The Postcolony as Trope: Searching for a Lost Continent in a Borderless World

If the hubris of postcolonial studies derives from the inflation of a local condition into a cosmic paradigm, the very idea of Africa as a massive, monolithic postcolony must be one of the comforting illusions of contemporary theories of African cultural, economic, and political production. Achille Mbembe has stressed the need to recognize the multiplicities of identities in the postcolony (5). Yet in his own epistemology, this pluralization of identities remains at the level of a particularly geocolonial space, with the Cameroonian experience providing the background and details for the postcolony. It is indeed a very sobering historic irony that very close to the southeastern border of modern Cameroon, the imposition of three different types of colonial rationalizations on the people of the old culturally contiguous Kongo kingdom would have altered the postcolonial realities of modern day Angola, Congo Brazzaville, and the former Zaire.

Yet as a trope, the postcolony is profoundly illustrative of the African condition in the epoch after the cessation of actual colonization. Whether the "post" in postcolonial is taken to mean "after," "because of," and "inclusive of," or as a prefix of opposition and resistance to the colonial, the conclusion is inescapable that it suffers from a diminution or attenuation of the real thing (see Hutcheon).Thus, whether it is a protocolony or a paracolony, the postcolony wears the marker of inferiorization or juniorization in bold, troubling relief. It has the disadvantages of the colony without its advantages. At least in the colony, the colonizing metropole takes some responsibility; whereas under the guise of independence the postcolony is formally on its own. The postcolony, then, is a Kafkaesque penal colony where inhabitants perfect the masochistic pastime described by a celebrated Nigerian musical gadfly as "shuffering and shmiling."

But if the notion of the postcolony is a tormenting if illusive reality, the quest for a "lost" continent in a world often described as borderless, a global space where everything is ground into conformity by the homogenizing leviathan of globalization, is at best quixotic and at worst a Sisyphean venture. (see Jameson and Miyoshi) Yet despite the onslaught of globalization, despite the relentless attempt to subsume the entire world within the capitalist logic of development, the invention, re-invention and de-invention of Africa with all their cultural, intellectual, and ideological accretions have continued apace. Indeed, in sharp contradistinction to Bhabha's controversial postmodernist and "post-nation" notion of the "cultural and historical hybridity of the postcolonial world [. . .] as the paradigmatic place of departure" (21), others have insisted that the nation-state remains the most vibrant site for contemporary cultural and political contestations (see Chabal; Ahmad).

The search for Africa in the agonistic arena of postimperial space thus assumes an ideological and political urgency. Well before the advent of globalization, the continent had been in danger of being "lost" to the rest of the world, a perpetual blot of darkness in a post-Enlightenment world of modernity and civilization. For some observers, the failure of postcolonial self-governance has given rise to the possibility of Africa falling off the world map (see Callaghy). For others, the ravages of unabating underdevelopment, the grim misery index suggest that Africa is a danger to civilization in the coming millennium (see Herbst; Leys). And yet a few have alerted the rest of the world to the possibility that political disorder is in fact the natural and logical order of Africa (see Chabal and Daloz).

It is in the light of this frenzied debate that continuing efforts to recuperate the essence of Africa must be situated. At the center of these often majestic surveys lies what Richard Werbner has rightly characterized as "politicized memory," which according to him lies "at the very heart of postcolonial studies" (15). With this politicization of (re)membering, Africa is being re-memorialized and de-memorialized or re-membered and dis-membered simultaneously in...