ABSTRACT
I argued in the first chapter that an understanding of the good life demands an articulation of a robust social ontology – that is, to put it rather telegraphically, that a vital dimension of the good life necessarily consists in a politics of the good society. As the epigraph above suggests, I want to think through what this means by making a turn toward a more historically grounded analysis via a granular engagement with the major contours of African politics. The main purpose of this chapter is to articulate the social ontology of African political life and thereby to offer intimations of the promises made by various political imaginaries to the good life. To be clear, this chapter does not seek to offer an “ideal” vision of African politics. Rather, in engaging with the social ontology of African politics, I am arguing that it is only through an excavation of the actually existing deep structure of African political, economic, and cultural forms of life, that we are able to articulate a robust vision of the good life. My focus on “Africa” is also meant as an argument that one cannot understand global politics without reckoning with its entanglement with “Africa”; indeed that “Africa” is constitutive of global politics. The first section of this chapter thus begins by contextualizing the meaning of “Africa.” The second section then will engage in a critical discussion of the political imaginaries structuring African (and global) politics.
