Untimely Continuities: Nyerere & Cabral on Politicizing History for Socialism

• In Event: Time, Narrative, and Anticolonial Political Thought

Abstract

Recent research across political theory, postcolonial studies, and critical geography has identified how systems of domination rely upon accounts of historical time that naturalize and sustain such domination. However, responses to this politicization of time do not propose competing conceptions of history that could inspire alternative systems. In response to many contemporary crises, leftist thinkers have emphasized a politics of rupture while ceding the “use and abuse of history” to right-wing actors who gain populist traction through appeals to tradition. In this paper, I argue that we can look to anticolonial nation-building movements to fight on this terrain of temporality toward socialist, democratic futures. I develop this argument through a close reading of work by Julius Nyerere and Amílcar Cabral. Though rarely read together, I show how these two thinkers each interpreted emancipatory politics as an effort to articulate a coherent relationship between policy and historical continuity. They did so by unsettling blunt divisions between “traditionalism” and “modernism” and by firmly characterizing historical motion as a product of human intervention. Following these two thinkers, I articulate a theory of history that demonstrates how politics must and can go beyond addressing immediate crises or articulating timely solidarities for a specific moment. I call this alternative the cultivation of “untimely continuities.” I interpret Nyerere’s and Cabral’s work to articulate three features of this alternative politics and demonstrate its strategic value. First, I explain how, especially in conditions of crisis, the creation of historical continuity is itself a political challenge. Nyerere and Cabral repeatedly argued that colonialism and capitalism established a specific trajectory of history, and they explained their revolutionary and nation-building projects as changing that trajectory by drawing from local practices and memory. Second, I show how national policies and potential international ties should be developed with this challenge in mind. Rather than defending their policies purely as appropriate to a particular moment—and therefore bound to a metric of “timeliness”—Nyerere and Cabral took up the language of culture to articulate those policies as consistent with historical narratives that resonated with the people. Third, I propose that making history and shaping culture provides a foundation for political change in which people can step out of their own timely concerns and material interests in service to ideals of a different, aspirational, social order, exemplified historically in Cabral’s “return to the source” and Nyerere’s Arusha Declaration. These ways of articulating and deploying continuity underpin an “untimely” approach to politics that enables people to pursue emancipatory ends that otherwise seem like historical impossibilities.

Author

• David Suell, University of Michigan