Achille Mbembe

Agora

Achille Mbembe

b. 1957

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

Modern power is not just the power to govern life but to decide who may live and who must die – a legacy of colonialism and slavery.

Placement

African & Africana Philosophy · Africa south of the Sahara · Politics & Law, Society & History

Cameroonian historian and political theorist: “necropolitics” names sovereignty as the power to decide who may live and who must die.

Key ideas

Necropolitics
The postcolony
Critique of Black Reason

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Influence

Influenced by 6

Hannah Arendt

influenced by ✓
In “Necropolitics” (2003) Mbembe drew, alongside Foucault’s biopower, on Arendt’s analysis of race, colonial rule and the camps in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) to describe the colony as the place where sovereignty is exercised as the right to kill. A. Mbembe, “Necropolitics”, Public Culture 15:1 (2003), 11–40
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Hannah Arendt › 1906–1975
Frantz Fanon

influenced by ✓
Mbembe read Fanon as a thinker of the universal, taking up his critique of colonial racism in a critique of ‘Black reason’ (Critique de la raison nègre, 2013). A. Mbembe, Critique de la raison nègre (2013); “L’universalité de Frantz Fanon”, preface to F. Fanon, Œuvres (2011)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Frantz Fanon › 1925–1961
Michel Foucault

influenced by ✓
Mbembe extended Foucault’s biopower into ‘necropolitics’: sovereignty shows itself in deciding who may live and who must die, from plantation to colony (‘Necropolitics’, 2003). A. Mbembe, “Necropolitics”, Public Culture 15 (2003); M. Foucault, « Il faut défendre la société » (lectures 1976; publ. 1997)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Michel Foucault › 1926–1984
Fabien Eboussi Boulaga

influenced by ✓
Mbembe, in an obituary (2018) and a dossier with Nadia Yala Kisukidi (2019), placed Eboussi Boulaga’s work in the project of ‘writing the world from Africa’. A. Mbembe, “Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, disparition d’un ‘inlassable veilleur’”, Le Monde (15 Oct. 2018); N. Y. Kisukidi and A. Mbembe, “Eboussi Boulaga. Défaites et utopies”, Politique africaine (2019); F. Eboussi Boulaga, La Crise du Muntu (1977)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Fabien Eboussi Boulaga › 1934–2018
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

influenced by
Mbembe took up Ngũgĩ’s Decolonising the Mind and his idea of decolonisation as a continuing process of “seeing ourselves clearly” in the debates on decolonising South African universities. A. Mbembe, “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive” (lecture, WISER, Johannesburg, 2015)
Evidence: AI draft
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o › 1938–2025
Giorgio Agamben

influenced by
Mbembe drew on Agamben’s state of exception and the camp as paradigm of sovereignty in describing colonial and occupied zones as spaces of necropower (‘Necropolitics’, 2003). A. Mbembe, “Necropolitics”, Public Culture 15 (2003); Politiques de l’inimitié (2016); G. Agamben, Homo sacer (1995)
Evidence: AI draft
Giorgio Agamben › b. 1942

Criticism

Criticizes 1

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

criticised
In Critique of Black Reason (2013) Mbembe read Hegel’s account of Africa in Reason in History – figures lacking language and self-awareness – as the culmination of a Western race discourse that defined Africa by absence. A. Mbembe, Critique de la raison nègre (2013; English Critique of Black Reason, 2017), ch. 1 “The Subject of Race”
Evidence: AI draft
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel › 1770–1831

Works

2000On the Postcolony
Power in postcolonial Africa: rulers and ruled share an aesthetics of excess and vulgarity in which domination and complicity are intertwined.
2003Necropolitics
From the plantation to the colony to occupation: sovereignty as the power over death.
2013Critique of Black Reason
How the figure of the “Negro” was invented in the Atlantic slave trade, colonialism and race thinking – and how, under neoliberal capitalism, the condition once imposed on Black people threatens to become general.

Position

Mbembe analyses power after colonialism. In On the Postcolony he described how authoritarian African regimes and their subjects are bound together in a world of excess, spectacle and grotesque laughter. His essay Necropolitics extends Foucault’s idea of biopolitics: modern sovereignty shows itself not only in managing life but in deciding who may live and who must die, from the plantation and the colony to zones of occupation. In Critique of Black Reason he traces how the figure of the “Black” was invented to justify slavery and exploitation – and warns that such logics now threaten ever more people worldwide. He is a key voice of postcolonial theory.

Life & context

Mbembe was born in Cameroon in 1957 and studied in Yaoundé and Paris, where he earned his doctorate in history at the Sorbonne. He taught at universities in the United States, including Columbia and Yale, and directed the African social science council CODESRIA in Dakar. Since 2001 he has worked at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg.