incapable of producing any true knowledge about non-Europe’ (Ahmad, 1992, 178), then the authors of the centuries-old Eurocolonial library of Africa could not be accused of perfidy, but had instead to be understood (and exonerated?) as the victims of conceptual determinants beyond their control. Better still – those writers from Homer and Herodotus onward who, despite such glacial forces of conceptual arrest stacked against them, had nevertheless steadily reported that African cultures could be complex, varied, different, yet comprehensible, now not only deserved more respect and serious attention, but might yet be recruited into a discourse of reclamation that seemed ever more urgent.
Several Saidean acolytes drew attention to further directions that could be pursued, some even when denying such options. So, for instance, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in a much-cited essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1985a), held that the colonial subject could only ever speak as a ventriloquist’s dummy in colonial discourse, even when sympathetically and authentically presented in a first-person voice, since, as she put it elsewhere, ‘the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been absolutely Other into a domesticated Other that consolidates the imperialist self’ (1985b, 253). Some of Kipling’s first-person Indian tales are pertinent here – their narrators appear authentically Indian, yet are comprehensively manipulated. This ‘process more insidious than naked repression’ would also occupy Abdul R. JanMohamed, for whom ‘any evident “ambivalence” is in fact a product of deliberate, if at times subconscious, imperialist duplicity, operating very efficiently through the economy of its central trope, the Manichaean allegory’ (1985, 61). How such a ploy could be at once ‘deliberate’ and ‘subconscious’, JanMohamed does not explain, but the uncompromising manichaeism evident here was diagnostic of a first cohort of postcolonialists inspired by Fanon and Said. It was propagated assiduously as a timeless and cosmic absolute by writers such as JanMohamed:
Fanon’s definition of colonial society as a Manichaean organization is by no means exaggerated. In fact, the colonial mentality is dominated by a Manichaean allegory of white and black, good and evil, salvation and damnation, civilization and savagery, superiority and inferiority, intelligence and emotion, self and other, subject and object (1983, 4).
Yet such pronouncements ineluctably drew me to the dissident recognition that they simply did not match the evidence of my everyday experience as a bilingual speaker in a multicultural African country, and even less the testimony of many texts in the discourse of Africa that I had come across. With Benita Parry, I felt that Said had fostered ‘readings that are indifferent to textual gaps, indeterminacies and contradictions’ (1992, 26), and that Spivak’s anxieties did not express either the sentiments or the performance of generations of colonised speakers who could speak clearly from their host texts.
Nevertheless, the stark and punitive manichaeism inherent in Said’s thesis continued to supply former-colonial and Third World critics and their sympathisers in the West with a new arsenal of theoretical weaponry that could be deployed against all Western (univocally read as ‘imperialist’) scholarship. JanMohamed’s contributions (1983, 1985), and Hugh Ridley’s (1983 – see below), were among the earliest, but they were joined by many others dedicated not only to the dismantling of the Eurocolonial archive, but also to the disparagement of much Western cultural and intellectual achievement deemed to underlie it (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 1972, 1981; Mudimbe, 1988, 1994; Salami, 1998; Afzal-Khan and Seshadri-Crooks, 2000). ‘Institutional colonialism was maintained by language as much as by guns,’ declared Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (1994, i), and a large echelon of postcolonialist scholarship has come into being to explore the ‘linguistic turn’ and a consequent cognitive determinism in the colonial project. Mahmoud Salami has argued that all European authors are ‘politicized and ideologized whether [they] like it or not’ (1998, 151), hence their work merely encodes ‘accumulated Western guilt’ (155). Evidently, such ‘accumulated Western guilt’ is akin to Calvin’s notion of Original Sin – it might be forgiven, but must remain a crippling moral and cognitive curse from which no Western mind can escape.
By 1982, Peter Marshall and Glyndwr Williams felt obliged to complain that ‘Europe’s reaction to the blackness of the Negro has been exhaustively examined by recent scholars’ (228). By then, this discourse of exhaustion, focusing relentlessly on a perceived inability of European commentators to say anything ‘true’ or worthwhile about Africa and its people had led to totalising and exasperated conclusions such as those of Hugh Ridley:
Colonial literature [is] an exclusively European phenomenon with next to nothing worthwhile to say about other races and cultures. No more than anti-Semitic literature can be used as a handbook to Jewish culture should colonial literature be treated as a source-book on the Third World (1983, 3).
There did not seem much left to say after this. The postcolonial project of disparagement, energised by the scandals of slavery, colonialism, racism and the Holocaust, constantly revivified by contemporary liberation struggles, the Civil Rights movement in the United States, and the universal abhorrence of the apartheid policies for which my own country had become notorious, seemed set to derail any serious attempt to rehabilitate the textual record of the centuries of encounter between Africa and the Western world.
Yet the sheer vehemence of this discourse, paradoxically, continued to suggest other lines of approach. A seminal contribution to the debate, at one level indicative of the mounting impediments with which my own project had to contend, came from Australia – Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back (1989). The work’s title and informing impulse derived from Salman Rushdie, although its central assumptions shared little of the playful iconoclasm of Rushdie’s novels. For its authors, the English language was itself an endocultural racialised code, deeply implicated in the cognitive ravages of imperialism. It was the bearer of a ‘cultural conspiracy’, appropriating the non-imperial world and enforcing a ‘violent hierarchy’ of knowledge and power. According to this view, ‘Europe and its others’ are locked in a permanent binary opposition, a conceptual grid of violation in which language with its own coercive dynamic towards enforcing difference plays the major constitutive role. Thus ‘the nexus of power involving literature, language, and a dominant British culture’ (4) meant that the very process of encrypting the ‘other’ into a text was already a violation, an imposition and a disempowerment of the subject. All writing – and most especially all transcultural writing – was in a sense illicit, and, in the colonial context, expropriative. It would appear that none of the European texts about Africa that I had been studying should even have been written. If I seem to be lampooning The Empire Writes Back – its insights were widely respected and are still cited – it is not to discredit its scholarship, but to indicate how a punitive discourse of postcolonial rectitude was itself heading for a speechless abyss even as it increasingly refined and redefined the kinds of question one had to ask of Eurocolonial texts.
The unease generated by the uncompromising stance of The Empire Writes Back is codified in its style. A lexis of violence articulates its thesis – language, we are told, intrudes, invades, subverts, intervenes, seizes, demands, asserts, disfigures, oppresses, dislocates, denigrates and violates everything it used to be thought of as merely imparting. In this, the work echoed its Fanonist and Foucauldian inspirations and anticipated other critiques of a manichaean cut. So, for instance, Sara Suleri’s The Rhetoric of English India (1992), despite promising a more nuanced reading of Eurocolonial discourse, is marked by a discursive pathology of such vehemence – ‘anxiety of empire’ (13), ‘epistemological terror’ (15), ‘cultural terror’ (17), ‘discursive terror’ (18), etcetera, all the way to ‘imperial horror’ (112) – that it could only confirm what it had set out to challenge. ‘The astounding specificity of each colonial encounter’ (13) that it promises to celebrate reveals only ‘a binary rigidity … which is an inherently Eurocentric strategy’ (4).
For several decades, the bleak binarism displayed by works such as these echoed through the discourse.
