Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa: Nation and African Modernity (review)

In an article addressing the silence (or silencing) of Africa in contemporary postcolonial theory, Simon Gikandi offers the following explanation for the situation: "The institutions of interpretation that now operate under the orbit of poststructural or postcolonial theory have proven incapable, or ill-prepared, for the conjunction between a particular politics and morality," he writes; yet this conjunction is vital to "the making and unmaking of African worlds" (Gikandi 3). With politics, morality, and "the making and unmaking of African worlds" firmly in view, Kwaku Larbi Korang sets the record straight in Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa, opening up a vital space in the cultural history of West Africa for indigenous intellectual activity and nationalist self-assertion. In the process, he engages with dominant figures in the institution of postcolonial theory, from Partha Chatterjee to Kwame Anthony Appiah and Paul Gilroy, showing how their negative assessments of nationalism fail to admit the rich history of African agency within colonial social formations.

Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa is an elegantly written and meticulously researched history of intellectual self-assertion in colonial West Africa. Korang puts aside the common assumption that there were no formal political or philosophical movements in West Africa prior to négritude. He convenes a loose grouping of highly educated, anglophone African men whose writings and publications on the subject of African modernity and African nationalism formed sites of self-conscious intellectual activity between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Their links with a global pan-Africanist intellectual community are emphasized, for, as Korang shows, "Africa" emerged as the product of vital interregional exchanges of ideas about modernity and the nation (6–7).

The book charts the contribution of heterogeneous West African thinkers to the ideas of Africa, modernity, and African nationalism. Focusing in particular on the Gold Coast (Ghana) in the century before independence, Korang locates a "frontline" of African intellectuals whose inspiration was drawn from race-thinkers in all parts of the colonial world. Alongside well-known pan-Africanists such as E. W. Blyden, J. E. Casely Hayford, and Kwame Nkrumah, Korang studies the work of less internationally familiar intellectuals such as Carl Christian Reindorf, John Mensah Sarbah, John Ocansey, and Kobina Sekyi. He emphasizes that the contribution of the latter group to the idea of African modernity—ranging from the accommodationist to the ultraconservative—was no less significant than that of the former group.

These intellectuals are placed together for the first time as a group in Korang's comprehensive study of the intellectual currents circulating around West Africa. The intersection between their particular politics and their pan-Africanist identification is the defining space in which Korang undertakes his study. In recognition of their shared colonial culture, and also in recognition of colonial Africa's porous "national" boundaries, he shows how the idea of "Africa" remained strong among these intellectuals and political figures, informing (rather than simply complementing) their political struggles, and inspiring their literary production.

Given the emphasis on African agency throughout the book, it is both ironic and historically perceptive that what emerges from Korang's study of frontline intellectuals is the portrait of an intensely tragic class of men, bound into a Faustian pact in which they were conscious of their position as mouthpieces for the very colonial epistemologies from which they attempted, in their writing, to break free. A "constitutive and untraceable contradiction" made each individual a friend and enemy to himself, Korang writes, for each man was, in spite of himself, "the agency by, and subjectively through, which Enlightenment (indirectly) fasten[ed] its grip on native realities" (13; 42). Caught between seeing modernity as alienating and desirable, this "middle class" was literally a middle class: these men were inheritors to "a deathly heritage" that they were "powerless not to pass on" (179).

One consequence of the tragic positionality of this group was that their nationalism and engagement with modernity exhibited an intimacy with European philosophy. On one...