Theater and the Rites of "Post-Negritude" Remembering

To judge from all the clamor in contemporary literary discourse, it would seem that we are back, we black writers, to the days of Negritude, and that the most acute subject of our writing is once again the rediscovery and reaffirmation of our cultural values, and the reinscription of our racial identity on the pages of history. The white man, to consolidate his military, territorial, and economic conquests over us, has inscribed us within a grand myth of Absence, according to which our lives were more or less a virtual tabula rasa before his arrival. And therefore, as the argument goes, all our work, like that of our Negritude predecessors, is assumed to be dedicated to the deconstruction of this racist myth, through the demonstration of the value and plenitude of our past, and the recovery of our autonomous identity. However—as someone from the so-called Third World, who lives and works in Ibadan, Nigeria—I find it curious, to say the least, that this debate about a so-called "war of Identity" has come to assume a position of such signal importance in discussions about Africa and the Asian world. Perhaps I should not complain; perhaps I should only be grateful that we feature at all in the debate, in a context where the arrogance of late capitalism—with its triumph over world socialism, and the subsequent end of the cold war; its visible material affluence, and the fashioning of such an astute economic arsenal as multinational companies (Shell, the World Bank, the IMF, the Club of Paris, etc.); its dominant control of the technology of communication and warfare; and so on—has proclaimed the "end of history." A new theology, that of "market forces," authorizes astounding philosophies and new epistemological systems that proclaim the irrationality of all causes and all beliefs, sing of the virtues of hybridity and difference, while in fact making the poor and the deprived of history more invisible. Against this threat of invisibility and anonymity, and fueled by Edward Said's seminal Orientalism, the exiles from the Third World in Euro-America mount a fierce and courageous battle, indeed, to be heard, recognized, and respected, a battle in which the so-called "postcolonialist" discourse is the noisy battleground, and the erasure of identity the strident lament.

It is a battle with which, naturally, I am in sympathy. But if I must confess, it is a battle not my own. In Africa we have our own battle of Identity, of course, but it is not the same as that of postcolonialism, and where it concerns individuals and the private psyche, not the most urgent of our preoccupations. And this, no doubt, may be one of the reasons Africa, so far, has featured only marginally in the wonderful "postcolonial" debate.

I have talked above of the Western world's control and manipulation of the technology of communication. One of its consequences is to worsen the unequal exchange of information that, some years ago, the UNESCO under the Senegalese Moktar Mbow tried to correct. Of course Mbow and his supporters failed, because America, followed by Britain—the two of them being the richest of the financial contributors—simply withheld their funds and orchestrated a process that saw to the rapid rout of the daring Mbow. Now things have grown worse, with the development of satellites and the Internet, the world wide web pages, all in the hand of Bill Gates and the American empire. CNN comes directly from Atlanta into our bedrooms and parlors in Ibadan, or Nairobi, bringing such cargo as the Spice Girls and the funeral of Princess Diana, along with numerous European sports and comedy channels, with the ubiquitous Time Magazine and Reader's Digest, and the latest bestseller from Sydney Sheldon. Eagerly and enthusiastically, we consume the movies, CD-ROMs, records, books and magazines, comic cartoons, etc., produced in Hollywood, India, or Japan.

But nobody elsewhere watches our own...