ACHILLE MBEMBE ON NEOCOLONIALISM

Achille Mbembe reviews the forms and malformations of state power in Africa from the colonial times. In a post colony of this kind, then, he is  concerned with the ways in which state  power, creates,  through its  administrative  and  bureaucratic practices,  a world of meanings  all its own, a master code which,  in  the process of becoming the society's  primary central code, ends by  governing  the various logics that  underlie  all  other meanings within that society; attempts to  institutionalize its  world of meanings as a 'socio-historical world  and to make that world fully  real, turning it  into a part of people's common  sense not only by instilling it in the minds of the cibles, or target population, but also by  integrating it  into  the  consciousness of the period.
 Of the colonial period, Mbembe identifies four main properties of commandment that still remain in today’s Africa and argues that, the office should come from a heart-felt recognition of the continent’s woes and should not coincide with a desire to entertain the West.First, state power is always a departure from the principle of a single law for all. Second, it confers privileges and immunities on multinational companies and agencies, privileged groups and individuals, n thirdly, it conceives of itself, on the basis of an imaginary of thestate as the organizer of public happiness, and finally, its instruments and institutions are hardly designed to attain any public good. The failure of civil society and the rise of lawlessness in national life arise from this biasness in the relations of power and speeds the process of decomposition of postcolonial African states through an implosion. He weighs the available options and the abuse to which these remain prone because of consequences such as dissociation of Africa from formal international markets.He refers to  those  elements  of the obscene  and the grotesque that Mikhail Bakhtin claims to have located in  'non-official'  cultures  but  which  in  fact  are  congenital to  all systems  of domination  and  to  the  means  by which  those systems  are  confirmed  or deconstructed. He demonstrates how  the grotesque and  the  obscene  are  two essential  characteristics  that identify  postcolonial  regimes of  domination. We can come to understand  that  the postcolonial  relationship is  not primarily a relationship of resistance or of collaboration but can best be characterized  as illicit  cohabitation,  a relationship made  fraught  by the very fact  of  the  commandment and its subjects  having to  share the same living  space, there  is  the question of the absurd and the  obscene being used as means of erecting, ratifying or deconstructing  particular  regimes of  violence  and domination.