deus
ex machina—that lies behind its visible face. For the recently colo-
nized, or those who feel the vibrations of the imperial presence
just over the horizon, generally believe that there is something
invisible, something profound, happening to them—and that their
future may well depend on gaining control over its “magic.” (1:
31–32)
Just as the Tswana world and politics were transformed in all sorts of ways
by the colonial encounter, the world and politics of the colonialists did
not remain the same. The Boers (of Dutch, German, and French descent)
struggled with the British over the control of Tswana land. In more specific
terms,
the African communities along the frontier became the object
of struggle among white colonists with designs on their land and
labor and the Dutch Reformed Church had long opposed mission
work among the slaves at the Cape. Not unexpectedly, then, the
Nonconformists entered this troubled arena as marked men and
were soon drawn into the thick of the dispute. For they too were
competitors in the battle to gain control over black populations.
Fresh from an abolitionist climate, they tried to force the issue of
“native” social and legal rights upon the administration. (1: 45)
This scenario—in which various European nationalities participated in
the colonial process—was unique within the South African context since
the colonialists of other African regions were usually solely anglophonic,
 Sanya Osha 177

francophonic, or lusophonic. In Tswana land, the combustive mix of these

various European nationalities must have contributed immensely to the
strange brew that came to be known as apartheid.
The Comaroffs have also drawn well-deserved attention to the social-
political background of the evangelists who defined the shape and trajec-
tory of the civilizing mission. This background is not depicted with the aid
of anthropological or historical texts alone. Classic English literature is
employed as a credible source of information in the background of the cru-
sading evangelists. Daniel Defoe was aware of the formation of missionary
societies. Charlotte Brontë drew “deft strokes” of the missionary in fictive
discourse and it is pointed out that “Dickens called upon all his powers of
polemic and sarcasm to attack the very idea of missionary philanthropy,
and he dismissed Africa as irredeemably unfit for civilization” (1: 51). This
evinces the extent to which the public sphere in England was affected by
the missionary effort at the time.
It is emphasized that we need to be less partial regarding our analyses
of the encounter between Christian missionaries and African peoples.
Likewise, anthropological studies also need to focus on the sociopolitical
conditions that produced and directed European missionary activity. And
as noted recently, the literary context of the period is equally important
if we are to understand the numerous antecedents of colonialism in their
continuous and discontinuous forms. In short, “Wordsworth’s romantic
idealism, Defoe’s gentle skepticism, and Smith’s editorial cynicism; South-
ey’s polemical imperialism, Brontë’s fictional ambivalence, and Dickens’s
populist criticism” (1: 54) all provide crucial keys for understanding the
impulses that propelled Nonconformist missionary activity.
To accomplish analyses of sufficient depth and subtlety, it is necessary
to bear in mind that “the missionary encounter must be regarded as a two-
sided historical process; as a dialectic that takes into account the social and
cultural endowments of, and the consequences for, all the actors—mission-
aries no less than Africans” (1: 54). In the past, anthropological studies,
historical texts, philosophical constructs, and postcolonial themes gener-
ally excluded these crucial elements. One of the vital features in the work
of the Comaroffs, however, is their ability to carry out this two-sided project
of analysis.
The typical missionary who sought to change his fortunes and those
of Southern Tswana was often a product of the drastic socioeconomic
upheavals taking place in England. Accordingly, “[T]he industrial revolu-
tion, then, forged the particular sociological context from which arose the
clerical army of Nonconformist missionaries to the colonies” (1: 59). They
were also the “dominated fraction of a dominant class,” as propounded
by Pierre Bourdieu. In more ways than one, Christianity itself became the
site of intense political struggle. Consequently, it is important to bear in
mind that “from the moment that the church had, like other human agen-
cies, to negotiate its position in the world, its absolutist spiritual dominion
began to melt away” (1: 78). This weakening of the powers of the church
in Britain in turn intensified the drive to appropriate and reconstitute the
African world.
178 Research in African Literatures

But the Kingdom of God in Tswana also paved the way for the Empire
of Britain. Before the advent of the Empire of Britain in Southern Tswana,
we must remember, the clergy were caught in a struggle to raise above the
underclass and be counted among the bourgeoisie. They had little theolog-
ical education and actively sought to recreate an idyll of British yeomanry
within the seemingly virgin stretches of African lands or wastelands, as
the case may be. The epistemological and psychological framework that
defined the relationship between Britain and precolonial Southern Africa
is described thus:
[W]e witness the rise of a more and more elaborate model of
the relationship of Europe to the “dark continent”: a relationship
of both complementary opposition and inequality, in which the
former stood to the latter as civilization to nature, savior to victim,
actor to subject. It was a relationship whose very creation implied a
historical imperative, a process of intervention through which wild
would be cultivated, the suffering save. (1: 87)
And from this point on, the racist biases of the colonial enterprise begin
to pile up. Mungo Park, an important explorer, regarded “black men as
nothing” (1: 116–17).
An entire epistemology within Eurocentric discourse was initiated to
liken the African continent to a passive female body waiting to be pen-
etrated by the heroic European in “a spirit of improvement” and adventure.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., contends in his essay “Writing, ‘Race,’ and the Dif-
ference It Makes” that Francis Bacon, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and G.
W. F. Hegel were all great Western intellectual racists (73). Thus the epis-
temology regarding not only the mythological classification of the passive
African body (and landscape) but also the need for its urgent penetration
went along with a quite remarkable intellectual vocabulary. The Comaroffs
add that “the vocabulary of natural science was to strengthen and legiti-
mize the association of dark continents with black bodies and dim minds”
(1: 99) became a prominent mode of signification.
Georges Cuvier, a prestigious Swiss comparative anatomist, believed
qualities such as “self-awareness and control were underdeveloped among
non-Europeans” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1: 101). This sort of view con-
tributed immensely to the epistemology of the time in terms ascribing
tropes of gender and subjection to questions of race:
[I]n the late eighteenth-century images of Africa, the feminiza-
tion of the black “other” was a potent trope of devaluation. The
non-European was to be made as peripheral to the global axes of
reason and production as women had become at home. Both were
vital to the material and imaginative order of modern Europe. Yet
both were deprived access to its highest values. (1: 105)
Having explored the various contours of colonialism from both sides
of the racial divide, the Comaroffs begin to analyze the internal construc-
tion of Southern Tswana. Prior to that, they had depicted in elaborate
terms “a colonialism whose founding charter fixed contemporary images
 Sanya Osha 179

of nature and gender, race and reason, savagery and civility, into a compel-
ling mythological mosaic” (1: 116). They also carry out an intensive explo-
ration of the traditional Tswana before the intrusive excursion of colonial-
ism. Of that stable traditional world they write: “[A]n incessant stream of
political, social, and ritual acts reiterated the precedence of agnation over
matrilaterality, of males over females, of pastoral production over cultiva-
tion, of the dictates of the public arena over those of the domestic sphere”
(1: 137). That assessment more or less captures the nature of Tswana
society. Of course, within this broad context we encounter various tropes
of dominance and subjugation within and outside the domestic sphere,
continual struggle for chiefly control of the realm and its perpetual themes
of power, legitimacy, centralization, and decentralization. Such were the
sociopolitical tropes at play in Tswana society before the advent of the
colonial encounter.
The stage was set for the meeting of two worlds, “one imperial and
expansive, the other local and defensive” (1: 171). We are to note also that
“despite the fact that the colonization of the Tswana began with polite
ceremony rather than with a crashing military onslaught or a crippling
economic invasion, there was, hidden in the politesse, oblique forewarning
of later struggles” (1: 171). Those struggles had to do with control over local
resources and also human capital. Thus Tswana society was not exactly the
passive virgin territory projected by the Eurocentric imagination. Within
the seemingly pacific undercurrents of the initial colonial encounter loomed
the imperial figure of the evangelist:
The evangelist was an intrusive, forceful figure within the chief-
dom, a figure not subject, finally, to indigenous control. Not only
did his knowledge and technology challenge their categories, con-
ventions, and forms of creativity, but his commanding bearing also
contested existing lines of authority. (1: 196)
Soon after being admitted into the chiefdom, the primary task of the evan-
gelist became transforming the habits of the local people, removing the
detritus of a counterproductive culture, and replacing it with European
technological reason.
That decisive effort at cultural transformation on the part of the Non-
conformist missionary was extended into the sphere of language, a sphere
that has been the preoccupation of major theorists of decolonization such
as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Kwasi Wiredu. The Comaroffs describe this criti-
cal aspect of the colonization process in the following terms:
[T]he colonization of language became an increasingly important
feature of the process of symbolic domination at large. Indeed,
Setswana was to carry the lasting imprint of Christian Europe in its
lexicon. This was evident in the commandeering of everyday terms
like moruti (“teacher”), which took on the connotation of “minister
of the church,” and modumedi (“one who agrees”), which came to
imply “Christian believer” [. . .]; unlike badimo, these were subtle
acts of appropriation rather than bold mistranslations and hence
180 Research in African Literatures

were potentially all the more invasive. The process was also marked
by the use of Dutch and especially English loan-words for features
of the emerging colonial universe. (1: 218–19)
For the European linguistic scholar, the domestication and restructuring
of Setswana was a welcome challenge. It meant reducing a “folk” tongue
into some civilized, manageable form. In a similar vein, “[i]t was language
[. . .] that provided the fixed categories through which an amorphous cul-
tural landscape became subject to European control” (1: 222). In essence,
the conquest of Setswana as dialect should be perceived as a vital part of
what the Comaroffs have term “the colonization of consciousness.”
Contained in the colonization of consciousness were processes of con-
version:
“Conversion”, the ultimate objective of the Nonconformists, was
a process involving the removal of difference and distinction—a
process whereby the Tswana were to be assimilated into the moral
economy of civilized man, in which human worth was evaluated
against the single currency of absolute truth. Over the long run,
the process would not efface human differences but would extend
the European system of distinction over Africa, drawing its peoples
into a single scale of social, spiritual, and material inequality. (1:
244–45)
After sufficient physical and cultural penetration of Tswana political psy-
chology by the Nonconformists, the powers of the chiefs started to wane
because their previous control over tributary wealth, cattle, and serfs became
far less secure. Furthermore, European ways of seeing and doing things
had resulted in the chiefs’ loss of a monopoly over power and knowledge.
In overturning the powers of chiefs, the Nonconformists often con-
flated secular power with religious authority, which within the Tswana
context was quite different from European doctrines of separation of
powers. In Tswana society, the secular and sacred were fused to form a
cosmological totality. The Nonconformists’ intrusion in this realm was to
be extremely disruptive, because the chiefship, rather than being the sole
focus of authority, became one of two contending powers. Once that had
taken place, it was left for the Boers to assume control not only over the
lands but also over human capital. The seizure was almost total, and most
certainly brutal, due to the quest of the Boerish masters to transform the
physical landscape.
The Boers continued their brutal domination and exploitation of the
blacks of Bechuanaland, which eventually led to the first Anglo-Boer War,
between 1880 and 1881. Subsequently, in 1884 the Gladstone administra-
tion in Britain decided to install a protectorate over Bechuanaland. In the
end, the missionaries had done their bit for the colonizing process, but
they were not equipped, on the other hand, for the demands of realpolitik,
since it entailed a tough-minded secularism. A passage in the conclusion
of the first volume of Of Revelation and Revolution captures the very spirit of
 Sanya Osha 181

the colonial encounter in Southern Tswana, summarizing the impact and

ambivalences of the missionary encounter:
[T]he meeting of these two worlds was driven by a logic that tran-
scended—indeed, shaped—the explicit intentions of the actors
on either side. On the one hand, it was prefigured in the imperial
thrust of Europe into the non-European world, itself a product
of the postenlightenment imagination. The evangelists were not
just bearers of a vocal Protestant ideology, nor merely the media
of modernity. They were also the human vehicles of a hegemonic
worldview. In their long conversation with the Tswana, whether
they knew it or not, they purveyed its axioms in everything they
said and did. And yet despite this, they were themselves deeply
affected by the encounter. (1: 310)
The second volume of Of Revelation and Revolution continues the explo-
ration of the conversation between Africans and Europeans and how this
process marked both in a fluid context of hegemonic contesting, ideologi-
cal squabble, and religious argument. Another aspect of the Comaroffs’
work can also be examined—the South African postcolony in this age of
globalization. In that volume of their massive work, the Comaroffs con-
tinue their argument that the colonial encounter transformed both Euro-
peans and non-Europeans. In the same vein, it is interesting to note that “it
was in the confrontation with non-Western societies that bourgeois Britons
honed a sense of themselves as gendered, national citizens, as Godly, right-
bearing individuals, and as agents of Western reason” (2: 6). The develop-
ment of this line of thought further distinguishes their work from that of
other theorists (especially African) who concern themselves with the colo-
nial encounter. Undoubtedly, insights such as this are bound to change in
a significant way discursive approaches to the study of the encounter.
Still on the effects of the encounter, the Comaroffs state:
The encounter between Nonconformists and the peoples of the
South African interior, then, joined populations with divergent
cultural perspectives, dissimilar intentions, dissonant notions of
value—and distinctly unequal capacities to control the terms of
the unfolding relations. Not surprisingly, their early exchanges
initiated a protracted dialogue based in part on misrecognition,
in part on shared interests, in part on alliances across the very lines
that divided them. These parties acted as mirrors to and for each
other, refracting and reifying new orders of social distinction and
identity— and struggling to master the hybrid language, the swirl
of signs and objects, that circulated among them. (2: 6–7)
In the second volume of Of Revelation and Revolution,the very contradictions
of the colonial enterprise are unearthed on a number of levels and with a
variety of analytical registers. The Comaroffs argue about the missionaries,
for instance, that “in order to convert ‘natives’ into ‘civilized’ Christians
they had to make other into same, to erase the distinctions on which colo-
182 Research in African Literatures

nialism was founded” (2: 7). But what emerged from this religious encoun-
ter or argument, as the case may be, was “the reality of a creolized African
Christianity whose very vitality—often ascribed to the peculiarities of the
African ‘nature’—spoke to the Europeans of apostasy, even paganism”
(2: 7).
The Nonconformists nonetheless continually strove to impart the value
of honest toil among the converts so as to create God’s kingdom on earth.
For them, this was an important way to construct a moral and self-regulat-
ing civil society in Bechuanaland. This in turn “opened the door to the
liberal forces of Euro-modernism and industrial capitalism” (2: 9). But
even Western-style capitalism was not without its contradictions and inco-
herences, as the Comaroffs suggest:
[. . .] European capitalism was always less rationalized and homog-
enous than its own dominant ideology allowed; always more
internally diverse, more localized in its forms, more influenced
by moral and material considerations beyond its control—and,
finally, wrought more by its confrontation with the rest of the world
than by purely endogenous forces. Despite its own self-image and
its affinity for rationalization, it was shot through with the features
it projected on colonial others: parochialism, syncretism, unrea-
son, enchantment. (2: 11)
These are the kinds of issues the Comaroffs tackle in the second volume
of Of Revelation and Revolution. The construction of the colonial world was
never a harmonious or strife-free endeavor. Rather, it involved complicated
processes of construction that the colonial subject “contested, appropri-
ated, joined, turned aside, acquiesced” (2: 9). In short, it was a world pro-
duced by “hybridity, mimesis, and cultural fusion” (2: 13).
Quite a number of the theoretical tropes employed by the Coma-
roffs are obviously postmodernist, but again, such an enriched discursive
expanse definitely increases and improves our approaches to the analysis
of the colonial encounter. In both volumes of Of Revelation and Revolu-
tion, they manage to develop a number of analytical models that can be
employed in the study of various forms of colonialism. For instance, we
must always remember that the colonial encounter was never a one-sided
affair with the rational, civilized, Christian Nonconformist on the one
hand, and the passive, feminized colonial subject on the other. Further,
in analyzing the colonial encounter, we must study in equally broad detail
both the colonized and the colonizer: their sociopolitical backgrounds,
religious orientations, cultural affiliations, economic circumstances, and
cosmological outlooks. All those factors go a long way in deepening our
modes of analysis regarding the colonial encounter.

The African postcolony in the age of contemporary globalization

deserves to be studied and is being studied in interesting ways. The periph-
eralization caused by the decisive event of the colonial encounter bears
some resemblance to the forms of sociopolitical, cultural, and economic
disempowerment created by the unparalleled expansion of global capital-
 Sanya Osha 183

ism. In spite of the mechanics of exclusion created by the various manifes-

tations of Western capital, non-Western societies are also inventing new
modes of appropriation, rejection, and subversion. Again, tropes of hybrid-
ity and mimesis and also questions concerning cultural differences and the
meaning of value are being (for they need to be) reformulated for greater
relevance. The entrenchment of all kinds of inequalities within the global
system necessitates a rethinking of terms such as imperialism, domination,
and subjection. Similarly, terms such as gender, class, and race have to
be recontextualized within a far more complicated conceptual milieu. In
some cases our conceptual tools are simply inadequate and have to be dis-
carded, and in other instances we obviously need to modify and complexify
them in order to function in an increasingly complex universe.
We need to examine how the twin processes of colonialism and global
capitalism have continued to define the destiny of African territories.
Again, this is an area in which the Comaroffs have done considerable work.
The Cameroonian theorist Achille Mbembe points out that
[f]ar from being simple products of colonialism, current bound-
aries thus reflect the rivalries, power relationships and alliances
that prevailed among the various imperial powers, and between
them and Africans through the centuries preceding colonization
proper. (“At the Edge” 6)
The collapse of state order within the “strategic ghetto that Africa has
become in the aftermath of the Cold War” (Mbembe, “At the Edge” 10) is
an occurrence that most existing explanatory models cannot handle. To
be sure, strange processes are taking place. Apart from chronic economic
and institutional failure in the African continent, we also have to contend
with the widespread debacle of democratization experiments that in turn
have truncated in a fundamental way the project of modernization in most
parts of the continent. Consequently, according to Mbembe, disturbing
scenarios keep emerging:
Through the mediation of war and the collapse of projects of
democratization, this interlacing of dynamics and temporalities
leads to the “exit of the state”. It promotes the emergence of tech-
nologies of domination based in forms of private indirect govern-
ment, and have as their function the constitution of new systems of
property and new bases of social stratification. (“At the Edge” 10)
The informalization of many African economies is also creating strange
scenarios. A general tendency that Mbembe terms “disinstitutionalization”
is not only leading to the dissolution of the state but also the diffraction of
society. To understand in specific terms this process of disinstitutionaliza-
tion, it is important to note that
new forms of territorialization and economies of scale, movements
of money have accentuated fragmentation of national and regional
economic spaces. Whereas some spaces were evincing an advanced
de-monetarization, and even experiencing a return to practices
184 Research in African Literatures

of bartering or self-subsistence, others were entering an economy

based on the dollar, with unanticipated effects. (“An Essay” 7)
It would be interesting to give if only a passing glance at the contribution
of the Comaroffs to the understanding of these disturbing events in the
African postcolony. They point out that concepts such as citizenship, iden-
tity, nation-building, heritage, and patrimony are being recast even in the
light of the most mundane events as processes of transnationalization and
informalization continue to create ever newer instances of social stratifica-
tion and fragmentation.
A prolonged period of “debt, dependency and structural maladjust-
ment” has become the condition of existence after the political and eco-
nomic realities and after-effects of decolonization. Since we now inhabit a
universe in which market forces have been set free in a context of extreme
digitalization largely controlled by the West, Africans have to grapple with
a situation where
geography is perforce being written; in which transnational identi-
ties, diaspora, connections, ecological disasters, and the mobility
of human populations challenge both the nature of sovereignty
and the sovereignty of nature; in which “the network” returns as
the dominant metaphor of social connectedness; in which liberty
is distilled to its postmodern ontological essence, the right to
choose identities, subjectivities, commodities, sexualities, locali-
ties, and other forms of collective representation. (“Naturing the
Nation” 14)
The same processes of disinstitutionalization in addition to the diffraction
of society Mbembe dwells so much upon are also treated at great length
and with great sophistication by the Comaroffs. For instance, in relation to
existential conditions in the postcolony, they write:
Almost everywhere in the postcolonial world, it seems, community
and family are said to be widely at risk; the very existence of ‘soci-
ety’ is under scrutiny, called ever more acutely into question as
other kinds of attachment take precedence; regular, standardized
blue collar jobs are thought to be a fast-disappearing anachronism
in ever more labile material environments; masculinity is felt to
be compromised with the reconstruction of gender roles and rela-
tions. (14)
At the institutional level, they observe, “‘the’ state, an ever more poly-
morphous entity, is held, increasingly, to be in perpetual crisis, its power
ever more dispersed, its legitimacy tested by debt, disease, and poverty,
its executive control repeatedly pushed to the limit and, most of all, its
hyphen—nation—the articulation, that is, of the state to the nation, of the
nation—state—everywhere under challenge” (14).
These related developments can be construed as the outcome of glo-
balization, and the Comaroffs suggest an interesting theoretical possibil-
ity by relating, even if only obliquely, colonialism with the process. In the
 Sanya Osha 185

final analysis, they accomplish a theoretical consistency in explicating a

historical anthropology of colonialism coupled with proffering revelatory
insights about the processes—continuous and discontinuous—reconstitu-
tions and dysfunctionalities yet unfolding within the postcolony. All this is
accomplished keeping in focus important questions of indeterminacy and
contingency without the usual postmodernist excess. The matter of life
and death has become unduly vulgarized and has assumed too alarming
proportions in Africa to allow for such an excess.
When all is said and done, the Comaroffs establish the basis for a seri-
ous methodological reappraisal of various forms of colonialism, and in
concentrating systematic attention on the current wave of globalization,
they situate Africa in discursive centers that tend to be perpetually oppres-
sive and permanently exclusionary. Furthermore, not only has careful
attention been given the selection of discursive strategies suited for the
network of presentations about Africa, they have also deepened the modes
of analysis by which those very strategies may indeed become enduring
paradigms.
The precolonial subject’s encounter with modernity begins when she
becomes a colonial subject or when she is branded “native.” This apparently
simple act has an infinite scope of implications. An entire universe of rela-
tions and epistemic constructs is thrown into disarray. In other words, a
complete existential mode is reconstructed by coercion. Nonetheless, this
coercive process is not a one-sided affair. Victim and victimizer are trans-
formed in spite of the unequal relations. Hybridity and the eclectic ingredi-
ents of the newly evolving world are set into motion, creating new satellites,
languages, commodities, and beings. In short, a new mode of existence
is set in motion. Neither victim nor victimizer, colonized nor colonizer is
free from its transformative currents, from the tyrannical forces at work
and the equally vehement elements of resistance. John L. Comaroff and
Jean Comaroff encourage us to rethink the possibilities inherent in these
processes against a much larger backdrop than we had previously been
accustomed. In that way, we will come to appreciate that processes of force
and power once let loose mold and transform all beings, commodities, and
values in their way, including perhaps also their long forgotten histories.

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