Preface: Modernism in the World

Sometime in the early 1960s, David Rubadiri, a Malawian student and then lecturer at Makerere University College in Uganda published a poem entitled "Stanley Meets Mutesa." The poem, one of the most anthologized in collections of African poetry, had a theme that was familiar in the early days of postcolonial literature: the encounter between Europe and Africa, the colonizer and the colonized. Rubadiri's poem, in both its key theme and movement, drew heavily on the history of late-nineteenth-century colonialism in East Africa, more particularly the arrival of the Anglo-American imperialist, Henry Morton Stanley, to the Kingdom of Buganda. The poem is, indeed, most memorable in its last stanza, which allegorizes the entry of the west in the world of the other:

"Mtu mweupe karibu" White man you are welcome, The gate of reeds closes behind them And the west is let in.¹

These, the last four lines of the poem, have come to signal the doubleness of the postcolonial literary project, namely the imperative to mark a space of local identity in the language of the other and to reroute the signifiers of colonialism. Rubadiri's poem is in English, except the one line that signals the entry of the colonizer—"Mtu mweupe karibu"—which is in Swahili. Significantly, Rubadiri does not let this line stand out as the mark of African identity or self-inscription; in fact the line that follows—"White man you are welcome"—is a direct translation of the line in Swahili. The colonial event is thus represented as a form of alien invasion, which is, nevertheless, controlled through linguistic gestures. For Rubadiri and many of his contemporaries, it was in this play of alienation and identification that postcolonial difference would be inscribed.

Beneath the allegorization of the colonial encounter, however, there was something else happening in Rubadiri's poem: it was recounting the African encounter with Europe, and indeed recuperating that fatal moment of history when Stanley met Mutesa, in the language of modernism. A remarkable but often forgotten feature of Rubadiri's celebrated poem is how its denotation of an African version of history is effected through the language of high modernism. This is evident in the very first stanza of the poem, which recounts Stanley's journey through the African landscape:

Such a time of it they had The heat of the day The chill of the night And the mosquitoes That day and night Trailed the march bound for a kingdom.²

Readers of these lines will, of course, recognize the influence of T. S. Eliot. In its structure, rhythm, and imagery, "Stanley Meets Mutesa" borrows heavily from Eliot's "The Journey of the Magi." The above stanza bears a striking similarity to the famous opening of Eliot's poem:

"A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, The very dead of winter."³

The great irony of the history of postcolonial literatures was the emulation of high modernists, such as Eliot and Yeats, as formal models. This emulation was explicit, as the poetry of Rubadiri and Christopher Okigbo illustrates, but it could also be indirect and epigraphic, as in Chinua Achebe's derivation of a title and epigraph from Yeat's "Second Coming" for Things Fall Apart, and from "The Journey of the Magi" in No Longer at Ease. As the essays in this special issue of Modernism/Modernity vividly illustrate, a convergence of political and literary ideologies mark a significant part of the history of modernism and postcolonialism. Indeed, it is my contention that it was primarily—I am tempted to say solely—in the language and structure of modernism that a postcolonial experience came to be articulated and imagined in literary form. The archive of early postcolonial writing in Africa, the Caribbean, and India is dominated and defined by writers whose political or cultural projects were enabled by modernism even when the ideologies of the latter, as was the case with Eliot, were at odds with the project of decolonization.⁴ Eliot...