For information on the cryptid, see: Mokele-Mbembe

Mokèlé-mbèmbé

Mokèlé-mbèmbé, meaning "one who stops the flow of rivers" in the Lingala language, is the name given to a large water-dwelling cryptid found in legends and folklore of the Congo River basin. It is sometimes described as a living creature and sometimes as a spirit. It could be considered loosely...

Achille Mbembe is a philosopher and political scientist. He was born in Cameroon

Cameroon

Cameroon, officially the Republic of Cameroon , is a country in west Central Africa. It is bordered by Nigeria to the west; Chad to the northeast; the Central African Republic to the east; and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo to the south. Cameroon's coastline lies on the...

 in 1957. He obtained his Ph.D. in History at the University of Sorbonne in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

, in 1989. He subsequently obtained a D.E.A. in Political Science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in the same city. He has held appointments at Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 in New York, Brookings Institution

Brookings Institution

The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, D.C., in the United States. One of Washington's oldest think tanks, Brookings conducts research and education in the social sciences, primarily in economics, metropolitan policy, governance, foreign policy, and...

 in Washington, D.C., University of Pennsylvania

University of Pennsylvania

The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...

, University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

, Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

, Duke University

Duke University

Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...

 and Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa

Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa

Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa is Pan-African research organisation headquartered in Dakar, Senegal.- Background :...

 (CODESRIA) in Dakar

Dakar

Dakar is the capital city and largest city of Senegal. It is located on the Cap-Vert Peninsula on the Atlantic coast and is the westernmost city on the African mainland...

, Senegal

Senegal

Senegal , officially the Republic of Senegal , is a country in western Africa. It owes its name to the Sénégal River that borders it to the east and north...

.

Mbembe is currently a member of the staff at WISER Institute in Johannesburg

Johannesburg

Johannesburg also known as Jozi, Jo'burg or Egoli, is the largest city in South Africa, by population. Johannesburg is the provincial capital of Gauteng, the wealthiest province in South Africa, having the largest economy of any metropolitan region in Sub-Saharan Africa...

, South Africa

South Africa

The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...

, and a contributing editor of the scholarly journal Public Culture

Public Culture

Public Culture is a reviewed interdisciplinary academic journal of cultural studies, founded in 1988 by anthropologists Carol Breckenridge and Arjun Appadurai...

. He also has an annual appointment as a visiting faculty member in the department of English at Duke University

Duke University

Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...

. His main research topics are African history and politics and social science. Although he is called a postcolonial theorist, namely due to the title of his first English book, he has thoroughly rejected this label more recently, because he sees his project as one of both acceptance and transcendence of difference, rather than of return to an original, marginal, non-metropolitan homeland.

His central work in English, entitled On the Postcolony, was released by University of California Press in 2001. In this text Mbembe argues that academic and popular discourse on Africa is caught within a variety of cliches tied to Western fantasies and fears. For instance, Africa is seen by the West, he argues, as "a headless figure threatened with madness and quite innocent of any notion of center, hierarchy, or stability…a vast dark cave where every benchmark and distinction come together in total confusion, and the rifts of a tragic and unhappy human history stand revealed: a mixture of the half-created and the incomplete…in short, a bottomless abyss where everything is noise, yawning gap, and primordial chaos" (3). Following Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon was a Martiniquo-Algerian psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer whose work is influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism...

 and Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...

, Mbembe holds that this depiction is not simply a reflection of a real Africa but an unconscious projection tied to guilt, disavowal, and the compulsion to repeat. He adds, "Africa is the mediation that enables the West to accede to its own subconscious and give a public account of its subjectivity" (3). In this sense, like James Ferguson

James Ferguson (anthropologist)

James Ferguson is an American born Anthropologist. He is known for his work on the politics and anthropology of international development, specifically his critical stance . He is currently chair of the Anthropology Department at Stanford University...

, V.Y. Mudimbe, and others, Mbembe interprets Africa not as a defined, isolated place but as a fraught relation between itself and the rest of the world which plays out simultaneously on political, psychic, semiotic, and sexual levels.

In his article Necropolitics, Mbembe refers to necropolitics as the subjugation of life to the power of death. The authority to kill is no longer solely controlled by the state, but rather distributed throughout society. An example of this dispersion of a static sovereign to allow the right to kill can be seen through the situation in Darfur

Darfur

Darfur is a region in western Sudan. An independent sultanate for several hundred years, it was incorporated into Sudan by Anglo-Egyptian forces in 1916. The region is divided into three federal states: West Darfur, South Darfur, and North Darfur...

. The lack of a dominant sovereign resulted in the distribution of the right to kill amongst multiple social groups, most notably the Baggara Arabs and the Sudan People's Liberation Army

Sudan People's Liberation Army

The Sudan People's Liberation Movement is a political party in South Sudan. It was initially founded as a rebel political movement with a military wing known as the Sudan People's Liberation Army estimated at 180,000 soldiers. The SPLM fought in the Second Sudanese Civil War against the Sudanese...

. This particular version of sovereignty goes back to a definition by Carl Schmitt

Carl Schmitt

Carl Schmitt was a German jurist, philosopher, political theorist, and professor of law.Schmitt published several essays, influential in the 20th century and beyond, on the mentalities that surround the effective wielding of political power...

: "he who decides on the state of exception". By invoking a state of exception, the sovereign is able to suspend the law, thus sanctioning any action. The sovereign avoids breaking the law because the sovereign chooses when the law applies. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben is an Italian political philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception and homo sacer....

 argues that the USA PATRIOT Act

USA PATRIOT Act

The USA PATRIOT Act is an Act of the U.S. Congress that was signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001...

 allowed the US to claim a state of exception in order to justify the violence, violation of rights, and war that characterized post-9/11 politics.

Books

• 1985 Les Jeunes et l'ordre politique en Afrique noire, Éditions L'Harmattan, Paris 1985 ISBN 2-85802-542-5
• 1996 La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun, 1920-1960 : histoire des usages de la raison en colonie.
• 2000 Notes provisoires sur la postcolonie, essai sur l'imagination politique dans l'Afrique contemporaine. (English edition On the Postcolony, 2001. Second revised French edition, 2005.)
• 2000 Du Gouvernement prive indirect
• 2010 Sortir de la grande nuit – Essai sur l'Afrique décolonisée

External links

• Lecture at Victoria and Albert Museum, Figures and Fictions Conference, 2011
• 'What is Postcolonialism?', Eurozine, December 2008
• Presentation at WISER-institute http://wiserweb.wits.ac.za/home%20-%20staff.htm#2