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‘ provides a powerful critique that Africa-
centrism in no way needs to reject universalism. Indeed, the danger that Ato
Sekyi-Otu points to in his original book is that we reduce Africacentrism to
ethnophilosophy and, therefore, reduce its range as if it were only a local philo-
sophical perspective. This is a well-argued and clearly written defense of uni-
versalism without in any way undermining his powerful critique of eurocentrism.
It will be an important book in many diverse fields from anthropology, sociology,
and political science, to key departments in the humanities such as comparative
literature and philosophy.’
Drucilla Cornell,

‘Ato Sekyi-Otu’s is that rare intellectual gift-

offering that one encounters between long gaps: elegant in conception, astute in
its execution, and proffering some serious revisions to the entire landscape of
African thought. His propositions on the relevance of a left universalism for
conceptualizing an ethics of African identity are going to set the terms of the
debate not just in philosophy but well beyond. It is superb.’
Ato Quayson, Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of
Transnationalism

‘This book is a much-needed text in contemporary political philosophy written

by a giant in African political thought. It addresses the unfortunate tendency to
treat key theoretical concepts such as universality and individuality as imports into
the African context instead of part of the already critical discourses of African
societies. Through skillful analysis and a sober understanding of theory as addres-
sing reality, Ato Sekyi-Otu takes on many classic tropes of postmodern political
theory and avowed anti-liberalism. He brings to the fore core insights of revolu-
tionary theories of social change in which the outrage at degradation entails
antidotes of dignity, respect, and transformation of social and material conditions
that impede their potential. Here, political science meets philosophy, literature,
sociology, history, and more, because, as should be evident, none alone could
address the gravity and scope of this problem without ignoring disciplinary
shortcomings. Disciplinary nationalism falls sway to reality, as it should. I expect
this work to be, as it were, a classic of contemporary political theory.’
Lewis R. Gordon,
Existentia Africana
LEFT UNIVERSALISM,
AFRICACENTRIC ESSAYS

Ato Sekyi-Otu
First published 2019
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

© 2019 Taylor & Francis

The right of Ato Sekyi-Otu to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.

A catalog record for this title has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-138-61177-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-61178-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-46523-9 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Taylor & Francis Books
For Ato who took the oath to keep our homestead whole
and for Ewurabena, Kobena, Kurankye and Kwegienyiwa
whom he conscripted for his healing work.
This page intentionally left blank
CONTENTS

1 Is She Not Also a Human Being? 1

2 Difference and Left Universalism 58
3 Ethical Communism in African Thought 89
Postscript to Chapter 3: Rereading ‘Masks and Marx’ after G.A.
Cohen and the Ethical Turn 142
4 Individualism in Fanon and After 157
Postscript to Chapter 4: Egoism and Conformism: Pathologies of
the Moral Life in Ghana 228
5 Enigmas and Proverbs 234
PREFACE

is a defense of universalism as a metaethical

position and as the foundation of substantive moral and political arguments and
commitments. The book claims that centering such arguments and commitments
on a particular place and context – in this instance, the African world – is entirely
compatible with that foundational universalism. It thus proffers a less conven-
tional mode of Africacentrism, one that rejects the usual hostility to universalism
as an imperialist Eurocentric hoax. It argues that universalism is an inescapable
presupposition of ethical judgment in general and critique in particular, and that it
is especially indispensable for radical criticism of conditions of existence in post-
colonial society and for vindicating visions of social regeneration. The five con-
stituent chapters are exhibits of that argument. Taking seriously the normative
presuppositions and implications of an ordinary Akan-Ghanaian language of
moral outrage – ‘Is She Not Also a Human Being?’ – the opening chapter, which
serves as an introduction to the entire work, argues for a humanist universalism
that is no exogenous cultural import, the product of an alien Kantian cosmopo-
litan imagination as some cultural nationalists claim, but rather is a regular feature
of our native moral argument. The second chapter, ‘Difference and Left Uni-
versalism’, offers a critical defense of multiculturalism as an exemplary instance of
the politics of difference. However, it argues with both its friends and its enemies
against difference absolutism as an incoherent stance. It demonstrates the prag-
matic dependence of the claims of difference on commonality and the civil
commons of a determinate political community for their success. More pro-
foundly, it argues that the ethical justification of those claims – affirming differ-
ence in the name of the human – constitutes an immanent refutation of
difference absolutism. Because of such elective entailments, the left universalist
need not embrace the indiscriminate hostility to multiculturalism expressed by
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 Preface ix

some egalitarian liberals, feminists and philosophers of the left such as Alain
Badiou. The universalist is able without self-contradiction to support the
pursuit of difference, thanks to the very nature of its justifying argument. The
third chapter, ‘Ethical Communism in African Thought,’ is a reconstruction of
the idea of communism as an ethical-political commitment to the quest for ega-
litarian justice presented in a provocative 1984 essay ‘Masks and Marx: The
Marxist Ethos Vis-à-Vis African Revolutionary Theory and Praxis’ by the Gha-
naian writer Ayi Kwei Armah, read in conjunction with some key philosophical
themes of his historical novels, and . A revised
version of a paper originally written in 1991, the chapter considers the essay
together with its literary companions as an important African statement of the
vindication, to echo a recent formulation by Timothy Brennan, of ‘spirit’s ethical
will as a protest against capital’ and all forms of social subjugation, and a vision of
moral relations, practices and virtues which are at once the ends of a different
human association and the means required for bringing it into being. In the
process, the chapter explicates the injunctive metaphysics of ‘connectedness’
which grounds that vision. In addition, it contrasts the radically deontological
ethicism of Armah’s argument for communism not only with the historical
materialist position as he understands it, but also with the cultural ethicism that
undergirded the doctrine of a specifically ‘African Socialism’ prevalent in the early
post-independence years and espoused by thinker-statesmen such as Léopold
Sédar Senghor of Senegal and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania. A Postscript,
‘Rereading “Masks and Marx” after G.A. Cohen and the Ethical Turn,’ places
the African thinker’s argument in conversation with some of the key debates and
figures (among them the analytic philosopher G.A. Cohen) associated with the
‘ethical turn’ in recent left thinking on socialism and communism. The fourth
chapter, ‘Individualism in Fanon and After,’ argues against the conflation of
individualism with one of its modes – atomistic, possessive individualism – the
conflation that leads some cultural nationalists to regard individualism as
‘un-African’ and some left thinkers in the West to see it as first among damaged
bourgeois goods. Refusing such value apartheids, the chapter begins by showing
that no less an iconic figure of left thought and practice than Frantz Fanon, far
from being a collectivist votary of the ‘volk’ as one caricature has it, grounded his
critique of racial orders and colonial racism on the ideal of individual singularity
and dignity. That foundational ideal, the chapter argues, informed Fanon’s vision
of the postcolonial citizen as a responsible ethical subject who participates in the
constitution and the work of the political community. The chapter considers that
ideal in relation to new conceptions of historical necessities and emerging notions
of individuality in the African public sphere. It focuses on versions of individual-
ism in the thought of two prominent African philosophers, Paulin Hountondji of
Benin and Kwame Gyekye of Ghana. Upholding individualism as an ideal of
autonomy and responsible agency, the chapter thus seeks to salvage it as a human
good and a postcolonial imperative from hijackers on the right and detractors on
x Preface

the left. A Postscript, ‘Egoism and Conformism: Pathologies of the Moral Life in
Ghana,’ underscores the crucial importance of that principle by showing the costs
of evading it – the habits, practices and perverse forms that take its place by default.
Throughout, I stress that the version of individualism advanced here has nothing to
do with ε ε , a good Akan word for the mode of human conduct and
ethic which C.B. Macpherson named ; for that reason, it is
not incompatible with commitment to community – more precisely, the radical
egalitarian ideal of community. To the contrary, that ideal serves as a countervailing
conception of the conditions and ends of a sanguine non-atomistic, non-acquisitive
and non-competitive individualism, ultimately as a contrapuntal element of an
integral political morality. The last chapter, ‘Enigmas and Proverbs,’ is an illustra-
tion, from the prism of a literary-philosophical study, of the formal and substantive
universalism undergirding the arguments of the entire book. It is an invitation to
re-encounter in literary texts that are undoubtedly shaped by a particular historical
experience – the brutal enigmas of the postcolonial world – visions of history and
redemptory action made compelling by that very experience; but also characteristic
social, existential and moral dramas, even metaphysical quandaries occasioned by
crisis regarding identity and difference, being and time, nature and history, essence
and appearance. Novels by Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Armah are canvassed as exhi-
bits of the context-marked literary universal.
It is not inapposite to inject a personal note into these prefatory remarks (‘the
personal is political,’ the adage of another time, is not the whole truth but
an important aspect of it). The circumstance that I assembled these essays upon
returning to my native land, Ghana, in 2015 after half a century of living
in North America has a great deal to do with the renewed urgency and convic-
tion with which I offer the work. As I say in the course of the second chapter,
nothing teaches the necessity of universalism better than getting back home.
Nothing focuses the mind more compellingly on the essential tensions, require-
ments and possibilities of the human condition in history, on the irrevocable tasks
of moral agents and the crucial imperatives of ethical reasoning everywhere than a
return home – for me a return after a life that, politically speaking, alternated
between unforgivable apathy and desultory engagement. Now the social universal
of class, the injuries it inflicts and the pathologies it engenders; the responsibility –
be it willful or inadvertent – for the existence of these injuries and pathologies on
the part of even those of us who acknowledge and bemoan them; consequently,
the call to egalitarian justice a call, and the necessity of political commitment
and action towards its realization; the ethical imperative, as a corollary of that call,
of individual autonomy and agency particularly under social orders and historical
contexts in which they are devalued or thwarted: from conditions of existence in
the homeland these things stare at me more glaringly than ever before. Under the
circumstances, the well-worn antinomies of social and political philosophy are of
necessity dissolved. The ‘social question,’ anodyne name for the spectacle of
obscene opulence coexisting with abject destitution, is here made viscerally
 Preface xi

manifest and, Hannah Arendt’s scholastic distinctions, rendered demonstrably

inextricable from the political, conjointly demanding a radical answer. And if one
part of the radical answer is the subjunctive proposition, emblematically revived
by Massimo de Angelis, , ‘that all things be held in common,’
that call is here not incongruent with the principle of individuation, still less with
the ideal and practice of public freedom. Confronted with such intertwined
requirements of human existence in the specific gravity of its postcolonial
instance, faced with the impelling need for a ‘ruthless criticism of all existing
conditions’ and injunctive visions of social regeneration, the poverty of nativism
of the relativist and fetishistic kind – as distinct from appeal to homegrown dis-
cursive resources and their seditious proverbs of justice and human dignity – stands
revealed. Such is the paradoxical consequence of self-repatriation for ethical rea-
soning in the critical mode. That is perhaps as it should be. The bard whose iconic
title ‘return to the native land’ I have with extreme temerity invoked sang of native
particulars as special forms of human universals.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank Ian Angus and the other participants in the Joanne Brown Sym-
posium on Citizenship and the Limits of Multiculturalism organized by the
Institute for the Humanities, Simon Fraser University in March 2006 where I
presented the first version of ‘Difference and Left Universalism’ as a keynote
address. Very special thanks to Samir Gandesha and Sophie McCall for their
incisive comments on the paper. I thank the Mariano A. Elia Chair in Italian-
Canadian Studies, York University for permission to use parts of that paper
published as a chapter in
(2017). Thanks again to Sophie McCall for reading ‘Enigmas of the
World, Proverbs of Human Existence’ in its original form and offering extremely
helpful suggestions for improvement; and also to Mauro Buccheri, Elio Costa and
Donald Holoch, my colleagues at York and editors of
(Ravenna: Editore Longo, 2005) in which a
slightly shorter and different incarnation of the essay appeared. Inestimable grati-
tude to participants in the ‘Fanon Fifty Years After’ Colloquium organized by the
Thinking Africa Project of the Department of Political and International Studies,
Rhodes University, South Africa in July 2011. It was at that lively gathering that I
first aired my evolving thinking on individualism. I especially want to thank Sally
Mathews and Richard Pithouse for inviting me and for their energizing enthu-
siasm and warmth, Gillian Hart for her generous commentary on my paper, and
the indefatigable Lewis Gordon and Nigel Gibson for being, well, Lewis and
Nigel. The questions and contributions of the graduate students who took part in
that colloquium – among them Danielle Bowler, Chantelle Malan and Simone
Levy – were extremely rewarding and powerful evidence that radical thinking by
the young is robustly alive in the land. I hope that they can hear echoes of their
voices in this book.
 Acknowledgments xiii

In my waning days at York University, Alok Mukherjee and Janine Wiley, two
doctoral students in the Department of English, recruited me – no doubt out of a
perverse curiosity – to conduct a reading course with them on a topic I knew abso-
lutely nothing about: a comparative study of works by Canada’s Mixed Blood People
of First Nations Origins and Dalit writers of India. That little symposium of ours turned
out to be a huge revelation and a confirmation. First the bad news: If you think you
know of all the rich variety of social evil, think again. The good and equally pertinent
news: No one needs the language of universalism more viscerally, and no one speaks
that language more eloquently than those who precisely because of their intimate
knowledge of abject exclusion and dehumanization voice their incendiary fury and
self-affirmation in the name of the human. Janine and Alok, many thanks for inviting
me to join you in studying another prism into some of the more repugnant conditions
of human existence – and some of the more recalcitrant voices of insubordination.
I am enormously grateful to some very dear friends whose love, care and counsel I
have all too often rewarded with inexplicable silence and disappearing acts: Derek
Cohen, Dianne Davies, Patricia Stamp, David McNally, Himani Bannerji, Pablo
Idahosa. I cherish our shared commitments and our conversations over the years;
I know that they inform the questions and dreams broached in this work. Returning
to Ghana after a long absence, it has been decidedly medicinal to make some new
friends and be reacquainted with a few old ones with whom it is possible to exchange
heterodox thoughts in this deeply conservative society replete with the most mind-
numbing beliefs mouthed with equal certitude by the barely educated, mercenary
‘men of God,’ the intelligentsia and scientists, abysmally failed leaders of a botched
endogenous enlightenment. For sharing with me glimmers of reason in a darkened
land, I am very grateful to Ama Ata Aidoo, Kofi Ansah, Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang,
Kwaw Ansah, Kobena Woode and Tony Obeng. I thank Tony specifically for alert-
ing me to the early twentieth-century British conservative pedigree of the idea of a
‘property-owning democracy’ – that howling contradiction masquerading as a benign
oxymoron – a central slogan of Ghana’s ruling New Patriotic Party and a corollary
tenet of the new/old open-for-business individualism I touch on in Chapter 4.
I have to thank Natalja Mortensen of Routledge with the sounds of Ghanaian
drums for her absolutely empowering enthusiasm and the sprinter’s speed with
which she, supported by Maria Landschoot, went about the business of getting
this book to become a material reality.
A final word of gratitude. Mansa, my love, how can I thank you for your
unstinting support all the days, weeks and months I sat ensconced in my study
writing this book, but also for the times when I would enlist your keen intellect to
see if an idea encountered or concocted in solitude and wrapped in extraterrestrial
prose made any earthly sense? I can only hope that the result goes some way to
justify your priceless patience. Once more, . I am dedicating this book
to our children whose accomplishments and devotion are your true reward.

Brafoyaw, Ghana, March 2018

This page intentionally left blank
1
IS SHE NOT ALSO A HUMAN BEING?

The declaration that ‘we too are human beings’ is at the bottom of any revolution.
– ‘ ’

If the Left turns its back on its foundations, it will be unable to make statements
that are truly its own.
– ‘ ’*

Left Exercises in Retrieval

‘To go back to retrieve that which you forgot is no vice’: So goes a saying of the
Akan people of Ghana. Ever since C.B. Macpherson’s
, 1 the work of thinkers of the Left whom Frank Cunningham famously
named ‘retrievalists’ appears to have grown in gravity and credibility in recent
years.2 Awakened to the urgency of recuperating principles and practices of which
the Left can rightly claim to be progenitors but which it has sometimes consigned
to disuse if not downright disdain, it is no longer embarrassed to recognize as its
very own precious but erstwhile disavowed inheritances. Not least among these
inheritances is the very idea of inheritance, now refigured not as finished heritage
awaiting joyous restoration but rather as an invitation to the exacting practice of
possibility: remembrance of things not yet done with promissory notes, inventive
pursuit of their radical implications, what Ayi Kwei Armah’s
calls their ‘farthest meaning,’3 excavating them in the service of unenvisioned but
impelling ends by reviving that which the same thinker’s first novel named ‘inti-
mations of belief’4 in a time of incipient nihilism. The names of such discursive
forms proposed for the pressing labor of re-appropriation are manifold:
2 Is She Not Also a Human Being?

‘Transformative constitutionalism’ and ‘left legalism.’5 The idea of freedom

understood and pursued as a right which, Isaiah Berlin,6 is indissociable from
the conditions of its possession and the ability to exercise it. Individualism both as
an ideal of personal autonomy and singularity, particularly in new or refurbished
orders of asphyxiating conformism, and as a principle of responsible agency
beyond possessive egoism: no kin of two imposters with a shared pedigree, which
enlist the generic vocabulary of individuality in the service of unjust ends – settler
colonialism’s policy of ‘[implanting] a spirit of individual responsibility’ into
Indigenous communities by destroying their ‘tribal or communist system’ of land
ownership;7 and neoliberalism’s censorious commandment of ‘responsibilization’
with its concomitant contempt for the salvaging offices of public goods,8 its cruel
theology of abandonment sanctifying its enforcement of freedom as capitalist
market economy. Left individualism, then, as an enabling and exacting paradox: a
vision of the egalitarian conditions and ends of individuation. The demand for
radical democracy instigated by a suspicion of representation,9 committed, thanks
to a well-earned ‘misarchism’ – Nietzsche’s scornful neologism for the ‘demo-
cratic idiosyncrasy’10 – to decentralized, even acephalous, forms of political asso-
ciation and practice. Vindication of the nation not as the ultimate territory of our
political and ethical attachments but as the potential embodiment of popular
sovereignty, object of the compelling rhetoric which proclaims that this land is
our land, ε , again, not in the service of an organicist and xeno-
phobic nativism but rather to combat capital’s dominion and avarice without
borders, its violent contempt for local needs and rights and ‘customs in common,’
but also to contest the sophistic nationalism of an ascendant class that in one breath
abets the alienation of our lands and resources and in another invokes the name
of the nation for its self-serving acquisitive ambitions.11 Human rights, even as
natural rights, taking rights extremely seriously by crossing the narrow horizon
of their ‘negative’ libertarian auspices – to say nothing of their provincial prove-
nance and perverse uses – and wresting from that etiolated tradition commitments
and claims beyond proscriptive limitations upon the state; rather, enlarging the
province of rights to entail entitlement to social and moral goods, positive prin-
ciples and practices of recognition – in private and public spheres of life alike –
which are our due simply in virtue of our common humanity and necessities of
the times. Listening to religion not by accepting its truth-claims but by under-
standing the radical needs to which it ministers and thereby returning its vaunted
redemptory mission to this inverted world; that is to say, reframing the sacred as
the earthly holiness of every single one of us, and, consequently, our equal moral
standing, dignity and right to all that is conducive to human self-fashioning and
flourishing – egalitarian perfectionism as the matter of reverence, the vital ‘sub-
stance of things hoped for.’ Above all, the ‘ethical turn’ in the argument for
communism, that is to say, communism as first and foremost an ethical imperative
rather than history’s unwilled consequence, the idea of communism as the quin-
tessential incarnation of ‘radical normativity’ demanded by ‘spirit’s ethical will as a
 Is She Not Also a Human Being? 3

protest against capital’ and social subjugation;12 communism as and ideal.

What is to be done with forgotten premises of such articles of belief and projects?
How to bring back to life their tabooed and utopian implications, what Fanon
called , 13 values left unspoken, not yet made explicit, expressed but
inchoately in the vindicatory language of historical action, although intimated and
implicit in what Bessie Head called the ‘moral logic’ of antecedent or contiguous
acts, claims, assertions, avowed commitments, what I would describe as
?14 An even more challenging task: how to redeem and deploy anew
utterly renounced and abandoned legacies, legacies left by the Left only to be
suborned by those who would enlist them for adversary ends; in which case to
recover them would be veritable acts of expropriating the expropriators. Today,
the Left is laying claim to these critical substantives and metacritical cognates: say,
‘leftist ontology,’15ontology as hortatory description, description with ‘deontic’
consequences and so flouts the Humean separation of ‘the is’ and ‘the ought,’ not
least because it has history’s scars to show.16 Thanks to that testimony, such an
ontology resists invocations of motionless substances, although it recuperates with
Herbert Marcuse ‘the concept of essence’ and with Armah the thought of ‘living
essences,’17 prompted by a rekindled suspicion that, without the distinction of
essence and appearance, criticism of the existing state of human affairs is impos-
sible, radical hope inexpressible. Likewise, a certain foundationalism,
foundationalism, the thought of foundations as promises of things to come,
grasping the grounds of principles, practices and claims as anticipated achievements
of our groundwork. Retrieval, then, of precepts and proverbs forgotten and for-
saken, even unacknowledged and disavowed. But of these exemplary exercises in
recovery, the principal metadiscursive instance is : the criticism or vin-
dication of an arrangement and a convention, an idea and a practice, an event and
an action; the justification or confutation of a moral assertion and a claim, a belief
and a principle, in the inquiring name of the human and human universals.
The principal instance but also the most contested among the discursive forms
that are candidates for urgent retrieval. A venerable tradition of thinking on the
Left has persistently administered a joint interment of universalism and kindred
ideas such as humanism together with supportive metadiscursive conceptions like
foundationalism. In particular, adherents to a dominant school of strong histori-
cists have always served as enthusiastic pallbearers. The latter’s stance derives its
putative warrant from such texts in the Marxist classics as and
, especially those passages in which Marx and Engels mock the
more subjectivist and history-amnesiac versions of German idealism, those ideas
that substitute ‘pious desire’ for knowledge of the determinate and determining
conditions of communism; but also, later, the acerbic criticism of the rhetoric of
rights in the and the sardonic parody of the idea of
innate human rights in the first volume of :18 texts in which, in a classic
case of rhetorical overreaction with momentous consequences, Marx and Engels
enact what appears to be a stance of radical historicism, even historical
Visit https://ebookname.com today to explore
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