Long read essay on Africa

July 7, 2016 6:52 AM

Africa In The New Century

An essay by the Cameroonian philosopher and post-colonial theorist Achille Mbembe. Entitled “Africa In The New Century”, the essay advances one of the most profound arguments yet for the growing—if still marginalised—hypothesis that the future of humanity is being subsumed by the future of Africa.

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posted by infini (15 comments total)

It's long, interesting, slightly disjointed, but I am struck by the fact that against all recent advice, it seems the author cannot help but "refer to Africa as a country", comparing it's GDP, for instance, to Russia and Brazil. I thought we weren't supposed to do that anymore?
posted by OHenryPacey at 7:35 AM on July 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

I would defer to Dr. Mbembe on this - I believe a lot of his research deals specifically with how the West conceives of Africa the continent as a whole, so those comparisons are deliberate.
posted by ChuraChura at 7:52 AM on July 7, 2016 [6 favorites]

I think regardless of whether or not we should clump all the countries in Africa into one joint statistic to describe economic tendencies throughout the continent, it's nice to see/hear that there are major progress being achieved in recent years. Is this enough? Maybe not, but any good news is welcome.
posted by LarryMan at 8:14 AM on July 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

I like "long-reads," but this author's writing style is as un-compelling as it gets.
posted by kozad at 8:17 AM on July 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

Race has once again re-entered the domain of biological truth, viewed now through a molecular gaze. A new molecular deployment of race has emerged out of genomic thinking.

This is also not at all supported by current genomic thinking and ultimately deeply fucking racist in addition to not especially coherent.

We can demonstrate that race is itself nearly useless as a lens through which to understand human diversity except in how easy it is to collect data and how it remains the only consistent lens through which study participants understand the information they have about their own heritage. Thus there is indeed a conundrum facing genomic researchers in that that while race is both fundamentally and inherently flawed as a scientific model, it is temptingly easy to use anyway to add depth to work otherwise being done. The use of racial concepts in the scientific literature has indeed increased over the last decade or so, but that is largely because we need to reference those older concepts in order to understand their relationship to the better understandings of human diversity that replace them.

Over the last year or so, the Human Genomics has been doing a lot of soul searching about the frameworks with which data should be collected, the context with with race should be understood with relation to genomic data and conclusions, as well as what results mean in social, philosophical, and political contexts. I'm no post-colonial theorist, and would have no idea where to begin with judging the main content of this dude's work, but he clearly hasn't been following the global discussion on the relationship between genomics and race well enough to coherently summarize or critique it. No one, but him it seems, is talking about building new post-genomic constructions of race to replace old calipers with new primers.

Also no one worth talking to, save perhaps George Church when grumpy, is talking about using the much hyped technology with the potential to edit human germline cells to create new races of human and recent international agreements are heading that shit off.
posted by Blasdelb at 8:18 AM on July 7, 2016 [13 favorites]

I've tended to have this same challenge when faced with perusing articles written by the continent's scholars. So often and so commonly that it made me pause and wonder whether it was simply an entirely different cultural style in narrative that I was facing, given my own Anglo education. Now I feel that I should attempt to read it as it stands, and accept it as a continent wide cultural difference. Its not always easy though.
posted by infini at 9:00 AM on July 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

There is a reasonable TLDR provided by the author:

Firstly, that Africa is gradually perceived as the place where our planetary future is at stake—or is being played out—is due to the fact that, all around the world and especially in Africa itself, older senses of time and space based on linear notions of development and progress are being replaced by newer senses of time and of futures founded on open narrative models.

Secondly, within the continent itself, Africa’s future is more and more thought of as full of un-actualized possibilities, of would-be-worlds, of potentiality. Many increasingly believe that through self-organization and small ruptures, we can actually create myriad “tipping points” that may lead to deep alterations of the direction the continent is taking.

Thirdly, in fact, it has of late been a matter of tacit consensus, especially among international financial institutions and experts, that Africa represents the last frontier of capitalism.

I tend to agree with all of these points, although I would argue that they are much older ideas now being applied to Africa (or some analysis thereof) rather than a novel circumstance. The deeper root of all three is that (possibly aside from China) the future of Africa is not thought of as a grand project of Empire, but the consequence of Enterprise.
posted by ethansr at 9:33 AM on July 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

I particularly like this image from the FPP that Blasdelb posted. On the left, you see how to sample human populations in order to prove that races, like, totally exist. On the right, you see how to sample human populations to see how human populations blend into one another, with no demarcated races. We are a species of clines, not clades.
posted by clawsoon at 9:56 AM on July 7, 2016

This is also not at all supported by current genomic thinking and ultimately deeply fucking racist in addition to not especially coherent.

We can demonstrate that race is itself nearly useless as a lens through which to understand human diversity except in how easy it is to collect data and how it remains the only consistent lens through which study participants understand the information they have about their own heritage. Thus there is indeed a conundrum facing genomic researchers in that that while race is both fundamentally and inherently flawed as a scientific model, it is temptingly easy to use anyway to add depth to work otherwise being done. The use of racial concepts in the scientific literature has indeed increased over the last decade or so, but that is largely because we need to reference those older concepts in order to understand their relationship to the better understandings of human diversity that replace them.

so uhh... an American calling a black African writer "racist" has some problems, yes?

but it's not clear to me that you actually understand the scientific issue involved here. you seem to want to say that older taxonomic categories, like "race," have no objective meaning wrt current "data-science" based genomics. but data science is nothing but a set of generic mathematical taxonomies for classifying *any* sort of data (including that latest fad of multilevel "neural" convolution nets AKA "deep learning.") modern genomics doesn't actually involve any sort of "objective" categories ie. there's no reason why, in principle, you couldn't code a way to define, say, "black African" using only genomic data. which is why you have creeping racialism in modern genomics.
posted by ennui.bz at 10:56 AM on July 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

Or specifically while genetic researchers may reject "race" there are companies that will give you a DNA test and present the results as "you are X percent European, Y percent African, Z percent Native American."
posted by atoxyl at 11:10 AM on July 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

Which is likely quite poor science but if this is his quote

And yet the core racial typology of the 19th century still provides the dominant lens through which this new genetic knowledge of human difference is understood—and , indeed, is taking shape and entering medical and lay conceptions of human variation.

I'm not sure he's quite right about "medical conceptions" but I think he is about "lay conceptions."
posted by atoxyl at 11:19 AM on July 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

"so uhh... an American calling a black African writer "racist" has some problems, yes?"

If misrepresenting genomic science to support the position that a new scientific racism, which genomic researchers aren't actually proposing, has a molecular basis can't be called racist then I'm not sure what can. Words mean things.

"but it's not clear to me that you actually understand the scientific issue involved here. you seem to want to say that older taxonomic categories, like "race," have no objective meaning wrt current "data-science" based genomics. but data science is nothing but a set of generic mathematical taxonomies for classifying *any* sort of data (including that latest fad of multilevel "neural" convolution nets AKA "deep learning.") modern genomics doesn't actually involve any sort of "objective" categories ie. there's no reason why, in principle, you couldn't code a way to define, say, "black African" using only genomic data. which is why you have creeping racialism in modern genomics."

Scientific theories in a proper sense are not really formulated to be wrong or right in some hypothetical objective sense, though they can also be that, but are focused on being something fundamentally different - useful.

For a theory to be a useful one, it must be validated by solid data from diverse sources and approaches, explain natural phenomena, and be useful for making verifiable predictions of what those phenomena will do. For example, the theory of evolution by natural selection is all of these things while the theory of Intelligent Design is only able to explain phenomena based on unrepeatable and subjective reasoning. That does not mean that creationism as a representation of who we are through a metaphorical description of where we come from is stupid, bad, or even unreasonable. However it does mean that as an explanation of natural phenomena it is unverifiable, and more importantly, fundamentally not useful for understanding the natural world. This is the biggest reason why Intelligent Design has no place being taught next to or as a viable replacement for the extraordinarily useful theory of evolution in a science classroom. To do so would be to fail to teach science, which is more than just the collection of facts our teachers tried to cram into us once upon a time, but the practice of trying to describe the natural world in a way that is useful to understanding it.

Similarly, Plato's geocentric model for understanding the heavens was very wrong, and can only be made to fit when you've got really terrible data, but its wrongness is trivial next to its uselessness for explaining why the celestial bodies move the way they do. Even then, it is broadly still useful to this day for things like pointing telescopes as the reasons why things move are only so relevant to tracking their movements and pointing at them. Tycho Brahe's geocentric model for understanding the heavens, is an example of how a theory could be pretty right but still useless, where Brahe, motivated by his own understanding of the Bible, worked desperately to incorporate his data into a model that would keep the Earth at the center. He used his data and Kepler's mathematics to construct something that was many orders more complex and that ended up being more or less just the same thing as Kepler's model - just spinning around on an Earth centered axis for no empirically discernible reason. It wasn't any more 'wrong' than Kepler's model was in a meaningful sense as it could still be used to predict the motions of the celestial bodies in more or less the same way, at least once the couple of his mathematical errors were fixed. The difference Occam's razor makes between the two systems does something ontologically weird but powerful though, where his basic model would have been both correct and be able to make predictions, but the inherent distortion would have made, for example, the Law of Universal Gravitation impossible to discern from Brahe's confused equivalents to Kepler's laws.

The goal of building models for understanding human diversity needs to be usefulness, not some warped idea of 'rightness' precisely because we could very easily use SNPs to do what Dr. Mbembe is proposing and you are worried about, all while having the results all feel very 'right.' We would end up layering human diversity onto a map of our prejudices just like Brahe layered the stars onto a map of his understanding of the Bible, only the consequences of the mistake would be much greater. The scientific community has already done exactly this stupid thing before, just with sillier data gathered from caliper measurements of noses and skulls, and we ended up with pseudoscientific justifications for perpetrating some of the greatest catastrophes mankind has ever suffered. We can do better now, we are currently doing better now with a necessarily complex debate on the place or lack thereof of race in genomic science, but this essay's racist ignorance is at best an embarrassment to this man and his field.
posted by Blasdelb at 11:32 AM on July 7, 2016 [6 favorites]

Or specifically while genetic researchers may reject "race" there are companies that will give you a DNA test and present the results as "you are X percent European, Y percent African, Z percent Native American."

there's no reason why, in principle, you couldn't code a way to define, say, "black African" using only genomic data. which is why you have creeping racialism in modern genomics.

Saying that a genetic test could tell you something about your ancestry or certain physical traits which we use to construct "race" (for instance, skin color, hair color or texture, or eye color) is quite different than the proposition that those traits can be used to meaningfully determine where your particular constellation of alleles falls in the broader spread of human genetic diversity.
posted by pullayup at 12:35 PM on July 7, 2016

Saying that a genetic test could tell you something about your ancestry or certain physical traits which we use to construct "race" (for instance, skin color, hair color or texture, or eye color) is quite different than the proposition that those traits can be used to meaningfully determine where your particular constellation of alleles falls in the broader spread of human genetic diversity.

But does the average person understand the difference? Blasdelb is defending actual biological and medical research against the charge of racialism by saying that professionals in those fields are actively trying to sever ties to the 19th century racial framework - and he's probably right. At the same time I think it's also true that the tools and language provided by those fields have been and we be used in a way that reifies that framework - which is something discussed in one of his own links so I'm not sure there's actually that much disagreement here?
posted by atoxyl at 4:15 PM on July 7, 2016

Originally presented in a lecture series and later compiled in The Philosophy of History (Germany, 1837), Hegel adds: “The Negro … exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state. We must lay aside all thought of reverence and morality—all that we call feeling—if we would rightly comprehend him. There is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character.” Hegel then promises himself not to ever mention Africa again, for “it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit.” What we properly understand by Africa, he concludes, “is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature.”

That's even worse than it sounds, if you think about what history means for Hegel. He means "movement or development" of reason, not of events. He literally thinks that Africans are like animals, mentally.
posted by thelonius at 5:52 PM on July 7, 2016 [1 favorite]