double’ (1994, xii). They have inspired Henry Louis Gates Jr to conclude: ‘As a psychoanalyst of culture, as a champion of the wretched of the earth, [Fanon] is an almost irresistible figure for a criticism that sees itself as both oppositional and postmodern’ (1991, 458).
The ready enlistment of postmodernism here in the recuperative programme of postcolonialism is diagnostic and will occupy us later. That the Manichaean heresy of the fourth century (which posited an absolute dichotomy between equal forces of good and evil in the cosmos) was itself hugely popular in the early Christianity of the Maghreb Africa from which Fanon would eventually speak, has not been noticed by many; but Fanon spoke in accents resonant of that ancient debate: ‘The primary Manichaeism which governed colonial society [has been] preserved intact during the period of decolonization; that is to say, the settler never ceases to be the enemy, the opponent, the foe that must be overthrown’ (1961/1964, 40).
Yet a current inspection of Fanon’s two major texts, Peau noir, masques blancs (1952, translated as Black Skin, White Masks, 1959) and Les damnés de la terre (1961, translated as The Wretched of the Earth, 1964), reveals a febrile, emotive and naïve dramaturgy of racial conflict that can only have derived its potency from the harrowing Algerian struggle that had inspired these works and which had been carried over to the heroic early phases of the postcolonial era. Fanon’s major thesis, that colonial occupation destroys not just the political and socio-economic independence of black people, but the very essence of their being, their sense of self-hood, a thesis corroborated by the works of Mannoni (1950) and Memmi (1965), is an important one. It has understandably remained an inspirational tenet of liberationist discourse.
Less inspired and more problematic was Fanon’s insistence that the colonial struggle was an utterly manichaean contest between dire enemies that had to be carried into all aspects of existence and could be invoked to sanction violence: ‘Violence was cathartic and unifying, transforming disempowered and atomised colonial subjects into a powerful political force’ (Vaughan, 2001, 18). For the rest, the intellectual substance and persuasive rhetoric of Fanon’s polemics could be thin and even preposterous, as in the following playlet from Black Skin, White Masks:
I put the white man back into his place; growing bolder, I jostled him and told him point-blank: ‘Get used to me, I am not getting used to anyone.’ I shouted my laughter to the stars. The white man, I could see, was resentful. His reaction time lagged interminably…. I had won. I was jubilant (Fanon in Goldberg 1990, 119).
Nevertheless, Fanon’s morality-play version of racial contestation constituted and enlisted a powerful body of images of Africa, the foundational status and potency of which continued to become clearer in the unfolding genealogy of the imagined Africa of my project. When in 1979, in the course of the annual BBC Reith Lectures, East African academic Ali Mazrui recommended that African states should set up ‘a continental nuclear consortium’ (808) to protect themselves from South Africa and Israel – one correspondent had already charged that ‘a more frightening concoction of Nazi-style cant I have not had the privilege to hear in years’ (781) – it was still Fanon speaking.
If Fanon provided the moral passion and aggressive energy of the first generation of postcolonial polemicists, Edward Said was to furnish the intellectual ordnance of the second generation. Sharing Fanon’s manichaean, contestational view of the colonial and Third World struggle against Western imperialism, Said infused into this paradigm the epistemological tenets of Foucault that knowledge, language and power are intimately related, and that a given culture’s language acts as both a conceptual armature and a straitjacket from which escape is wellnigh impossible: ‘Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth, that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true’ (Foucault, 1972, in Cahoone, 1996, 379). The absolute distinctions and imbalances between those with and those without power (the fundamental colonial situation) are enhanced by and expressive of the fact that, cognitively, each culture is trapped within the paradigms of experience and visions of power made possible, even dictated, by its language.
In addition, in The Order of Things (1966, translated 1970), Foucault proposed the notion of the episteme, or time-bound habit of mind, which ensures that human understanding and empathy is not only difficult and imperfect across different languages and cultures, but also across the centuries. Beyond the perceptual horizons allowed by our languages and temporality, we cannot ‘see’ the worlds of other cultures and times. Hayden White speaks of ‘ruptures in Western consciousness, disjunctions or discontinuities so extreme that they effectively isolate the epochs from one another’ (1978, 235).
The stark denial of any transcultural understanding or negotiation implied by such arguments of course renders a postcolonialist critique itself untenable and would, if true, have made the present study impossible. With Louis Montrose, one wants to say: ‘I find this aspect of Foucault’s social vision – his apparent exclusion of a space for human agency – to be extreme. In other words, my intellectual response is that his argument is unconvincing, and my visceral response is that it is intolerable’ (cited by Cheney, 2007, 265).
Nevertheless, the intellectual pedigree that Said could invoke in support of a Foucauldian revamp of Fanon, enlisting linguists and philosophers from Saussure to Derrida, ensured that Third World proponents of postcolonialism (and notably those from the Indian subcontinent) now had an elite theory to bolster Fanonist indignation on the one hand, and to expose the delinquency of Eurocentric colonialism on the other. Though Said made many attempts over the quarter of a century that followed the publication of Orientalism in 1978 to soften the rigour of its charges (1983, 1985, 1986, 1989, 1998), its essentialising and totalising condemnation of Western transcultural discourse speaks from every page. ‘Orientalism’ as ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient’ (1985, 3) ‘assumed an unchanging Orient absolutely different … from the West’ (96). Said’s conclusions were blunt and, after 200 pages of argument and indictment, uncompromising: ‘It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was … a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric’ (204).
Said seemed to revel in the harsh simplicity of his claims, and in this anticipated the mood of many followers:
The argument, when reduced to its simplest form, [is] clear, it [is] precise, it [is] easy to grasp. There are Westerners, and there are Orientals. The former dominate; the latter must be dominated (36).
According to Said, the ‘ruthless cultural and racial essences’ of the West had been elevated and manipulated into a ‘streamlined and effective’ mechanism for confronting and subjugating the non-European world. Little wonder that as recently as 2005, David Parker has been driven to the conclusion that such arguments ‘are better understood as the elaboration of a gigantic conspiracy theory than as constructive thinking’ (3). More pointedly for my own project, if Said’s claims were to be conceded for the West’s annihilating discourse of the East, how could the Eurocolonial library of Africa, far more blatantly racist and dismissive than that of the East, warrant any attention at all? The margins within which a Western discourse of Africa might be thought to have anything useful or ‘true’ to contribute about its subject were dwindling to invisibility.
The ongoing debate about ‘Orientalism’ and its implications for the scholarly study of the East in the Western academy need not detain us here (see Ahmad, 1992; Behdad, 1994; Mackenzie, 1995; Teltscher, 1995; Young, 1995; Moore-Gilbert, 1997; Cannadine, 2001; Buruma and Margalit, 2004; Irwin, 2006; Jasanoff, 2006), but some of its tenets and African inflections warrant attention.
Crucially for me, Said inadvertently suggested a way forward from the moribund thesis industry of content analysis and blame-mongering inspired by simplistic assumptions that European observers could have written more empathetically about Africa if only they
