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PART 1

THINKING POLITICAL SEQUENCES: FROM AFRICAN HISTORY TO AFRICAN HISTORICAL POLITICAL SEQUENCES

Perhaps we should say today that, insofar as politics is concerned, the real will only be discovered by renouncing the historicist fiction – in other words, the fiction that History is on our side.

– Alain Badiou, À la recherché du réel perdu, 2015 (my translation)

An event is the sudden creation, not of a new reality, but of myriad new possibilities, none of which is a repetition of the already known. This is why it is obscurantist to say ‘this movement demands democracy’ (meaning the kind we enjoy in the West) or ‘this movement demands social improvement’ (meaning the middle prosperity of our petty bourgeoisie). Beginning from practically nothing, resonating everywhere, this popular upsurge creates unknown possibilities for the entire world.

– Alain Badiou, Le Réveil de l’histoire, 2011 (my translation)

Does history begin only from the moment of the launching of the phenomenon of class, and consequently class struggle? To reply in the affirmative would be ... to consider – and this we refuse to accept – that various human groups in Asia, Africa and Latin America were living without history or outside history at the moment when they were subjected to the yoke of imperialism.

– Amílcar Cabral, Presuppositions and objectives of national liberation in relation to social structure, 1966 (Unity and Struggle, 1980, emphasis in original)

The people and the people alone are the makers of universal history.

– Alain Badiou, Le Réveil de l’histoire, 2011 (my translation)