Sovereign power includes deciding who may live and who is exposed to death. Colonial histories shape that decision.
The longer story
Mbembe extended Foucault's 'biopolitics' into 'necropolitics'—the power to expose people to death. Where Foucault studied how power makes life live, Mbembe studies how it makes life die. Colonial and postcolonial sovereignty operates through the creation of 'death-worlds' where survival itself becomes a form of resistance. For research in postcolonial contexts, Mbembe shows how violence and dispossession structure the conditions under which creative work happens. You can't study African cultural production without confronting these histories of extraction and survival.