in the Eurocolonial discourse of Africa that I have been pursuing?
For there can be no question that if Western representations of the Orient have to be regarded as fundamentally and inevitably biased, the European discourse of Africa would by the same token have to be regarded as utterly irredeemable. By contrast with the treatment of Africa and Africans in much Eurocolonial writing, the rendition of the East in a parallel Orientalist discourse can only be described as verging on the admiring or utopian, as in the following passage from Thomas Astley’s compendium of travels of 1745:
Such is the difference between Africa and Asia…. [In Asia] the scene at once changes from sandy deserts to well-cultivated plains; from poverty and want to wealth and plenty; from miserable villages and huts, to magnificent cities and buildings; from people dwelling in a kind of savage state, to nations improved by all the refinements of policy and arts (3: vi).
Contrary to Said’s claims, it is not the Orient but Africa that has in the minds of most commentators over the ages figured as the utter ‘Other’ of the civilised world. This realisation raised new challenges for my project even as it also clarified lines of approach and opened up new possibilities.
The Foucauldian challenge to the independent status of human cognitive processes rendered the unproblematic and judgemental assumptions of earlier academic studies of ‘the image of Africa’ ever more questionable, even as it suggested new approaches. One extreme position was taken up by Christopher L. Miller in Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (1985), where the ‘real’ geo-historical Africa simply disappears in a discourse of utter disempowerment. Miller’s ‘Africa’ is no more than a blank, an emptiness, a function of language: ‘an allegory of inauthenticity …, conceived of as a void and unformed prior to its investment with shape and being by the Christian or Islamic outside’ (13).
Such extreme positions became paradigmatic as the awkward embrace of postmodern relativism and postcolonial idealism spiralled into incoherence. ‘Language is a self-referring system of signs that does not indicate meaning outside itself, and does not refer to or have any correspondence to reality…. [Hence] one cannot expect a literary text to relay information about … “the South African situation”’, wrote Paul Williams (1988, 33). If such tenets were true, there could of course be no ‘real’ or ‘true’ pre-colonial Africa to redeem or recuperate, just as no one image of Africa could be declared superior to another, and the idealist endeavours of postcolonialism would be pointless. Ultra-postmodernist approaches such as those of Miller and Williams erased Africa along with the postcolonial recuperative project that their anti-colonialist critique appeared to support.
By contrast, Peter J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, historians of a realist school, were in 1982 still committed to archetypal verities and an unquestioning assumption that Africa and its peoples were solid entities that had been shockingly confronted:
There is no need to labour the point: when white Englishmen first encountered black Africans preconceptions of distaste, even repulsion, already existed. The Negro – black, naked or semi-naked – was deviant in appearance, and there would be no great surprise if he should turn out to be deviant in behaviour and custom…. The fact was that the African instead of being white and clothed, was black and naked (1982, 34–36).
Such stark views are still very much with us. Writing in 2005, Arnu Korhonen, arguing from a Finnish perspective, is of the opinion that ‘the enigmatic nature of black skin [has been] central to the construction of black “otherness” … to define the borders of civility and barbarism’ (95), and to serve as the central metaphor that has ‘allowed the various meanings ascribed to Africa and Africans to be gathered together’ (110). For Europeans, ‘dark skin was both comic and horrifying: it embodied vice, sin and terror’ (106).
Such disabling caricatures of cross-cultural encounter, and their implications for any redemptive re-examination of the Eurocolonial discourse of Africa, would have been bleak were it not for the fact that such verdicts once again did not match my own experience of many pertinent texts as pluralist, dense, multivalent and culturally interactive. Clearly, some compromise had to be found between the nihilism of Miller and the reductive phenomenalism of Marshall and Williams, and Korhonen.
That the essentialist and evangelical convictions of a postcolonialism wedded to the view that Eurocentrists of the imperial era were either plain evil or irremediably cognitively handicapped, could not be reconciled with the disruptive scepticism of a postmodernist discourse of suspicion, eventually dawned on both parties, but not without difficulty. By 1995 the editors of a special issue of ARIEL dedicated to ‘Postcolonialism and its Discontents’ would speak of their subject as ‘a suitcase blown open on the baggage belt’ (McCallum et al., 1995, 7). However, none of their contributors seemed able to identify the incendiary device.
At the crudest level, misgivings about the affiliation of the two ‘posts-’ emerged in the shape of resentment at the domicile of many theoretical postcolonialists not in the Third World for which they presumed to speak, but at prestigious institutions in the West: ‘Their [Said, Spivak and Bhabha’s] inspiration comes perhaps more from nicely subtle readings of fashionable European theorists, Foucault or De Man and Derrida or Bakhtin and Lacan, than it does from … current local knowledge of the cultural politics of everyday life in postcolonial hinterlands’ (Young, 1995, 160). Aijaz Ahmad spoke darkly of ‘this relationship between the immigrant intellectual, literary Third-Worldism [and] avant-garde literary theory’ (1992, 91) that had the disempowering effect of displacing ‘an activist culture with a textual culture’ (1) and of turning the crises of the wretched of the earth into academic accolades.
The harshest censure came from an African intellectual, albeit one also based at an American university. Asking whether ‘the Post- in Postmodernism [is] the Post- in Postcolonial’, Kwame Anthony Appiah concluded: ‘Postcoloniality is the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia: a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained group of [Third World] writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery’ (1991, 348). Clearly the naïveties of postcolonialism hold few charms for at least some of the beneficiaries of both a postmodernist discourse of dismantlement emanating from the Western academy, and a consequent postcolonial programme of affirmative action at Western universities.
Other scholars, investigating specific periods or localities of colonial discourse, have been able to show that Saidean postcolonialists have at times simply had their facts wrong. John David Ragan, in a chapter entitled ‘French Women Travellers in Egypt’, concludes that ‘Orientalist discourse was not hermetically closed but rather permeable and porous, and under constant challenge and discussion’, and that there were always ‘plenty of people around who were “thinking otherwise”, who were speaking “ungrammatically”’ (1998, 227).
Such views are duplicated in many other studies of ‘Orientalist’ writing (Lowe, 1992; Melman, 1992; Donnell, 1995; Carolyn Shaw, 1995; Codell and Macleod, 1998; Irwin, 2006). In her study of nineteenth-century French treatments of North Africa, Lisa Lowe proposes an Orientalist discourse ‘through which the management and production of many Others take place … [and] in which we trace not only the desires for mastery, but the critiques of these desires as well’ (1991, 217). Carolyn Shaw, writing about colonial Kenya, reveals a colonial encounter ineluctably ‘temporal, unstable, contingent, fragmentary, localized, multi-vocal, the process and product of decentred selves’ (1995, cited by Ranger, 1996, 277). ‘If postcoloniality has been defined as the transcendence of imperial structures and their histories, such a definition is obviously contradicted by the everyday experiences and memories of the people in the ex-colonies’, writes Simon Gikandi (1996, 15) as he goes on to show how postcolonial African nationalist governments have internalised only too thoroughly some of the very worst features of the colonialism they claimed to repudiate
