The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith

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 had been more honest and less racist. For if Foucault and Said were right about an absolute cultural and linguistic determinism, namely that ‘Europeans were ontologically incapable of producing any true knowledge about non-Europe’ (Ahmad, 1992, 178), then the authors of the centuries-old Eurocolonial library of Africa could not be accused of perfidy, but had instead to be understood (and exonerated?) as the victims of conceptual determinants beyond their control. Better still – those writers from Homer and Herodotus onward who, despite such glacial forces of conceptual arrest stacked against them, had nevertheless steadily reported that African cultures could be complex, varied, different, yet comprehensible, now not only deserved more respect and serious attention, but might yet be recruited into a discourse of reclamation that seemed ever more urgent.

      Several Saidean acolytes drew attention to further directions that could be pursued, some even when denying such options. So, for instance, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in a much-cited essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1985a), held that the colonial subject could only ever speak as a ventriloquist’s dummy in colonial discourse, even when sympathetically and authentically presented in a first-person voice, since, as she put it elsewhere, ‘the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been absolutely Other into a domesticated Other that consolidates the imperialist self’ (1985b, 253). Some of Kipling’s first-person Indian tales are pertinent here – their narrators appear authentically Indian, yet are comprehensively manipulated. This ‘process more insidious than naked repression’ would also occupy Abdul R. JanMohamed, for whom ‘any evident “ambivalence” is in fact a product of deliberate, if at times subconscious, imperialist duplicity, operating very efficiently through the economy of its central trope, the Manichaean allegory’ (1985, 61). How such a ploy could be at once ‘deliberate’ and ‘subconscious’, JanMohamed does not explain, but the uncompromising manichaeism evident here was diagnostic of a first cohort of postcolonialists inspired by Fanon and Said. It was propagated assiduously as a timeless and cosmic absolute by writers such as JanMohamed:

      Fanon’s definition of colonial society as a Manichaean organization is by no means exaggerated. In fact, the colonial mentality is dominated by a Manichaean allegory of white and black, good and evil, salvation and damnation, civilization and savagery, superiority and inferiority, intelligence and emotion, self and other, subject and object (1983, 4).

      Yet such pronouncements ineluctably drew me to the dissident recognition that they simply did not match the evidence of my everyday experience as a bilingual speaker in a multicultural African country, and even less the testimony of many texts in the discourse of Africa that I had come across. With Benita Parry, I felt that Said had fostered ‘readings that are indifferent to textual gaps, indeterminacies and contradictions’ (1992, 26), and that Spivak’s anxieties did not express either the sentiments or the performance of generations of colonised speakers who could speak clearly from their host texts.

      Nevertheless, the stark and punitive manichaeism inherent in Said’s thesis continued to supply former-colonial and Third World critics and their sympathisers in the West with a new arsenal of theoretical weaponry that could be deployed against all Western (univocally read as ‘imperialist’) scholarship. JanMohamed’s contributions (1983, 1985), and Hugh Ridley’s (1983 – see below), were among the earliest, but they were joined by many others dedicated not only to the dismantling of the Eurocolonial archive, but also to the disparagement of much Western cultural and intellectual achievement deemed to underlie it (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 1972, 1981; Mudimbe, 1988, 1994; Salami, 1998; Afzal-Khan and Seshadri-Crooks, 2000). ‘Institutional colonialism was maintained by language as much as by guns,’ declared Chris Tiffin