The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith

and Tiffin, 1991), there lurked an unresolved disjunction between the crusading ambitions and idealism of postcolonialist critiques to reveal the ‘truth’ of, and thus to disarticulate, all imperial authority; and, conversely, the fundamentally agnostic, iconoclastic import of postmodernist ideology, according to which ‘truth’ is a chimaera, infinitely deferred, always only partially captured in language which in turn, and despite all its lesions, erasures and contingencies, holds our cognitive powers in thrall. While the discourse and project of postcolonialism is inspired by the conviction that grossly biased Eurocolonial representations of the colonial encounter and the exploitation of colonised subjects can and must be replaced by ‘true’ accounts of these nefarious processes, postmodernism proposes an equally substantive but sceptical precept that no representation is necessarily superior to another, that no subjective insight is inevitably more ‘true’ or ‘correct’ than another, and that all truth beyond the arithmetically self-evident or the fundamentals of the natural sciences is contingent on context. ‘The postmodern sensibility sees the human condition as ephemeral, discontinuous and plural,’ writes Zygmunt Bauman (1990, 501), or, more forcefully, Joel Schwartz: ‘we are mired in indeterminacy’ (1990, 35). Behind such views lies Nietzsche’s foundational insight that truth is a construction, perspectival and contingent (1887/1968), and the disruptive effect of such thinking on the idealism of postcolonialism has been much debated (Hutcheon, 1987, 1988; Harvey, 1989; Elam, 1992; Lash and Friedman, 1992; McHale, 1992; Bauman, 1993; Cahoone, 1996; Eagleton, 1996; Jenkins, 1997; Moore-Gilbert, 1997).

      The scepticism and iconoclasm endemic to postmodernism may, it is assumed, be usefully recruited by a crusading postcolonialism to undermine Eurocentric and Eurocolonial confidence, and to bring to an end the Enlightenment project with its presumption that ‘the world could be controlled and rationally ordered’ (Anderson, 1995, 4). Thus the Enlightenment, with its rationalising and categorising zeal to define ‘races’ and rank them according to some hierarchy of progress or excellence, is frequently cited in postcolonial discourse as the major inspiration underlying Eurocentric racism, with the further inference that what was so opportunistically invented may just as readily be demolished. ‘Race is no more than a social construct’ is the accepted wisdom (Pagliaro, 1973; Augstein, 1996; Fredrickson, 2002); or, more bluntly, race ‘is a bogus scientific category rather than a fact of nature’ (Kidd, 2006, 18). Yet, as Lawrence Blum warns: ‘Racialized thinking is deeply imbedded in our social existence; its constructedness notwithstanding, we may not be able to change these social forms without far-ranging and currently barely imaginable changes in familiar structures’ (2002,159).

      In such a context, what hopes does postmodernist scepticism hold out for a postcolonial project of recuperating lost ‘truths’? The bear-baiting apostasy of a postmodernist ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ might prove invaluable in the demolition of the bastions of Enlightenment imperialist thinking, but how can these same tenets be reconciled with assumptions that the ‘truth’ of the colonial past is wholly recoverable and may be readily ascertained?

      Authors, including colonialist writers, either have a Cartesian capacity to understand and judge or condemn freely and justly the observed world, in which case they may in turn be judged by their critics, or they have no such freedom, are the victims of an imperfect human perceptual apparatus, and thus cannot be condemned. In other words, if the linguistic and cultural determinants of our conceptual world are as fixed and uncompromising as Foucault and Said would seem to maintain, certain individuals, and indeed entire cultures, are condemned by their cognitive and cultural grammars to be racist. Racism, then, would not be an unfortunate ideological aberration or delinquency that from time to time afflicts some people because of remediable socio-cultural and other negotiable factors, but would have to be conceded to be a primordial and inescapable feature of at least some, if not all, people’s conceptual worlds.

      The alarming implications for a society such as mine, a country attempting to recover from centuries of racial disharmony and rampant racism, and now dedicated to the construction of a non-racist world, are obvious. Are the hopes of the ‘rainbow nation’ forlorn, and is such forlornness always already fully inscribed 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