2 - Imperial Exchanges, Postimperial Reconfigurations: Africa in the Modern, the Modern in Africa

Summary

The political and literary struggles to locate and name Africa and its meanings involve a range of histories needing to be read in ways that acknowledge the specific textualities informing them. African identities become meaningful and politically contested within historically located debates and theories of race, nation, and culture.

—Kadiatu Kanneh, African Identities

Does One Bird a Flock Make? Modernist Quasi Objectivity, or Thinking/Enacting the Whole in the Part

[T]he African asks always not “who am I?” but “who are we?” and “my” problem is not mine alone but “ours.”

—Appiah, “The Myth of an African World”

For the native, objectivity is always directed against him.

—Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

The premier Gold Coast nationalist Sarbah by ethnic identification was Fanti; colonial legislation enacted in 1883 also classified him as a Native, one of several million such in the Gold Coast (and beyond). We may wonder why this “educated” author of Fanti Customary Laws and Fanti National Constitution refers to, and includes within his self-identification, a georacial abstraction, “African.” Why not for Sarbah the relatively concrete “educated native,” or the even more empirically precise “educated Fanti”? In what sense, for Sarbah, could the abstract inhere in the concrete, the universal in the singular? What gave rise to the need for Sarbah and his kind to make an Africa at large reveal itself through a Gold Coast small, the latter itself of horizontally subdivided ethnicity and of vertical class and gender differentiation? What compulsions drove the story of an intermediate class, a part, to include and mediate within its class self that of a whole? Include within itself, that is, a coherent whole that was imagined as such (a) territorially (“the Gold Coast nation”), (b) interterritorially (“West African nationality”), and (c) continentally and transcontinentally (“Pan-African supranationality”)? And, to complicate matters, these constructs were also to be coherently informed by a foundational (African) “nativity.”

As they engaged the problematic of African modernity at the frontline, an obligatory question of the relation between part and whole, indeed of whole displaced into part, was under perilous negotiation by the nationalist writer-intellectuals under review. For the coherently “native” and “African” forms in which these nationalists appropriated a self-identification were hardly, on historical ground, objective givens. Rather, their constructs were “fictive” objectivities, more symbolic than real.