Claiming the African mind: postcoloniality and cultural studies

Claiming the African mind: postcoloniality and cultural studies (Christo van Staden)

       The Africans' only value is their dispossessedness, their non-incarnation of value, whether this be in some vague kind of traditional society or, as Baudrillard does not acknowledge, in an inscription, often violent, into the different kinds of imperialism of globalisation. In one move Baudrillard constitutes Africans as despising Selves and takes away their agency and identity by subsuming them in his own extreme binary logic: the all-consuming logicof postmodernism that claims Africans as images of a lost West. 

         A few problems, and inconsistencies, with regard to the postcolonial emerges from these descriptions and/or definitions. First, there is the issue of the term post-colonialism: is the term used, as Dirlik (1994:329) claims, specifically with reference to 'the terrain that used to go by the name of Third World', and if so, in what sense? Dirlik {ibid: 332) mentions uses of the term to refer to literal conditions in formerly colonised countries, a description of global conditions after colonialism, and a 'description of a discourse on the above-named conditions'. The second problem with the postcolonial relates specifically to its use locally and globally - the Salman Rushdie kind of exile and the inhabitant of the former colony itself. Third, these totalising conceptions of the postcolonial do not take into account the difference between countries like most African countries with their African (indigenous) rulers after independence, and countries like the USA and Australia, which colonised their indigenous populations themselves (South Africa, of course, is an extreme example - how should postapartheid be articulated with postcolonialism?. Fourth, there is the problem of the postcolonial intellectual. Dirlik (1991:339) states that 'postcolo￾nial, rather than a description of anything, is a discourse that seeks to constitute the world in the self-image of intellectuals who view themselves ... as postcolonial intellectuals'.

          When developing cultural studies in and for Africa, these issues should be remembered. Africa is not merely an issue of representations, whether they be 'Western' or 'African', of identities or meaning. When speaking about 'decolonisation', the concept should be divorced from its privileging of the temporal over the spatial. Colonisation, in grand Western discourse, was above all (re)presented as a temporal issue, a temporal manipulation of diverse spaces for the enlightenment project. Privileging time over space means that modernism itself is reproduced in the questions of postmodernism (cf Grossberg 1993a:6). Perhaps we should think 'beyond' postcolonialism as a reproduction of temporality, as an after the period of colonisation. But then, taking 'beyond' to be spatial rather than temporal, we should be careful that this does not imply a centrism, with the 'beyond' the 'post' again marginalised, displaced to far-off corners on the map of contemporary thought. We should look at Africa not as a representation, but as an articulation, and rearticulate at the same time a critical practice of space.