Achille Mbembe

Achille Mbembe, a Cameroonian historian and political theorist born in 1957, works as a research professor in history and politics at the University of the Witwatersrand’s Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research. He is recognized for his work on colonialism and its aftermath, and he is a prominent figure in contemporary French critical theory. Mbembe grew up near Otélé, Cameroon. He earned a PhD in history from the Sorbonne in Paris in 1989, followed by a DEA in political science from the Instituts d’études politiques.

His academic career has included short-term posts at several institutions: he was an assistant professor of history at Columbia University (1988–1991), a senior research fellow at the Brookings Institution (1991–1992), an associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania (1992–1996), and executive director of CODESRIA in Dakar, Senegal (1996–2000). He also held visiting professorships at UC Berkeley (2001), Yale (2003), and Harvard’s W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute. In 2020, he delivered the presidential lecture in the humanities at Stanford University. His published work covers African history and politics.

Current appointments

Notable titles include La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (1996), On the Postcolony (first published in French in 2000, with an English translation in 2001 and an African edition in 2015), and Critique de la raison nègre (2013). He holds an A1 rating from South Africa’s National Research Foundation. Currently, Mbembe is based at WISER in Johannesburg and holds an annual visiting appointment at Duke University’s Franklin Humanities Institute. He also serves as a contributing editor to the journal Public Culture.

Mbembe’s research focuses on African history, postcolonial studies, politics, and social science. Though often labeled a postcolonial theorist because of his early English book, he has rejected that term, describing his project as one of accepting and moving beyond difference rather than returning to a pre-colonial or marginal identity. In On the Postcolony, he argues that both academic and popular discourse on Africa is trapped in clichés rooted in Western fantasies and fears.

Work

Drawing on Frantz Fanon and Sigmund Freud, he contends that these depictions are unconscious projections tied to guilt, denial, and repetition. Like James Ferguson and V.Y. Mudimbe, he sees Africa not as a fixed place but as a fraught relationship with the rest of the world, playing out on political, psychic, semiotic, and sexual levels. Mbembe argues that Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower is insufficient for understanding contemporary forms of subjugation. He adds the idea of necropolitics, which describes how sovereignty is exercised through the creation of zones of death, where death becomes the ultimate form of domination and resistance.

Ecology

He has applied this to cases such as Palestine, Africa, and Kosovo. He has also studied Johannesburg as a metropolitan city and the work of Frantz Fanon. Politically, Mbembe criticizes the lack of democracy in Africa and calls for an end to the CFA franc and French military bases on the continent, noting the decline of French influence there. On ecology, he argues that the climate crisis stems from human superiority over other species, a belief he says was absent from pre-colonial African traditions, and suggests looking to African archives for solutions.