In this essay, I am concerned with two interlinked phenomena. The first is the variegated manifestation of socio-political and economic tropes of privilege, status, and social differentiation in which overt and covert relational codes suffused with racial semiotics and histories are implicated. The second is the connection, causal and cultural, between this racialised discursive and interactional landscape and racial projects and idioms that are either unacknowledged as racial or whose racial properties are assumed to have expired with the oppressive racial practices and encounters of a colonial past.
Mapping Africaās imbrication in insidious racial aesthetics entails connecting postcolonial systems of identification and social differentiation, which have their ultimate origins in the discursive and social legacies of colonisation, to particular examples of far-reaching colonial racial projects, which foreground current pathologies. Much of the discussion below does this analytical mapping. The analysis is foregrounded by the contemporary ubiquity of structural, historical racism; its persistence in contemporary African political economy and cultural politics; its crude tyranny; its ongoing capacity to structure social relations and allocate privileges and marginality; its tendency to devalue, discriminate, and displace those outside the Euro-American universe of whiteness; and its ability to normalise its tropes. The last section of the essay explores the discursive and textual agency of African actors who have modified, elaborated, expanded, and instrumentalised the languages, idioms, and residual privileges of colonial racialism and white privilege.
On this point about the discursive and gestural complicity of Africans in postcolonial forms of racism, it is important to stress that the argument is not about Africans consciously participating in the perpetuation of racist institutions and idioms that diminish their humanity. Rather, it is about highlighting the racist genealogy and the benign racism of accepting and expressing the idea that the acquisition or embodiment of personal distinction, prestige, and moral virtue by black people qualifies them as civilised and exempts them from racist descriptors, a standard of moral perfection that is elusive and never expected of white people as a condition for recognising their humanity. The notion that, if black people exhibit high moral character and conform to standards of respectability defined by the prevailing white power structure, they would overcome their alleged inferiority and come to be perceived as civilised and worthy of rights, dignity, and recognition, what Ibram Kendi calls uplift suasion,1 is itself a kind of racism, albeit a benign one. It is prevalent but unacknowledged in Africa.
Africa cannot be essentialised into one category of being, so I preface my arguments here with caution about the limits of generalisation. However, even when we acknowledge Africaās infinite differentiation, its reality as an imaginary of colonial and postcolonial solidarity, and its dizzying ethnic, racial, religious, cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic diversity, we often do not think of race as being part of a range of practices and semiotic indices implicated in political and social processes on the continent. This is understandable but inaccurate. There is a pervasive discourse of Africa as a non-racial continent, where racial thought, racial discourse, and racial practices are rare, and where the signs and instrumentalities of race are aberrations.2 This is of course a problematic assumption even if you set aside the obvious pitfall of generalising an entire continent into one neat racial taxonomy.
With the exception of South Africa, where citizens of multiple racial heritages interact daily and where an explicitly racial apartheid order elicited an equally avowedly racial response from non-whites, Africa is often understood as a continent of black people, who make sense of differences between themselves largely through other identity markers such as ethnicity, religion, culture, and language. The persistence of racialised slavery and of other manifestations of Arab anti-blackness in Sudan, Mauritania, and in North African countries has not mitigated the monolithic narrative of Africa as an ethnic rather than a racial continent.3 Nor has this tendency to write race out of African identity discourses been tempered by a recent batch of illuminating studies pointing to the colonial and postcolonial aftermaths of African multiracial lives, to forms of racial reckoning, and to persistent racial signs and their intertwinement in histories of enslavement and oppression.4
Does this discursive erasure of race in favour of ethnic and cultural identification preclude the presence of racialised idioms and practices in the quotidian and sociological profile of contemporary Africa or does it mask a hidden corpus of racial signs and symbols? The argument of this chapter supports the latter proposition. The dominant Africanist literatures on the processes and imaginaries of solidarity, community, privilege, and self-making tend to deny the presence of discernible racial or neo-racial tropes capable of structuring lived African experiences. To posit the language of race is often to render oneself susceptible to charges of importing Western colonial frames of difference into discussions of postcolonial Africa.
The invocation of racial discursive registers even for purposes of analytical analogies tends to invite claims that such invocations racialise geographies of identification and social relations that are nonracial. Such was the case recently when, writing on the 2015 xenophobic attacks on African āforeignersā in South Africa, Achille Mbembe argued that black South African expressions of xenophobia index a variant of racial pathology derived from a narrative of national chauvinism that is itself located in a notion of exceptional South African blackness.5 South African black exceptionalism, Mbembe argued, is derived from, and animated by the white South African exceptionalism and nationalism that provided ideological sustenance for Apartheid. One commentator who typifies the widespread discomfort of Africans and Africanists with intra-African discourses of race, admonished Mbembe to āstop using the word racism when discussing black on black crime in Africa.ā6
To advance the social consequences of racialisationāthe process by which racial and neo-racial meanings are constructed, appropriated, recalibrated, and given utilitarian social valenceāis to risk being accused of misrecognising other social phenomena as racial manifestation. This racial denialism runs deep. Racial conversations about Africa tend to devolve into the past tense, framed by colonial realities pitting undifferentiated European colonisers and similarly undifferentiated African colonial subjects against each other.
When it comes to Africa, race and its discursive offshoots are often understood only in this relational, dramatic, adversarial context of encounters between weak, noble Africans and racist, domineering Europeans. Even in this context of the colonial and early postcolonial relational framing, the denial of race and its resonance is rife, prompting Mahmood Mamdani to isolate and critique two strands of this racial denialism: scholars who ascribe the formation of racial and neo-racial thought and discourse to colonial intellectual and administrative projects, and those who privilege the agency of African elites that purportedly appropriated colonial ethno-racial modes of differentiation.7 Another aspect of this scholarly blindness to race in Africa is the tendency to erase the ethno-racial significations of events and phenomena by applying other descriptive registers to them. One example: the bloody 1963 racial coup that overthrew the Omani Arab oligarchy in Zanzibar was re-christened a āsocial revolutionā by some scholars.8
The afterlives of past racial regimes in the present are rarely rigorously explored either. Although fairly prevalent across postcolonial Africa, cartographies of white privilege, of vestigial idioms of whiteness, and of racial vocabularies disguised as less-charged lexicons command little recognition as forms of racialism, as manifestations of residual racism. Contemporary Africans, several decades removed from the colonial past, are often credited with little racial awareness or expression. The narrative is simple: postcolonial Africans have no capacity to understand and express race or to even recognise racism because they come from non-racial societies. It is taken for granted that Africans ādiscoverā race when they migrate to racialised societies such as the United States, where they are racially educated through statutory demographic classification, social interaction, and quotidian experience into a recognition and understanding of race and racism.
The concept of a non-racial postcolonial Africa seems sensible on the surface, for how can race be meaningful in the absence of large-scale, consistent relations between people of difference races? How can race function or make sense in the absence of sustained quotidian race relationsāin the absence of statutory racial difference? Although this question is now considered irrelevant and passĆ© in conversations about race and racism in other contexts,9 in Africa it is posed in a rhetorical sense, with the answer presumably embedded in the question.
It is true that in racially homogeneous societies, and absent the racial hegemony of colonialism, race becomes a blur, and citizens in such a society can only develop a theoretical understanding of race based on the literatures and visual texts of racial societies, as opposed to an understanding of race founded on lived experience. Africa is however neither racially homogenous nor discursively autonomous of the racial strictures of its colonial experience. It may be true that contemporary Africans, especially those born after political independence, have few personal connections to their countriesā histories of colonial racial oppression. One result of this disconnect is a shabby appreciation for the racist horrors of colonisation on the part of postcolonial Africans. However, experiential race consciousness or its absence says little about the prevalence of stealthy, hidden, and thus unrecognised racial tropes and signs, the focus of this essay.
Moreover, the idea that race, racism, and racialised modes of social relations reside in a colonial past truncated by nationalist triumph is coterminous with the notion that racial and neo-racial forms of understanding the self and the Other were creations of colonialism. Both problematic postulations hold paradigmatic epistemological sway over attempts to understand contemporary Africa, but what if we moved away from the colonial framing of race and from the idea that race can only manifest through dramatic encounters and tensions between different races? What if, instead of fixating on race as a relational phenomenon forged only in the crucible of interracial interactions, we see it rather as something subtle, invidious, banal, and disguisedāsomething that is powerful precisely because it is seldom visible, acknowledged, transparent, or self-referential. What kind of racial realities would such an intellectual shift reveal for Africa?
This chapter attempts to unravel this subterranean, quotidian zone of racialised realities in contemporary Africa while foregrounding it in colonial registers of race-informed discourse and in colonial spatial projects that manifested and animated race. First, I survey the current epistemological landscape of race in Africa as a way of establishing a baseline for my exploration of quotidian signs of race, racism, and racialisation in postcolonial Africa. Adapting insights from critical race theory to Africa, I argue that postcolonial Africa is suffused in quotidi...