Grant Farred Not the Moment After, but the Moment Of

And heres the mutiny I promised you And heres the party it turned into. The New Pornographers, Mutiny, I Promise You, 2007 This is the age of revolution; the age of indifference is gone forever. Adolfo Gilly, introduction to Frantz Fanons A Dying Colonialism

Ten weeks, that is how long it lasted. Ten brief

weeks, that is all it took to peacefully gain and then brutally lose power. To lose the revolutions life. And, as V. I. Lenin reminded us, The only problem is the problem of power, so losing power is, inevitably, catastrophic.1 The problem of losing power is that it is a disaster that extends well beyond the individuals or vanguardists who make the revolutionextends beyond the powerful, those who have, as it were, power to lose. If, in John Reeds estimation, it was ten days that shook the world, it seems that in those early-twentieth-century struggles it was a long ten days, ten days that far exceeded the actual time. Reed, or Lenin and Trotskys October Revolution, was, arguably, following Alain Badious ongoing struggle to understand and mark the
South Atlantic Quarterly 108:3, Summer 2009 DOI 10.1215/00382876-2009-009 2009 Duke University Press

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precise time of the twentieth century, ten days that defined the twentieth century: from 1917 to 1989, from the October Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall.2 And so, we might say, the power of the revolution, as much as or more than anything, occupied the twentieth century and ours, if only to a less obvious degree, even if the socialist experiment did not survive for one hundred years. It is strange how much briefer those ten weeks in the Congo seemed in 1960: the time of a sovereign Congo, the time of Patrice Lumumba. It seems now, in relation to Reeds time, less like ten weeks and more like ten short hours. There are, of course, those who say that it was over at the very moment of the independence ceremonies, when Lumumba refused the protocols of the ceremony and, feeling compelled to respond to the patronizing speech by the Belgian ambassador, offered a critique in which he asserted the rights of a sovereign Congo. There are also those who suggest that it was over just four days into independence, when Moise Tshombe began planning the secession of the copper-rich province of Katanga. Frantz Fanon, a great admirer of Lumumba, goes further. Fanon antedates the attack on Congolese sovereignty to the moment before independence: Already, before July 1st, the Katanga operation had been launched.3 Before the moment of sovereignty, there were arms airlifted into Katanga to help Tshombe and his fellow secessionists prepare for the undoing of the Congo. Lumumbas time, it seems, was always short, always in short supply. Lumumbas Congo, as much as the man himself, was living on time borrowed from the imperialists, a time considered untimely, too threatening to Tshombe and the Katangans opposed to a new nation. Lumumbas time, according to Fanons calculation, was over before it began, before it could even begin. Ten short weeksand yet, how that historic moment has remained not only with us, but it has prospered as a historical event: the moment that we only understand fully, even as we grapple still with its aftermath, not in its having passed but because of its having passed, of having lived through it without relinquishing its ongoing political effects. That age, we might now say, that Adolfo Gilly, himself inspired by the work of Fanon in Algeria, names revolution,4 the age that brought, in its aftermath, because of its potentiality, because of its symbolic import, not only Che Guevara but the resources, as much as the young Cuban nation could muster, of Fidel Castro, for the first time, in Lumumbas name, the Lumumba brigades headed by Guevara, to Africa. The age of revolution that Castro sustained

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for decades, the revolution that would culminate in Samora Machel and Antnio Agostinho Neto, socialists both, taking power in southern Africa in the mid-1970s, Angola supported by Castro (military personnel, doctors, nurses, and so on), until Namibian independence in 1990. How can we not now, as we did then, concatenate these names of visionary Africansbeginning with Gamal Abdel Nasser or Lumumba, ending with Sam Nujoma, linked by Fidel and Che, the project for radicalization reanimated in the 1980s by Thomas Sankara in Burkina Fasounder the name revolution? How can we not know that in the names Machel and Neto, Sankara and Nujoma, there is already, by the historic force of ideological proclivity, the name Lumumba inscribed in the very utterance of those other names? Fanon5 promised us as much: For no one knows the name of the next Lumumba. There is in Africa a certain tendency represented by certain men. It is this tendency, dangerous for imperialism, which is at issue.6 And so, in the most profound sense of the political, which is to say, as the concentrated, enduring formation of the states power, we might say that Lumumba, founder (and later president) of the Mouvement National Congolais in 1958, ontologizes the Congo, ontologizes the revolutionary Congo for anti- and newly postcolonial Africaas he did Zaire, the fallen state of the Congo, as he does the ever-fracturing, ever-fractious Democratic Republic of the Congo. Born in Onalua (in Kasai Province), Lumumba is the victim of violent anti-African nationalism on behalf of Belgium, the United States, and the United Nations, a man who did not so much survive his own death, that brutal and bloody assassination orchestrated in Brussels, New York, and Washington, D.C., but lived for us again only recently in Raoul Pecks movie Lumumba (2000), as the postal clerk turned president who transcends even his own martyrdom. Lumumba became transcendent because he is the poignant symbol of what the Congo, indeed much of Africa, might have been but for the Central Intelligence Agencys perpetual interference in the continent, from the late 1950s through to at least the early 1990s in the Horn of Africa, during the cold war, and during the United States sponsorship of proxy wars in Mozambique, Angola, and the Congo, among others. More damningly, Lumumba serves as an indictment of the African elite, the degraded (in Fanons terms) national bourgeoisie, an indictment of the elites complicity in the death of its own sovereignty, in the death of its own (Lumumba). In the age of a self-destructing neoliberalism, Lumumba is a reminder that the national bourgeoisies preparedness to play footsie with the West goes back many decades, that its willingness

584 Grant Farred

to incarcerate, starve, and murder its own has a long and unsightly history. Darfur, whatever its complexities, whatever the corrective arguments some of which I am in full agreement withproffered by critics such as Mahmood Mamdani and Salah Hassan, thoughtful scholars both, is but the latest installment in this sorry narrative. Against this backdrop and no doubt because of this moment of continental angst, Afro-pessimism, and disaster, Lumumba stands au contraire. Lumumba is responsible for the definitive failure of the Belgian project (elimination definitive) to remove him permanently, through assassination, from the Congos political imaginaryto excise him forever, once and for all, to put him to death in such a fashion as would render Lumumba irrelevant to Congolese/Zairian time. (How appropriate, then, that late 2007 should have constituted a moment of cruel historical irony for Belgium? The country went for months without a government, unable to bridge the divide between the Flemish majority and the French-speaking minority; Belgium, as a national entity, found itself deadlocked, politically dead, for all intents and purposes. At that historical conjuncture, Lumumba, we might say, spectacularly survived not only his own death but his phantasmatic, iconic presence; momentarily, he outlived the very state of Belgium, the nonfunctioning state that some want to divvy up, the Flemish speakers to the Netherlands, the French speakers to France.) Lumumba: the definitive collapse of Operation Barracuda, the Belgian plot to eliminate him when he came to power. Time has laid waste not only momentarily to the state of Belgium but to the Belgian monarch so offended by Lumumbas postcolonial improprieties, King Baudouin, to the gendarmes so key to his murder by Katangan secessionists. Furthermore, only stalwarts of those ten weeks and historians, perhaps, remember even the name of his implacable foe Moise Tshombe, Belgian puppet president of the state of Katanga; hardly anyone recalls leading CIA operatives such as Lawrence Devlin who were instrumental in Lumumbas overthrow; time, moreover, has rendered grandiose, but still tragic, the carefully laid plans of Dwight Eisenhowers CIA chief, Allen Dulles. As for the traitorous colonel who succeeded him Joseph Mobutu who became Mobutu Sese Sekowhat is he but the very incarnation of postcolonial brutality and tragic failure? Congo watchers might have observed sympathetically the 2006 campaign for president by Unified Lumumbist Party (Parti Lumumbiste Unifi) candidate Antoine Gizenga, Lumubas deputy in 1960, and Lumumbas son (born six months after Lumumbas death), Guy-Patrice, neither of

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whom triumphed. At the end of 2006, Gizenga was named prime minister. In his turn, however, Lumumba the elder has more than survivedhe has thrived. The first president of the Congo is, today as much as he ever was during the heyday of one Colonel Joseph Mobutus perfidies, the only possible speaking of the Congo, Lumumba remains the authoritative interdiction against the United States, Belgium, and the UN: Lumumba stands against what these forces, individually and collectively, did to the Congo during the brief time of this rule. He is the incarnation of those brief ten weeks, from the declaration of independence on June 30, 1960, to the coup by President Joseph Kasa-Vubu and Mobutu on September 15, 1960, that removed him from power, that inaugurated the violent rule of Mobutu. There is, then, just before death and because of death, the event: the killing that cannot bury the revolutionary subject but that, paradoxically, confers on it a lifean interruption/irruption into historythat it could never have had while alive. It is clear that, following Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj ieks reloading of Lenin, there is something fundamentally reorienting about Lumumbas thinkinghis political actsin those ten weeks, dispelling all opportunistic compromises, of adopting the unequivocal radical position from which it is only possible to intervene in such a way that our intervention changes the coordinates of the situation.7 Steadfastly opposed to the balkanization of the Congo, itself of course the dream of a physically sick madman, King Leopold, Lumumba would not countenance opportunistic compromise: Lumumba is, in this logic, the Congo because he refused to recognize the tat voyous, the rogue state, of Katanga. He would not recognize the Katangan secession, backed by the Belgians, sustained through the complicity with the Belgians and the United States and the faux neutrality of Dag Hammarskjlds blue beret UN forces, nor would he capitulate to clandestine U.S. operatives. Lumumba stood against the reterritorialization of the Congo, the disintegration of the Congo into smaller, nominally autonomous units that would facilitate the exploitative ambitions of the Union Minire. Lumumba struggled against the rogue part for the constitutive whole; he struggled for a Congo nation, only weeks old, granted only ten weeks of life, so that it might be able to sustain itself. For those tumultuous ten weeks, he was intent on the nation retaining its unity. Lumumbas ideological transformation, from nationalist to communist, the communist who never named himself communist, changed, not only in his moment, but forever, maybe, the coordinates of the situation8 we

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know as the Congo, knew as the Congo, knew as Zaire, now are not sure we know as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In any case, as the catastrophic inventory of third world dictatorship has taught us, the signifier democratic always alertsor alarmsstudents of history not only to the possibility of atrocity but to the atrocity (already, long since commenced) in process. Lumumba, now that the cold war is supposedly over and now that we live in the age of a new war of absolute antimony (the Christian-Judeo West against Islamic fundamentalism in a range of sites) of a different variety, must be rethought for at least two reasons. First, this is necessary so that we might apprehend his thinking again and so that we might perhaps understand him better, even though, unlike Fanon and Sankara, he left us little, in truth, almost nothing, of his own writing (except for his Congo, My Country and the edited collection, Lumumba Speaks).9 Second, we must rethink Lumumba so that in our age of many coterminous, mutually inflecting post -s,postfeminist, postidentity, post-Marxist, and postpoliticalthe notion of postcommunist might be extended beyond the east (variously, the Baltic states, Eastern and Central Europe, where it is always imagined to be primarily located) to the south. It must be extended to Africa, where communismthe label communistwas both, for the West and its African associates, nothing but an inflammatory instance of cold war rhetorical assignation and, for the revolutionaries, a politics of everyday imagining. Lumumba provides an especially provocative opportunity to change the coordinates of the situation,10 of course, in large measure because he never named himself a communist. Perhaps, despite himself, Lumumba was right: he was not a communist except insofar as he was a Leninist. Lumumba: Lenin for His Time
Anyone can revolt, but not everyone can carry through a successful revolution. Terry Eagleton, Lenin in the Postmodern Age

It is more or less certain that Lumumba was not a socialist, certainly not a communist. In the hour of his most dire need, he did turn to Moscow to ask for help, and although the Kremlin tried to provide assistance, it was finally unable to help. Lumumba sought the Soviet Unions backing only after the West and the UN had repeatedly betrayed him. He best understood him-

Not the Moment After, but the Moment Of 587

self as a threat to, narrowly, Belgian and, more broadly, the entire Wests (neo)colonial interests; from the Belgians to the Americans to the South Africans, they all considered Lumumba dangerous to the plans for Africa in general and the Congo in particular. Lumumba was, more than anything else, an ardent bourgeois nationalist. What is salient about his politics is that Lumumba was labeled, repeatedly, by the West a communist, designated by the Americans and the Belgians as an instrument of the Soviet Union. In this space between Lumumbas nationalismone radicalized immensely in the course of his brief leadershipand the names appended to him is the question of the revolutionary subject, as in, who is the subject of the revolution? Who is the subject who produces the revolution? Who is produced by the revolution? Who is produced by the death of the revolution into, in (spectral-)Trotskyist terms, the permanent revolution of the undead? All but the last of these are Leninist questions, which Lenin himself struggled with from long before 1917 and, surely, in his ghostly afterlife and the Stalinist state that succeeded him. Some critics would go so far as to say that Lenin bequeathed the Soviet peoplewho were, of course, never truly a people but a collection of barely suppressed sovereigntiesthese questions, which they were forced to grapple with as he witnessed from some other place the devastation that followed the Bolshevik Revolution. There were always questions for Lenin, questions about the subject and the act of radical change, of the challenges such transformations presented to the vanguard, to the worker, and, of course, to the party, because, though less so than Lumumba, he was not fully prepared for the revolution that he and his colleagues had begotten. Both Lenin and Lumumba operated without precedent, without the model of, in Terry Eagletons terms, the successful revolutionor, that ur-document, a manual for how to make the revolution a success. Lenin, it is worth recalling, was in the moment of the revolution only last of allor, perhaps, only the first instancea student of Marx. Both Lenin and Lumumba were innovators: socialist nation-makers making a force that the nation itself could not contain. Thinking epic figures analogously, we might argue that if Kwame Nkrumah and Nelson Mandela are Africas Gandhis, if Tanzanias Julius Nyerere is the continents Leon Trotsky, if Burkina Fasos Sankara (a self-proclaimed Marxist; a man who did think himself unabashedly a communist, that bright red beret always at a just-so angle) is the nations Guevara and Castro rolled into one, then Lumumba and Egypts Nasser stand as Africas Lenins. However, while it could be argued that the socialist Nassersimply because he had the time,

588 Grant Farred

the opportunity, and the historic confrontation with British and French colonialism (and Israeli aggression) that was the Suez Crisis of 1956with his determination to nationalize, with his commitment to Arab nationalism, might have conceived of himself, imaginatively, as a Leninist, it would be difficult to make such a claim for Lumumba. But there are reasons that the Congolese leader recalls Lenin, that Lumumba invites our thinking of him as a Leninst and stands alongside Nasser. This is not only because Lumumba, like Lenin, operated without a blueprint (the Congo had only weeks to prepare for sovereignty,11 whereas South Africa had decades and, moreover, an incipient black sovereignty funded lavishly by Euro-American capital) but also because Lumumba and Nasser both demonstrated the commitment to imagine wealth and power (that Leninist term again) redistributedthe nation, the postcolonial nation, in their cases, socialized into sovereign being. Most important, it is Lumumba and Nasser (followed by their ideological heirs, Machel, Neto, and Sankara), not the oft-lauded Mandela or Nkrumah (the former all-too-easily celebrated for his ability to bring a catastrophic peace to the postapartheid nation; the latter venerated again recently on the occasion of Ghanas fiftieth year of independence, 2007), who, each in his moment, return Africa to an international radicality. Nasser does so with his vision of pan-Arabism, Lumumba with his commitment to a Congo dedicated to working for Africans against the forces of neocoloniality. Following Nasser and Lumumba is Sankara, forceful in his intent to, as he says, make imperialism tremble. It is trembling because it is afraid. It is trembling because right here in Ouagadougou we are going to bury it.12 Because Lumumbas socialist propensities were never so boldly articulated, he is especially evocative in this regard. For all his commitment to the communist project, Lenin was not against the nationalist bourgeois project per se. Lenin understood, learning from Karl Marxs dictum in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that the revolution or the independence struggle, like history, is made under conditions not of our own choosing. It is for this reason that Lenin was both a champion of the right to national self-determination and wary of those who believed in the pure revolution. Try as they might, the ideologically pure would never, Lenin was sure, experience a revolution, let alone the revolution, because of the impossibility of the pure revolution. They would be waiting in vain, to borrow a lyrical Bob Marley phrase. The Jamaican Marley, who lived through first the hopefulness of Michael Manleys Caribbean socialism and then the

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ongoing violent conflict between Manley and the largely reactionary politics of Edward Seaga, is a man who knows a thing or two about peace concertssince he tried, he and his band bloodied by the violence of Jamaicas fractious politics, to save Jamaica from its violent selfand unkept revolutionary promises, by Manley, Seaga, and their successors. Lumumba, through our thinking of him as a Leninist, is neither a ghost the specter of a country lost, the haunting reminder of a historic ideological opportunity ceded to the machinations of the cold war, the ghost returned, once again, to haunt King Leopolds subjects, the ghost who compels that Belgium returns, again and again, as if it had never really confronted its history of atrocity, to face, in full public view, that iconic visage of Lumumba, bespectacled, intense, and, yes, fiercenor a nostalgic symbol. Instead, Lumumba is a thinker of radical immanence. He instantiates the material spectrality of Europes meddling past in Africa, and he representsin that bold confrontational look that is first captured in those photographs of him and then in the movie that bears his namethe occasion for Africas communist evaluation: what was sacrificed and what was conceded in agreeing to cite the communist as the force of disruption, as the incarnation of godlessness, and the determination to make an African future not linked, first and foremost, to European capital and ideology. In Lumumbas case the pertinence of a Leninist figuring reveals how the subject of a fervent African nationalismthe subject for a genuinely sovereign third world independencecan come to stand as the exemplary revolutionary, as not simply the communist that the West designates him. After all, the lesson of cold war rhetoric teaches us that the nationalist who is against the colonialist is, by ideological default in the era of decolonization and a global coming into a new black subjectivity, a communist. To be a nationalist after Indian independence and especially after Ghanaian independence in 1957 was to be, without question, a communist. Nkrumah, arguably anticipating how such a label might affect his ability to govern an independent Ghana, got ahead of the game. Released from prison in 1951, Nkrumah declared, I am not a communist and have never been one.13 In his turn, it would have been futile for Lumumba to issue such a disclaimer on July 1, 1960. He had already made an enemy of the Belgian state so that his radicalizing nationalism made him what he did not think he was. The subject of the revolution, be it nationalist or socialist, is, in this complicated way (the realization of an always limited historical agency), what the strugglefor sovereignty or the rule of the proletariatmakes him or her.

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In any case, historical proximity to the then-spreading socialist revolution would have made hollow any such disavowal by Lumumba. This was, after all, the moment in which the Cuban revolution had only just overthrown Fulgencio Batista and brought Castro to power. Castro, it is worth recalling now, did not start out a communist. Neither, of course, did Lenin, and look what history he spawned. And, lest we forget, there was Guevara of the Lumumba brigades, so that Lumumba was, as it were, claimed by socialism when he was scarcely dead, named into socialist history, into socialist resistance. Guevara, fighting in Lumumbas name, for, we might add, the Lumumbist cause that Lumumba himself did not properly claim, could not claim until after he was dead, had to be, as it were, claimed for him by Guevara in his bloodied aftermath. Guevara, fighting just a few years later in central Africa (1965, when Castro dispatched Guevara to the Congo), engaged in the struggle to spread further the threat to U.S. and European security. In honoring Lumumba, Guevara and his colleagues were directly acknowledging the giftof ideology, of historic innovativeness, of Leninist enterprisethat Lumumba had made to socialism in Africa and beyond. If Lumumba could not successfully execute the revolution, he could, in his absence, demonstrate (if such an irony might be permitted) how he did not fully grasp the history that he was making, the futurethe Lumumbist brigades, the ongoing critique of Belgian brutality that his name would stand for. From Belgrade to Trafalgar Square, protestors aimed their considerable ire at the Belgian consulates or embassies after his death on January 17, 1961. It was afterward, in his aftermath, that Lumumba was, tentatively in his life and then assuredly in, and through and because of, his death, a revolutionary. If the only gift worthy of the name gift is, according to Jacques Derrida, that rare, almost impossible act, where giving presupposes no reciprocation, then Lumumbas might be the absolute gift of African socialism to Africas political, the gift that at once iterated and exceeded pan-Africanism. Lumumbas postipso facto communism can be said to be the only way to make a gift of the self: to give of the self, to give the self s historic standing, after death, which is to say, when there cannot be any expectation of reciprocation, when the giver gives without any possible anticipation of receiving, when the gift is a pure gift, when the giving of the gift can incur no possible debt. Except, we might say, the debt of history: the debt to history. That is, of course, the revolutionarys gift: acting in the name of an incomplete, in-process history. The life of history secured

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through the death of the name that after-lives onLumumba, socialism, communism. Not the Moment After, but the Moment Of Located within this history, how could Lumumba not be named a communist? More properly, was he not also, not already, the postcommunist sui generis? He was the most dangerous kind of communist because his communism applied specifically to the post-: the postcolonial, the independent, the communism that followed the overthrow of imperialism. Lumumba, as it was earlier feared of Nkrumah, as it was despised in Nasser and then feared in Ahmed Skou Tour, as it was feared in the African socialism of Nyerere, in the redistributive social democratic policies of Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, and in the public socialist commitments of Machel and Neto, as it was even feared, once, now a very long time ago, one hesitates to say now, of Robert Mugabe, was a communist who did not claim the name. Lumumba, in this strange historic way, stands as the inaugural postcommunist not because his leadership marks the passing of communism, which is always declaredhow often do we hear that communism is dead, only to see it resurrected when a national health care plan, for example, is floated as a political possibility in the United States? and thus must always be treated as suspect, but the communism lavenir, the communism to come that is incipiently present. It is a communism to come that is present in the nationalism of a bourgeois state determined to overturn the inequities of Belgian colonialism, the communism that might be produced out of the history of struggling against not one but several forms of neoimperialism. It is, then, possible to argue that there could only be a postcommunism: communism has always come after. It came after 1917, after colonialism, after (the collapse of ) capitalism, after the revolution. Because there is, as a practice, no communism, then it can only be post- because there was no pre-. The anti- would only, could only, come after there was already an extant communism. There was never a moment before, except insofar as every moment came before communism. Communism, as it were, has always come after itself, after the name, the (failed) praxis, of communism. The post- marks, as such, not the moment after but the very, maybe even the only, moment of. Postcommunism is, then, both evocative and

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substantively removed from postcolonialism, per se. There was an existing colonialism, a modality against being struggled against (the anti-), so that postcolonialism is, in truth, the moment afterthe modality being struggled toward, as in Fanons work Toward the African Revolution. The logic of postcolonialism is invariably, then, chronological. It is constitutive of difference, certainly, but also, by its very historical nature, primarily rooted in the chronos: in the time after, the time that is not the time before. In Lumumba, in a singular moment, the moment after is simultaneously rejected as a political logic (in part because the two post-s are made contemporaneous; the postcolonial and the postcommunist are forced to coincide, to write one another into history, to live each as the other of itself ) and then made coincident: the same as, the triumph of the constitutive of. In this regard, what is useful about Slavoj ieks notion of the parallax is that it compels us to think the dialectic as something more than simply the unity (the thinking together in the same ideological gesture) of opposites but without ever sacrificing the historical dynamism of the dialectic. iek proposes the parallax as not those two related forces between which no mediation or synthesis is possible, but as, instead, a radical change in our locationthe position from which we look or see the contradictionso that there might indeed be a parallactic conjuncture. In understanding Lumumba as a Leninist, it becomes possible to understand how the struggle for national (bourgeois) self-determination can be and is, in its very praxis, transformed into the socialist revolution. In its Lumumbist articulation, it is precisely that bourgeois nationalism and socialist revolution are not parallax, that they cannot be mediated into a mutual political manifestation that inaugurates another politics, one that, we might argue, neither Lenin nor Lumumba saw on the political horizon. It is in their operating together, one folded into the other, one barely acknowledged by the other, that these forces of history simultaneously invoke the parallax and exceed it. Importantly, thinking parallactically refuses national self-determination as the political horizon of the third world strugglethere is always something in it that is, paradoxically, beyond it, not fully known to it. Of course, the brutality of the Mobutu regime, the United Statessponsored, South Africanexecuted devastation of Angolan and Mozambican socialism, the failures of the Nyerere project, rendered the communist project over before it began. Or, more precisely, before it was allowed to begin, before it became the namethe politicalthat displaced the bourgeois nationalist. The name post- was appropriate before the designation

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pre-. The Congo was coterminously pre- and post-. For Lumumba, the postis not the moment after but, constitutively, the very moment of: the moment of a Leninist parallax. It is the moment of, shall we say, incipiently speculative revolution: the thinking of the nation that might parallax into the revolution; the transformation of the nation into a newer, unknown formationthe disarticulation into an expedient, externally inflamed ethnicization, Katanga; and the parallaxing in quick, historically rapid succession, from colony to sovereign state, from sovereign to revolutionary state. The decision, as it were, to be a bourgeois nationalist does not preclude the communist to come: the incipient socialist who might be radicalized, by the force of the contentious, fracturing event of sovereignty, out of a singular nationalism. If the rhetorical logic of the cold war was to make, for the purposes of opposing and assassinating him, Lumumba a communist, then that strategy succeeded admirably. It enabled Lumumba to become, like Lenin, the purest kind of communist: that genus produced entirely by history, the kind of communist that Marx would truly have lauded. In those ten weeks, Lumumba was, in Marxist terms, coming into socialist being. Lumumba did not possess a false bourgeois consciousness but a parallax consciousness that allowed himand maybe even compelled him into the act of making synthetic the relation between bourgeois nationalism and Leninist socialism. The postcommunist, like the revolution, emerges in the small moment, in that often disregarded, barely remarkedon interstice between colonialism and sovereignty, between sovereignty and Mobutist dictatorship. The postcommunist, again like the revolution, which for all its narrative grandness is the result of the small occasion: the contracted but glorious time of possibility, the time that is not fully known, knowable, to itself. Here Lumumba stands next to Toussaint Louvertures sans-culottes and, in our moment, the sans-papiers, literally those (refugees, illegal immigrants) without papers, but metaphorically those who are unwelcome and will never leave, the refugee or the illegal immigrant, as that figure of the political not accredited by history, to say nothing of the state, who is, however, the key force animating the politics of the state. For this reason there might not have been quite as much work to do to make of Lumumba a communist. Those who feared and opposed Lumumba, those in Belgium and the United States who opposed him because they feared him, might have had, if not exactly a justus causa, then causeat least some precipitous causefor ideological concern. Lumumba, the postcommunist, was, in any case, already an internationalistbefore which, of

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course, he had been a pan-Africanist. To be a third world bourgeois nationalist could not, in Lumumbas moment, preclude the possibility for difference in itself, as Derrida calls it: for the possibility of another politics emerging, a movement toward somewhere or something other than one peoples sovereignty. The moment of decision, of sovereignty, especially a sovereignty under threat, a sovereignty that does not fully know itself (the Congolese state had less than six months, or less than a month, depending on your calculus, to prepare for its own birth), a sovereignty attacked by an tat voyous that is backed by a more insidious tat voyous (the role played by the Belgians in the creation of Katanga, which they abandoned soon after Lumumba was assassinated), is a moment full of portentous possibility: the transition of the nationalist who has not denounced, let alone renounced, communism la Nkrumah into a communist. The mutiny promised is not, following the New Pornographers logic, the mutiny delivered, the mutiny produced in the brief party that was Congolese national sovereignty. The difference, or the non-iekian parallax, lies not only in between nationalist and communist, but in the as yet unnamedthe space, the very difference that is already constitutively present in the self: the subject of the revolution who is undergoing all the indeterminacies, the contingencies, the to-comes, as such, of a revolutionthe struggle against various imperialisms. This difference is also, one might say, a Leninist evolution: not the peaceful transition from one state, one state of mind, one form of political consciousness, one form of thinking the political, to another, but the radical, violent, bloody undoing of one form of political being. The postcommunist is more properly named the postnationalist, which is, again, where Lumumba might be said to join up with Lenin in his thinking. It is not the nation, the Congo, that Lumumba is abandoning, leaving behind, but how to think the nationits very survival, the maintenance of its sovereign boundariesas the untenable limits of the political in the time of the cold war. Lumumbas post- is, in this sense, the marking of a radicalization that animates the sovereign decision as an opening into the political beyond, not into the unknown, but into the coming to know, the coming to know how the violent strictures of the nowof the Katanga secession, of the UNs partiality to Western interests, of the bloody-mindedness of Belgian imperialismcompel a thinking of nationalism as a limit that makes impossible its own fulfillment. The nation, the Congo as nation, cannot be sustained, Lumumba begins to understand even as he anticipates his own

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certain death (unlawfully deposed, put under protective arrestsurely nothing but the last political modality before deathby the UN, escaping those strictures, rearrested by Mobutus forces, and then, finally, assassinated, his body hacked and burned to nothing by Belgian Police Commissioner Gerard Soete and his brother),14 unless it is radicalized out of itself, against its fractured self. The action cannot be unless it is socialized into something other than itself that retains, like Emmanuel Levinas might have it, something of its own selfness: its historic boundaries, its precarious sense of oneness. In his death, through his death, there is in the Lumumbist voice a calling out to a radical socialisma call his voice is making, a call that he himself cannot fully hear, one that he will, tragically, unlike Lenin, never get to hear. The precariousness of life produces the radicalizing subject, the subject of the revolution who did not anticipate the revolution, who made the revolution he did not know (fullyhow could he have known?) he was making. Lumumba created the grounds for a radical, violent course of political action that is an interdiction against bourgeois nationalism: the move beyond, to inaugurate a postPatrice Lumumba political. (Following Fanons thinking about Lumubas future, it is possible to argue that Lumumba himself might have emerged under another name, one that he himself did not recognize but would accede to and would understand its address to him.) Are not the best socialist leaders those who, significantly, do not start out as socialists? Is that why they are condemned to such short tenures, to live such short lives, as leaders? To figure Lumumba as a postcommunist in this way is both to anticipate the trajectory he might have embarked on had he lived and to argue, with a retrospective tentativeness, against the death of socialism in the Congo before there was a proper birth. It is, moreover, to restorein a moment when there is nothing that is not post-, when there is everywhere we turn a post- (among them, as I said, postfeminist, postidentity, postpolitical ), an idiosyncratic hope to the post-. It is to make, in the slender, truncated image, over the unburiable body of Patrice mery Lumumba, the post- signify as a strangely historic conjuncture, as not the moment after, but as the moment of paralactic difference. Lumumba, the force of a politics that was not ideologically fixed by nationalist imperative even as it was committed to the radical restructuring of Congolese life. In the case of Lumumba, the postrepresents a politics that is aware that it does not and cannot fully know itself. In advance, Lumumbist postcommunism knows only that it cannot sustain the nation as a neocolonial state. In the tumultuous and ultimately

596 Grant Farred

tragic birth of its sovereignty, it comes to understand how the nation must be thought beyond if it is to sustain itself as a whole that cannot be undone or broken by the violence of the tat voyousthis thinking of the nations moment must struggle rigorously against the possibility of a Katanga, of a Tshombe, or, worse, a Mobutu, even as it determinedly resists them. The only way to think the Congolese nation is, for this reason, to already understandif not in advance, then certainly in the constitutive moment that reveals itself to also be the moment of reterritorializationthe imperative of the post-, that which is, as always, in the mode of to come. To be after colonialism is, in the era of cold war brutalities, to be invariably against the history of colonialism. It is to imagine a post- in which communism signifies an after that is a radical rupturing rather than an unwanted continuity. In the terms of the New Pornographers, this is what is meant by the mutiny that is promised: the mutiny as the instantiation of difference, the encounter with the difference within, the signal differencethe difference that is, as Toni Morrison reminds us in The Bluest Eye, all the difference there is15that was only barely known to the self. What is promised is always, in political terms, both in excess of and less than that which is expected. The post- is, then, the violent fulfillment of the political that cannot, in advance, be known. The post- is a moment, a form of politics, that can never be thought only as a time unto itself, a time that can be understood only chronologically. The post- is most valuable in its ability to make us think at once with, against, and despite the political modalities, strictures, violence, and potentialities of our, or any other, time. The post- is, for this very reason, always the time of terror. It is not only the neocolonialist/comprador reterritorialization of the nation, or a Stalinist terror, but the stringent and often bloody terror that is integral to the moment of and after the political decision. It is the radical uncertainty, the terror of not knowing, of only glimpsing, and then only to behold a frightful vista, of not only what is to come, but what is, already, sometimes in gory detail, less often in a more promising visage, present. It is what is already to be grasped, what is therethe delineation of the struggles that lie ahead, of the bruising encounters that awaitto be confronted, what is unavoidable, and what might be avoided in order to ensure that the post- succeeds and liquidates that which went before. That is the real terror that Lumumba engendered in the West, especially with Belgium and the United States: that there would be, substantively, a post-Belgian Congo. The sovereignty of such a Congo would be neither con-

Not the Moment After, but the Moment Of 597

tingent nor restricted to itself (the very core of cold war logic): Lumumba struggled to ensure that the Congo would be beyond neoimperial control, that the effect of Lumumbism might open ontoor, more accurately, be forced intothe political that lies beyond the specter of Conradian horror, the always-present specter of imposed terror. And what is the promise of the post- if not the determination to live sovereignly, perhaps as a communist, beyond the mutinies begat by that Kurtzian heart of darkness? What could be more terrible and more tragic than a revolution that did not know that its own time had come? This is a terrible thing: a time that was not ready for the revolution it was making. Of the radical thinkers in the Congo at that moment, only Lumumba, caught though he was in a truly tumultuous time, could grasp what was on offer at the time, what gift history was making in that moment, what gift the time itself was, what power there was in the time, his time (in both the ontological and historical sense), how the time demanded a thinking of another timeof how the mutiny of Katanga could be parallaxed into a party for the socialist ages. The Congolese post- represents the determination to refuse, as Lumumba did, the infinite postponementthe elimination definitive of a political that showed itself to be radically different to, more different than it might at first have known, that which it was succeeding. The post-, we are again reminded, is perforce a thing of terror. In the melancholy terms of the New Pornographers, the tragedy and the promise of the mutinythe revolutionis that Lumumba was never able to fulfill itself as a party of the Trotskyist, Congolese, or, regrettably, the Emma Goldman variety. As Goldman said, If I cant dance, I dont want to be in your revolution.16 Lenin, good authority has it, was a hell of a revolutionary but not much of a dancer. Lumumba, on the hand, was deft enough on his feet, but, regrettably, at his death, had not yet identified the Leninist moves in himself. What he did realize, like Lenin, was the historic portents contained within the moment of.
Notes
Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the International American Studies Conference in Lisbon, Portugal, in September 2007, and at the Department of English at Cornell University, in November 2007. I am grateful to Jonathan Eburne for his suggestions. 1 V. I. Lenin quoted in Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj iek, eds., Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 12.

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2 I am invoking here the title, and the preoccupying concept, of Alain Badious book The Century, which is an attempt to understand, with some exactness, how the time of the twentieth century unfolded, how we might mark the beginning and, if at all possible, the end, putative, tentative, preliminary, imagined or not, of that epoch, the time when the hundred years might be said to be over. Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). 3 Frantz Fanon, Lumumbas Death: Could We Do Otherwise? in Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays, ed. Franoise Maspero, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 191. 4 Adolfo Gilly, introduction to A Dying Colonialism, by Frantz Fanon, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 1. 5 How can we not now remember that Lumumba and Fanon died within a year of one another and, yet, that we must think them discretely, even as Fanon obviously admired the Congolese revolutionary? He [Fanon] was to die a year after having witnessed the fall of his friend, Lumumba, the African leader whose African vision was closest to his. Franoise Maspero, editorial note, in Toward the African Revolution, x. 6 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 197. 7 Budgen, Kouvelakis, and iek, Lenin Reloaded, 3. 8 Ibid. 9 Patrice Lumumba, Congo, My Country (New York: Praeger, 1962); and Patrice Lumumba, Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 19581961, ed. Jean van Lierde, trans. Helen R. Lane (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972). 10 Budgen, Kouvelakis, and iek, Lenin Reloaded, 3. 11 Although the conference to decide the future of the Congo was concluded on January 27, 1960, the elections were only scheduled forand held betweenMay 1125, 1960, and Lumumbas Mouvement National Congolais declared victorious on May 30, leaving the leader and his party only a scant four weeks to prepare for sovereign governance. 12 Thomas Sankara, Who Are the Enemies of the People? in Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution, 19831987 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2007), 51. 13 Kwame Nkrumah, address to members of the United Kingdom and world press visiting the Gold Coast to cover the general election (World Press Conference, Accra, Ghana, February 13, 1951). 14 The Katangan authorities who carried out the murders also lined up, next to Lumumba, his comrades Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito, though the reasons for their deaths are less clear. 15 Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (London: Chatto and Windus, 1979), 84. 16 Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York: AMS Press, 1970), 56.

1 Abstract for Grant Farred, Not the Moment After, but the Moment Of (SAQ 108:3)

Using the brief (ten-week) rule of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo as an instructive instance for thinking the post-, Not the Moment After, but the Moment Of argues that the post- is never the time after but the momentimpossible as it is to understandof, that is, the moment itself. Grounded in a critique of postcommunism, this essay maps Lumumbas transition from bourgeois nationalistthe postcolonial leaderto the communist who did not name himself a communist, the anticolonialist transformed, by the force of history (the failure of the United Nations to protect the sovereignty of the newly independent Congo; the neoimperialist designs of the United States and Belgium; his struggle against the Belgian-sponsored secessionist movement in the copper-rich Katanga province), into a Lenin-like revolutionary. This essay thinks Lumumba both in relation to the African revolutionary tradition (Gamal Abdel Nasser, Julius Nyerere, and Agostinho Neto, among others) and the history of radical socialism (Lenin figures especially prominently in this regard).