Postcolonial Theory and African Literature

By Babatunde E. ADIGUN

1. Introduction

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin aver: "More than three-quarters of the

people living in the world today have had their lives shaped by the experience of

colonialism." Generally, the history of homo sapiens has been heavily punctuated, directed and is

still being redirected or influenced by imperialism (and neo-imperialism). According to Rafey

Habib (737), the term imperialism "as we know it dates back to the last half of the nineteenth

century; but the concept and practice is as old as civilisation itself." Habib (737) links the

etymology of the word imperialism to the Latin imperium, which has numerous meanings

including power, authority, command, dominion, realm, and empire. Simply put, imperialism is a

"policy" or a "strategy" in which a powerful nation extends its "power" or "authority" or

"command" or "dominion" or "realm" or "empire" or influence, etc. to a weak one. It is often

used interchangeably with colonialism which is also a term widely understood as its conceptual

subset. Bonnie Smith (10) notes: "world history provides many examples of vast empires,

including those of the ancient Romans, the Moguls of India, and the Ottomans, based in

present-day Turkey." Those are the documented ones. Being that imperialism validates man as a

domineering being, in line with Habib's observation that "the practice is as old as

civilisation"(737) - that is, as old as human beings, there are countless empires in the human

history. The question that plagues the mind as Wole Soyinka phrases it is "what it is that invests

the human psyche with the need to dominate others, irrespective of race, state of development or

environment...?" (3) This paper is not setting about to attempt answering the question.

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 Rather, it is concerned with an aspect of the discourse which imperialism in its

ramifications and/or dimensions has generated across the centuries in modern world history. As

presented by Benedikt Stuchtey, a foremost historian and researcher in Munich Centre for Global

History, the existential phase spanning 1450 and 1950 featured conspicuous imperial occupations

in many parts of the world by Europe. There were the colonisations of the Americas, East Indies,

India, Africa (organised and appropriated by what Habib (737) describes as "immense scramble

for imperialistic power between (sic) Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and other nations"), and

other regions of the world. It is a common knowledge that Great Britain created a vast empire in

the 19th century. Significantly, the responses of colonised (particularly those ones colonised by

Britain), in forms of narratives, poetics, dramatics, treatises and dialectics on the imperial

experiences have largely constituted and culminated into postcolonial theory. Thus, this paper

presents an exposition on the postcolonial theory. It presents brief notes on the language of the

theory. The literatures that are sensitive to colonial experiences have been tagged postcolonial

literatures (see Ashcroft et al, p. 2). Of crucial interest to this researcher is the imperialism of

Africa. To this end, this paper briefly discusses modern African literature as a postcolonial

literature.

2. Postcolonial Theory

As widely explained by its exponents, the post- in postcolonial does not necessarily mean

after (as to have the morphological denotation of after-colonial), but it is an arbitrary construct

which expresses a continuum - nonetheless heavily semantically punctuated by the colonial as it

serves as its prime essence. Apart from the simplistic view that postcolonial theory is a body of

responses of erstwhile colonised peoples in forms of narratives, treatises, and dialectics to their

perenial or protracted colonial experiences; literary critics have conceived the theory in different

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ways. Their conceptions can be seen as belonging in one of two paradigms: the positive view and

the negative view. Lazare Rukundwa and Andries Aarde write: “From an optimistic point of

view, postcolonial theory is a means of defiance by which any exploitative and discriminative

practices, regardless of time and space, can be challenged. By contrast, the pessimistic view

regards postcolonial theory as ambiguous, ironic and superstitious.” (1171)

The positive view or "optimistic point of view" subsists in activism, in the Empire

vociferously writing back to right the wrongs of the past and of the presence. Homi Bhabha

argues:

Postcolonial perspectives emerge from the colonial testimony of Third

World countries and the discourses of “minorities” within the
geopolitical divisions of East and West, North and South. They
intervene in those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to
give a hegemonic “normality” to the uneven development and the
differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, race,
communities, peoples. (171)

In this line of thoughts, Niyi Osundare states the activist essence of the theory very explicitly:

More than other terminologies of the 'post-' variety, 'post-colonial' is a

highly sensitive historical, and geographical term which calls into
significant attentions whole epoch in the relationship between the West
and the developing world, an epoch which played a vital role in the
institutionalisation and strengthening of the metropole-periphery, center-
margin dichotomy. We are talking about a term which brings memories of
gunboats and mortars, conquests and dominations, a term whose 'name'
and meaning are fraught with the burdens of history and the anxieties of
contemporary reality. (42)

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However, the "pessimistic view" on the theory often borders on what scholars like Robert Young

(67) and Stephen Slemon (100) conceive as the impenetrability of the theory's language.

Meanwhile, apart from Slemon's critique of the theory as lacking "consensus and clarity" (100), a

significant irony besieging the theory borders on its provenance. Simon Gikandi avers:

“Postcolonial discourse was produced by émigré postcolonial writers and intellectuals based in

the West. Irrespective of the validity of its claims, this is a discourse marked by its sense of

dislocation from what it considers to be one of its geographical references - the postcolony.”

(615) It is perplexing that the theory whose major operational aim is to critique imperialism is

caught up within what Osundare (42) calls "the imperialism of theory". Biodun Jeyifo laments:

the contemporary understanding of theory [denoting existing theories in

the business of literary criticism] not only renders it an exclusively
Western phenomenon of a very specialized (sic) activity, but also
implicitly (and explicitly) inscribes the view that theory does not exist,
cannot exist outside of this High Canonical Western orbit. (2)

Irrespective of where it started or whoever has its ownership, the postcolonial theory is

succussful at least in serving as a veritable epistemological platform where the characteristics of

the provenances of postcolonial writings have been foregrounded and studied thereby educating

the Eurocentric or Westerncentric critics. It refutes colonial ideology.

Some works have embodied and enhanced the theory. Meyer Abrams has itemised them.

Abrams (237) reports:

A comprehensive anthology is The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1995),

ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Refer also to Franz
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (trans., 1966); Ranajit Guha and
Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies (1988); Trinh T.

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 Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism
(1989); Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W. Said,
Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (1990); Christopher L. Miller,
Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthro-pology in Africa
(1990); Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism. (1993)

Lols Tyson (452) states the most crucial question postcolonial criticism asks as:

How is the text shaped by its (intentional or unintentional)

representation of cultural difference (the ways in which race, class,
sex, gender, sexual orientation, religion, cultural beliefs, and customs
combine to form individual identity)? Does this representation support
or undermine colonialist ideologies?

We can say that the breakdown of these questions is expressed by Young (11) as:

Postcolonial criticism has embraced a number of aims: most

fundamentally, to reexamine the history of colonialism from the
perspective of the colonized; to determine the economic, political, and
cultural impact of colonialism on both the colonized peoples and the
colonizing powers; to analyze the process of decolonization; and above
all, to participate in the goals of political liberation, which includes equal
access to material resources, the contestation of forms of domination, and
the articulation of political and cultural identities.

Peter Barry itemises what literary critics who employ postcolonial criticism as a framework upon

which they anchor their analyses of literary texts do as including:

1. They reject the claims to universalism made on behalf of canonical

Western literature and seek to show its limitations of outlook, especially

its general inability to empathise across boundaries of cultural and ethnic

difference.

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 2. They examine the representation of other cultures in literature as a

way of achieving this end.

3. They show how such literature is often evasively and crucially silent

on matters concerned with colonisation and imperialism (see, for instance,

the discussion of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park in the example described

below).

4. They foreground questions of cultural difference and diversity and

examine their treatment in relevant literary works.

5. They celebrate hybridity and 'cultural poly valency', that is, the

situation whereby individuals and groups belong simultaneously to more

than one culture (for instance, that of the coloniser, through a colonial

school system, and that of the colonised, through local and oral traditions).

6. They develop a perspective, not just applicable to postcolonial

literatures, whereby states of marginality, plurality and perceived

'Otherness' are seen as sources of energy and potential change. (130)

2.1. The Terminology of Postcolonial Theory

This paper has selected twenty terms that are common in the postcolonial discourse. They are

'binarism', 'Manichaeism', 'orientalism', 'essentialism', 'hybridity', 'worlding', 'slavery', 'subaltern',

'mimicry', 'miscegenation', 'appropriation', 'abrogation', centre/margin (periphery), 'diaspora',

'Third World (First, Second, Fourth)', 'Commonwealth', 'colonialism', 'identity', 'hegemony',

'colonial ideology', and 'neo-colonialism'. This list does not exhaust the terms. In other words,

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there are still many other terms in the postcolonial discourse. The itemised are discussed in

alphabetical order and in bullets in the following:

Abrogation: This, in literal usage, means an act of cancelling something formally -- a policy,

etc. In postcolonial theory, it often implies a refusal to use the language of the colonizer in

the exact way the latter uses it. Ashcroft et al. explains:

Abrogation refers to the rejection by post-colonial writers of a normative

concept of ‘correct’ or ‘standard’ English used by certain classes or
groups, and of the corresponding concepts of inferior ‘dialects’ or
‘marginal variants’. The concept is usually employed in conjunction with
the term appropriation, which describes the processes of English
adaptation itself, and is an important component of the post-colonial
assumption that all language use is a ‘variant’ of one kind or another (and
is in that sense ‘marginal’ to some illusory standard). Thus abrogation is
an important political stance, whether articulated or not, and even whether
conscious or not, from which the actual appropriation of language can take
place. (5)
As an idea, it was birthed by linguistic activism which itself sprung out from linguistic

nativism [check up nativism in Olaniyan and Quayson (199)].

Appropriation: As captured from Ashcroft et al's explaination on abrogation, it is the

process of adapting to the colonial culture, language by way of domestication. This is what

Chinua Achebe advocated, attempted and succeeded doing. He says: "I feel that the English

language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be

new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new

African surroundings." (62)

Binarism: As explained by Ashcroft et al. (5), the term is from binary - which is a

combination of two things; duality. As a concept in literary theory, it finds its earliest

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relevance in Ferdinand de Saussure's structuralism where it holds that things mean by

difference. Its relevance in postcolonial study is in the fact that colonial constructs subsist in

differential and dualistic relation that is predicated on influence. Metropole/colony,

centre/margin, West/Africa, master/ subaltern etc. are conceptually in binarism.

Centre/Margin (Periphery): This has to do with the "representation and relationship of

peoples as a result of the colonial period," Ashcroft et al. (36). They continue: "Colonialism

could only exist at all by postulating that there existed a binary opposition into which the

world was divided. The gradual establishment of an empire depended upon a stable

hierarchical relationship in which the colonized existed as the other of the colonizing

culture."

Colonialism: Echezona Ifejirika (1) says it is "directly negatively associated with forceful

occupation of a weaker state or country by a stronger and sometimes much more developed

state; the imposition of foreign administrative governance on the weaker State; economic

exploration and exploitation, political dominance, cultural and linguistic domination and

social oppression, and suppression of members of the colonies by the colonizers."

Commonwealth: Formerly the British Commonwealth of Nations, i.e. the political

community constituted by the former British Empire and consisting of the United Kingdom,

its dependencies and certain former colonies that are now sovereign nations (Ashcroft et al,

51).

Diaspora: This term is usually used to qualify geographically dispersed colonised peoples. It

qualifies émigrés. Many canonical writers - past and present - of African extraction, for

example, wrote or are writing from the diaspora. Many Negritude writers did. Chimamanda

Adichie, Chika Unigwe, Sefi Atta, write from the diaspora.

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Essentialism: Simply defined, "essentialism," as described by Ashcroft et al (77), "is the

assumption that groups, categories or classes of objects have one or several defining features

exclusive to all members of that category."

Identity: This literally refers to the individual characteristics by which a person or something

is known. As a concept in postcolonial discourse, we have a construct that emphasises the

confusion that colonialism brought to the colonised. The colonised is censured if they assume

the identity of the colonisers. The historically realistic hybrid identity is accepted and

advocated.

Hegemony: This is a term that captures the dominance of a people over the other. It is a term

often used to refer to the West.

Hybridity: This can be described as a state or quality of being mixed. It is term that

realistically captures the contact of the coloniser with the colonised. It is a mixed brought

about by the reality - as Ashcroft et al (221) puts it: "It is not possible to return to or to

rediscover an absolute pre-colonial cultural purity, nor is it possible to create national or

regional formations entirely independent of their historical implication in the European

colonial enterprise."

Colonial Ideology: Lols Tyson explains this as "the colonizers’ assumption of their own

superiority, which they contrasted with the alleged inferiority of native (indigenous)

peoples, the original inhabitants of the lands they invaded. The colonizers believed

that only their own Anglo-European culture was civilized, sophisticated, or, as

postcolonial critics put it, metropolitan. Therefore, native peoples were defined as

savage, backward, and undeveloped." (419)

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Miscegenation: Miscegenation, the sexual union of different races, specifically whites with

negros (OED), has always haunted European colonizers and their settler descendants...

(Ashcroft et al, 142). It is the sexual relation that birthed the coloureds. It is prevalent in

South Africa.

Mimicry: Simply described, it is the encouragement of the colonised by colonial discourse to

do things like the colonisers.

Neocolonialism: This term was coined by Kwame Nkrumah in his 1965 book Neo-

Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. In his words, it is a situation whereby a State is

in theory independent, but still "has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty".

He explains: "In reality its economic system and thus political policy is directed from

outside." (1)

Orientalism: Ashcroft et al (167) note that it is a term popularized by Edward Said, in which

he examines the processes by which the ‘Orient’ was, and continues to be, constructed in

European thinking.

Slavery: This is very important in postcolonial discourse in that it serves as the major

precursor to colonialism. Ashcroft et al (212) note: "Although the institution of slavery has

existed since classical times and has occurred in many forms in different societies, it was of

particular significance in the formation of many post-colonial societies in Africa and the

Caribbean."

Subaltern: The synonyms of this term in the postcolonial discourse are 'periphery', 'other',

'margin', etc. They qualify the colonised.

Third World (First, Second): Ashcroft et al (231) reports: "The term ‘Third World’ was

first used in 1952 during the so-called Cold War period, by the politician and economist

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 Alfred Sauvy, to designate those countries aligned with neither the United States nor the

Soviet Union." The term is usually used to refer to countries that are economically poor. First

and Second world countries are comparatively well-off.

Worlding: Ashcroft et al (241) maintain that it is a "term coined by Gayatri Spivak to

describe the way in which colonized space is brought into the ‘world’." Spivak (133) says:

"This is one of the many different processes of othering, which characterize colonial

contact."

Other terms in the postcolonial theory abound. The publication that has been extensively quoted

here is Ashcroft et al's Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies. Check it to know more.

3. Modern African Literature

Edgar Wright observes that "written African literature can be said to be in general terms a

post-war phenomenon". Not disregarding the Francophone writers, particularly the Negritude

writers who wrote in the 'twenties and 'thirties, that is, before the Second World War; Wright (i)

insistently argues: "The real beginnings of African literature in English occur in the 'fifties, and it

was not until the middle 'sixties that a sizeable body of the work was available for central

comparison." Though the modern African literature in English does not enjoy a monopoly in its

firmament as it co-exists with Francophone, Lusophone, and what Achebe typifies as "ethnic

literature"; it launched African literature into the canon of global literature. Of crucial

importance is the environment from which the African literature (in whatever language)

emanated. Omafume Onoge (22) has argued that "modern African literature was born in a hostile

milieu." Simon Gikandi (379) avers: "Modern African literature was produced in the crucible of

colonialism." Notably, not just only in literature Vincent Khapoya submits: "Colonization of

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Africa by European countries was a monumental milestone in the development of Africa." (100)

African literature has come to be the paragon of postcolonial literature of all postcolonial

literatures.

The postcolonial theory is more often than not handy for the analysis of African literary

pieces being that the latter often serve as vehicles of African history, culture, etc. Much of

African literature is a response to the African political milieu. As such, the centre and the self,

the margin and the other can always be instantiated. For example, in Achebe's Things Fall Apart

and Arrow of God, Umuofia and Umuaro are colonies while the base of the white colonial

masters is a metropole. In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Marlow and the crew members

are the self while the natives are other. In this contemporary time, hybridity has become the

essential feature of African literature, and the motley perspectives on the former can help in the

critical evaluation of the latter.

4. Conclusion

The postcolonial theory was birthed by imperialism, and it remains a critical discourse on

it. This paper has presented both the positive and negative views that literary critics have shared

on the postcolonial theory. The positive view holds that the theory is a composite of narratives,

poetics, dramatics, treatises and dialectics on colonial experiences in modern history -- that is,

the Empires of 19th and 20th centuries vociferously write back to right the wrongs of the past

and of the present. The negative view holds that the language of the theory remains

impenetrable. It also includes that the provenance of the theory is the hegemonic West -- hence,

it is caught up within 'the imperialism of theory'. This paper has highlighted and briefly

discussed some salient terms in the postcolonial discourse. It recommends that a comprehensive

reference material with the methodology employed in Ashcroft et al's Key Concepts in Post-

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Colonial Studies (1998) should be written on the theory to incorporate current coinages in the

discourse, like 'xenophobia', 'out-migration', 'democratisation', 'terrorism in the third world',

'culture shock', 'ethnic rivalry', 'neoliberalism', etc. which are 21st century postcolonial issues.

Being that Modern African literature responds to colonial and post-colonial issues, it can be seen

as a subset of the postcolonial theory. Its prolificacy makes it a paragon of postcolonial literature.

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