On the Postcolony

A book of linked essays by a Cameroonian political philosopher, first published in French with the subtitle Essai sur l'imagination politique dans l'Afrique contemporaine. Mbembe rejects two habits of writing about Africa: treating it only as a lack, measured against Europe, and treating it as an untouched essence. Instead he studies how power actually works in postcolonial states. He traces the colonial form of rule he calls commandement, arbitrary and violent, and shows how it survived independence. He describes what he calls private indirect government, as states hand public functions to private actors. In the best-known chapter, on the aesthetics of vulgarity, he argues that rulers and ruled share the same everyday world of display, excess and obscene jokes about power, so that both sides become what he calls mutually zombified rather than simply opposed. Later essays examine cartoons of the autocrat, the experience of death and violence, and religion.

It offers a new vocabulary for how authoritarian power is lived and mocked in everyday life, and has become a key text of postcolonial theory well beyond Africa.