Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization, the latest offering from Achille Mbembe (from the Wits Institute on Social and Economic Research in South Africa) takes its title from a remark by the late Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), whose work has long been arguably the most central influence on Mbembe.

A substantially reworked and amended version of a monograph first published in French in 2010, it offers a profound meditation on the potentialities and limitations of what we know as decolonization, and a future vision of the proverbial planetary humanism made to the measure of the world as seen from Africa and the global South.

Common habits of thought have led us to think of decolonization as a new term, and the political, historical, and social processes it purports to describe as limited to the assertion of national and political sovereignty among previously colonized territories and peoples in the 20th century. These habits of thought have been and remain particularly prevalent among Western political scientists mired in Eurocentric assumptions about the world. Yet, as Todd Shepard demonstrated in his seminal The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (2006), the term has an etymological lineage going back to at least 1836. When Jan C. Jansen and Jürgen Osterhammel in their Decolonization: A Short History (2017) note that decolonization had its “most decisive phase in the middle of the twentieth century during the three decades following the Second World War” and that “as a political process, decolonization has by now passed into history,” they are of course technically speaking correctly.

At the same time, such a representation risks traducing what decolonization was and meant for formerly colonized people, as well as for politicians, activists, and intellectuals who brought about these epoch-making and world-historical changes.

In Western political science, a hitherto predominant but seriously flawed historical account of what decolonization was and entailed has represented decolonization—as Adom Getachew reminds us in her recent brilliant Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise And Fall of Self-Determination (2019)—as a natural outgrowth of Wilsonian liberal principles of self-determination, and as flowing naturally from the founding documents of the United Nations after World War II. The fact of the matter remains, colonial powers saw little contradiction between their own professed liberalism and the brutalities of colonialism, and one cannot and should not “disregard anticolonial nationalism as a site of conceptual and political innovation.”

In this revisionist reading of decolonization, with which Mbembe’s account is aligned, decolonization entails much more than simply what Mbembe describes as “a diffusion of Western models of popular sovereignty.”

Mbembe was trained as a political scientist and a philosopher. His important contribution to the by now sizeable body of academic literature on decolonization must be placed alongside important critiques of the canonical interpretations of decolonization within Western liberal political science and theory from recent years, such as Gary Wilder’s Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, And The Future of the World (2015), Getachew’s Worldmaking After Empire (2019), and David Scotts Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Memory, Justice (2014). For if anything, Mbembe’s revisiting decolonization as “a key moment in the history of our modernity” is animated by an intellectual urge to explore precisely the “world-making” and the “will to community” that decolonization entailed, and what potential lessons it holds for our troubled and dark present. Mbembe does so in full awareness of the historical failures of the African postcolonial elites, who were brought to power through decolonization to realize the critical humanist potential inherent in decolonization as a critical and epoch-making historical event. For, according to Mbembe, the humanist critique that enabled decolonization had “the idea that Western modernity was imperfect, incomplete and unfinished” at the heart of analysis. It was an “impossible revolution,” which resulted in “a form of domination that has been described as ‘domination without hegemony’ on the part of former colonial powers.”

As in his 2017 Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe does not in Out of the Dark Night operate with a one-sided, one-dimensional and institutional account of what colonialism was and entailed: “colonization was in many regards a co-production of colonizers and colonized.”  This introductory formulation points directly toward chapter one of Mbembe’s book, which bears the title “Planetary Entanglement.” For the Africa of the past, present, and future has in Mbembe’s vision—and contrary to the visions of Africa offered in the canons of Western political thought—never been a world unto its own, let alone pure and isolated. Inspired by John L. and Jean Comaroff’s Theory From The South (2012), Mbembe argues that “the Southern Hemisphere” is “perhaps the epicenter of contemporary global transformations” and that there may in fact be “no better laboratory than Africa to gauge the limits of our epistemological imagination.” What is in Mbembe’s view pre-figured in developments in Africa and its experiments in neo-liberal deregulation is nothing less than the future of global capitalism itself. And this is in Mbembe’s optics a bleak future characterized by a growing crisis of reproduction in which human lives are increasingly rendered as devalued, superfluous and expendable forms. Africa offers us tell-tale signs that capitalism in its neo-liberal form is increasingly sutured from and incompatible with democracy. Mbembe does not fail to register the fact that Africa has become an experimental playground for the global rise in power and influence of China, but one wishes perhaps that he would have had more to say about the ambiguities involved in that for a great many Africans.

If any thinker is indispensably central to Mbembe’s account in this monograph, it is once more Frantz Fanon. For according to Mbembe, Fanon is “one of the very few thinkers who have risked something that resembles a theory of decolonization.”  Chapter two of Out of the Dark Night, entitled “Disenclosure,” is dedicated to an analysis of Fanon’s account of decolonization as “a hermeneutics and a pedagogy.” And in this chapter, Mbembe really demonstrates why he is one of the most original and insightful interpreters of Fanon’s life and legacy in our times. The categorical error of post-colonial elites that Fanon cautioned against was, as Mbembe duly reminds us, to take European models of capitalist development, popular sovereignty, and self-determination as their models. Decolonization for Fanon, was ideally about “provincializing Europe” and its claims to represent universal history and reason, and the creation of a new form of planetary humanism by starting from a tabula rasa and creating the proverbial “new Man.” Mbembe refers to this as “an ascent into humanity,” which he defines as “a new beginning of creation.” What Mbembe here advocates for is a return to the sources of what Aime Cesaire famously described as a “humanism made to the measure of the world” in the works of Fanon and other key thinkers in the Black Atlantic tradition in order to envision new and alternative futures beyond nationalism, racism, and environmental devastation.