ABSTRACT
Africa has had a particularly intense relationship with the norm of civilisation. Even as Africa was invented or imagined by outsiders, African agency has played a key part in shaping images and ideas of the continent. 'Civilisation' thus has complex meanings in Africa. This chapter offers an intellectual history of psychoanalysis and Africa as an attempt to understand the significance of the idea of civilisation in creating political authority. It draws broader conclusions about the relationship between civilisation and political authority in Africa by looking at the case of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe. Franz Fanon grasped the way in which the founding father of psychoanalysis fell victim to his own blindness about the omnipotence fantasy that is an expression of civilisation. Looking for psychoanalytic resonances within autochthonous ideas and practices in Africa, Valentin Mudimbe provides a more nuanced understanding of civilisation as a norm. Political authority has a highly complex relation to the idea of civilisation in postcolonial Africa.
