The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith

      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 and replace.

      Most pertinently for my purpose, more authors have come to explore the overall destabilising and disempowering impact on meaningful action and intervention when a postcolonial critique attempts to accommodate the disruptive and dissentient aperçus of a postmodernist discourse of suspicion (Slemon and Tiffin, 1989; Mason, 1990; Adam and Tiffin, 1991; Carusi, 1991; Mishra and Hodge, 1991; Appleby et al., 1994; Bahri, 1995; Werbner and Ranger, 1996).

      As early as 1983, Dennis Porter asked about Orientalism, if ‘as Said sometimes implies, truth in representation may be achieved, how can it be justified on the basis of a radical discourse theory [i.e. postmodernism] which presupposes the impossibility of stepping outside of a given discursive formulation by an act of will or consciousness’ (1993, 151)? If Said were right, Porter added later, there could be ‘no way out of cultural solipsism’ (1991, 4) – no culture could hope to understand another. Aijaz Ahmad took this depressing prospect further, arguing that the logic behind Foucault’s and Said’s arguments bestowed ‘upon the world a profound cage-like quality, with a bleak sense of human entrapment in Discourses of Power [sic]’ (1992, 130). Such propositions ‘depict human beings as caught in a prison of language’ (Appleby et al., 1994, 213). Billy Pilgrim, the character from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five (1969), strapped to a flat-car and peering through a fixed tube, comes to mind.

      Ahmad lamented the crippling of a postcolonialism predicated on postmodernist scepticism: ‘Any attempt to know the world as a whole, or to hold that it is open to rational comprehension, let alone the desire to change it, [is] to be dismissed as a contemptible attempt to construct “grand narratives” and “totalizing (totalitarian?) knowledges”’ (1992, 69). Speaking at a conference in 1991, the Ghanaian novelist Ama Ata Aidoo quipped: ‘Colonialism has not been “posted” anywhere’, and warned that as celebrated in the Western agnostic academy, the ‘postcolonial’ was ‘a pernicious fiction’ (cited by Gikandi, 1996, 14). More recently, Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, revisiting an article they had written in 1991, have charged that ‘postcolonial theory … has aestheticized the struggle’ instead of confronting it, and they have called for the postcolonial project to ‘re-establish vital links with Marxism’ in order to re-enhance its credentials as ‘a proactive and radically anticolonial theory’ (2005, 389–395). I shall return below to South African anxieties along the same lines.

      Numerous further discomfiting insights have followed in the wake of the recognition of the misalliance of postcolonialist idealism and postmodernist incredulity. Helen Tiffin has observed that ‘certain tendencies within Euro-American post-structuralism and post-modernism have in practice operated … to appropriate and control the “other” while ostensibly performing some sort of major cultural redemption’ (1988, 70). Confronting ‘The Problems of Cultural Paralysis in Postcolonial Criticism’, Alison Donnell has deplored ‘the propensity to deal in perpetual marginality and voicelessness [that] not only condemns writers to dismal and oppressed self-denying narratives but burdens readers with a baggage of unresolved cultural sensitivities’, when in fact the colonial record is full of ‘writings that often rest uncomfortably on the cusp of coloniality, and writings that select to work with rather than against European models’ (1995, 102).

      Such views are echoed by other critics weary of the Billy Pilgrim flat-car orthodoxies of postcolonial critiques: ‘The contemporary reification of otherness reproduces the sharp “us and them” opposition of colonial discourse itself, and simplifies the complex transactions and migrations of the history of colonialism’ (Edmond, 1997, 21). Deepika Bahri speaks of ‘the comfortable umbrella of essential binarism that characterizes much postcolonial discourse’ (1995, 61), which effectively blurs any insights it might have to offer.

      On the other hand, Salman Rushdie’s postmodernist playfulness in contexts properly deemed to demand a postcolonial solemnity has frequently been targeted as ‘an exercise in self-reflexive literary game-playing’ and as writing that ‘allows us to evade the necessity of concrete political and ethical choices’ (Baker, 2000, 43).

      A local version of such anxieties occupied South African academics and authors in the 1980s and 1990s in the shape of controversial polemics about ‘Writing in a State of Emergency’ (Chapman, 1992). Behind this preoccupation lay the heavy weight of centuries of apartheid and an already long history of agonised confrontation with South Africa’s racialised society that had occupied local writers – Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) is perhaps still the most famous instance. As apartheid ran its final desperate course and state repression increased, South African writers increasingly had to ponder