Not easy to meet Achille Mbembe; schedule constraints oblige. The Cameroonian intellectual based in Johannesburg, South Africa, takes advantage of his visit to Paris for a handful of days to increase his interventions. His commitments are twofold: promotion of his new book, The Terrestrial Community (ed. La Découverte, February 2023) on the one hand, development of the Foundation for Innovation for Democracy which he has directed since November 2022, of the other.

Despite the rhythmic pace of his appointments, Mbembe takes the time to articulate his thoughts. Installed on the terrace of a café a stone’s throw from his hotel in the 14th arrondissement of the capital, he is already in the shoes of the interviewee: tight-fitting transparent frame glasses to better plant the gaze, singing accent made of “r » rolled up in the shape of a lullaby, and, above all, words chosen with infinite care… Him to explain from the start: « Until then, the big question will have been « What separates us? I reverse it in my book by asking, “What do we share?” »

The Terrestrial Community represents the last part of a trilogy begun in 2016 with Politics of Enmity and continued in 2020 with Brutalism (both published by La Découverte). The Cameroonian intellectual led an organic re-reading of the contemporary social, economic and political challenges seen from the African continent. In this last volume, here he is exploring the possibilities of a “commons” in the light of the global environmental context.

“It all happened along the way. We open a window, we enter through a door that opens onto another and little by little, a path is sketched out. The result of an intellectual journey that began in the 1980s, The Earth Community is the product of philosophical influences borrowed as much from the African continent as from Europe and America.

“Until then, I had been very interested in the question of identity, which I discovered through African literature. In particular through the black poetry conveyed by the Négritude movement (Sédar Senghor, Césaire, Damas and the others…). It is a literature that strives to give Africa back its face – its own face. And its place in the history of the world. »

For Achille Mbembe, the question of identity arises in the philosophical discipline at the end of the Second World War, in relation to the more general question of the universal. “We find it in the works of Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre…” However, “modern African thought will have paid enormous attention to it as well. Considering African history in modernity and historical phenomena of domination such as the slave trade, colonization or the persistence until the early 1990s of racist regimes. »

From the 2000s, his attention as a philosopher and political scientist focused on “the springs of this drive for separation – always with a view to rediscovering what is common to us. As in the previous work, in The Terrestrial Community, the language swarms, searches, searches for itself and borrows here and elsewhere. Its author does not hesitate to introduce criticism and political analysis. One of the lessons that the academic trained with the influential historian Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch draws, among other things, from his time at Sciences Po.

His conscious and assumed position – “it’s my journey, it’s like that” – readily feeds on geopolitical observations. “The United States appears third in my geography. In relation to the black question. Attached to the circulation of ideas, Achille Mbembe is lucid about their possible manipulation. A researcher at the prestigious University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, he sees this very directly: “There is a traffic of concepts and categories between the United States and South Africa for everything related to the experiences of race and racism. , while North American and South African historical experiences are profoundly different. »

This does not prevent the intellectual from digging here and there at the bends of thought, readings and movements of the language – The Drunkard in the bush by Amos Tutuola, classic of Nigerian literature, returns from time to time under the pen of the author. Borrowings that testify as much to a real openness to the world as to an acute political awareness.

It is that at the heart of Mbembe’s thought, rhetoric and politics are nestled like twins. His neologisms, his organic writing and his attention to the living feed into forceful indictments of capitalism and technology – this “computational” world. As such, the notion of passerby is of particular interest to him: “It is at the heart of what is common to us. The philosopher-political scientist to proceed in a funnel to qualify it. First its philosophical meaning: “It originates in the fact that we humans are only here for a short time. We exhaust our vital credit in the very act of death. And to develop, hand gestures in support: “From there, the Earth we do not own it. It is what possesses us, in the sense that it makes room for us within it. It is this unconditional, extendable and radical hospitality that is the essence of the Earth. »

When the reflection unfolds, its political meaning immediately emerges. “One can also consider passing in its socio-historical sense: through the great movement of migration – whether forced or not. But there is no need to pull the thread to see the concept take on its political coloring in Mbembe’s mouth: “It implies the emergence in this global landscape of all kinds of encampment devices: refugee camps, which dot our world today ; walls; died at borders when crossing inhospitable spaces. Because according to the thinker, it is indeed the question of the government of migrations that occupies our time: “It refers to what if not to the question of knowing who owns the Earth. Who has the right to inhabit it and how? Who has the right to stay there and under what conditions? Mbembe does not hide his desire to see borders abolished – intracontinental above all. Because Africa remains the anchor of its global thought, made of round trips, commitments and adaptations. “It is clear that Africa needs to open up more than ever. Hence this insistence: “There is no need for young Africans to risk their lives crossing the Sahara and the Mediterranean where no one is waiting for them.” Africa is huge enough to house them. As long as it’s open. »

This openness, the thinker cultivates it on his own scale from South Africa and in permanent interactions with the foreign political and academic world. A singular positioning to identify the changes underway in the globalized intellectual universe. “My position is very different from that of neo-Pan-Africanists, who believe that the causes of the continent’s misfortunes must be sought externally. This is a misreading of the balance of power in the international arena. Mbembe clarified his position: “I will have tried during my work to be as realistic as possible. But a realism that does not lead to nihilism and cynicism. Hence the relatively poetic dimension of my work. This sometimes ambivalent rhetoric sends back to back several opposing analyses. The philosopher indeed discerns two harmful illusions in the current understanding of the continent’s challenges: “a libertarian vision first, according to which it would be enough to transform each African into an entrepreneur, to multiply start-ups, to free the market so that the emancipation happens; another driven by neo-Pan-Africanism which exacerbates sovereignty without democracy, with the use of force (military, religious fanaticism). In response to these two characteristic trends in the intellectual and militant landscape concerning the African continent, Mbembe advances “a collective intelligence that is based on concern for the living. It is the last name of democracy, the capacity to mobilize. »

In one formula, he concentrates the scope of his latest book: “I am campaigning to create an open Africa, a borderless Africa, a democratic Africa. Would the end of a programmatic written trilogy coincide with the beginning of political activity in word and deed? The answer to this question will remain in suspense, a lunch follows in stride.