Political emancipation in the twenty-first century must be conceived and achieved through establishing a 'distance' from the state and its practices. This article argues that in order to begin to understand politics 'at a distance from the state', we need to first understand politics as a collective thought-practice. The thought of an emancipatory politics exists o...

The paper begins from the axiomatic point that, despite the form it eventually took, namely that of a neo-colonial process, development was understood and fought for in Africa as (part of) an emancipatory political project central to the liberatory vision of the pan-African nationalism which emerged victorious at independence. Indeed independence was always seen, b...