Postscript - Ethical Transnationalism, Postcolonialism, the Black Atlantic: Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa vis-à-vis the Contemporary Revisionisms

Summary

A true respect for the past—a consciousness of a real national history— has not only a binding force but a stimulating effect, and furnishes a guarantee of future endurance and growth. That which has been achieved in the past is a prophecy of what may be done in the future. You may call this poetry if you like, but it is the kind of thing on which nations thrive.

—Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race

“Intellectuals everywhere,” Appiah reports from the trenches of the so-called culture wars of the late twentieth century, “are now caught up … in a struggle for the articulation of their respective nations.” And variously waging this struggle are “volunteers, draftees, and resisters.” This book, Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa, poised in nationalist defense of “Africa”—as read frequently through its subsidiary “Ghana”—will presumably have to count in Appiah's reckoning as a “volunteer draftee.”

It is Appiah also who, disposing of the fiction of disinterested knowledge in his essay “Tolerable Falsehoods,” has alerted us to the interest-relativity of all knowledge. Having this awareness makes it pertinent, as this book winds down, for its author to ask what interest exactly informs his articulation of the African nation in an intellectual-cum-activist history. “History,” as we have heard Mudimbe declare, “is a legend, an invention of our present. It is both a memory and reflection of our present.” If so the interest that informs this book's historical retrospection has been to recuperate for the present a knowledge of African and Pan-African figures, engaged in a drawn-out struggle to articulate African nationality, as model agent-protagonists in and of the modern. It has been a matter in what has gone before in this book's pages, then, of seeing these agents seizing themselves, not without difficulty and perplexity, contradiction and paradox, flaws and shortcomings, as subjects of modernity, a would-be African modernity. It is that, this book has endeavored to show, rather than their consenting to remain merely fixed in object status by and in the modern, in the manner purposed for them by the forces of colonial-imperialism.