The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith

      Yet the sheer vehemence of this discourse, paradoxically, continued to suggest other lines of approach. A seminal contribution to the debate, at one level indicative of the mounting impediments with which my own project had to contend, came from Australia – Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back (1989). The work’s title and informing impulse derived from Salman Rushdie, although its central assumptions shared little of the playful iconoclasm of Rushdie’s novels. For its authors, the English language was itself an endocultural racialised code, deeply implicated in the cognitive ravages of imperialism. It was the bearer of a ‘cultural conspiracy’, appropriating the non-imperial world and enforcing a ‘violent hierarchy’ of knowledge and power. According to this view, ‘Europe and its others’ are locked in a permanent binary opposition, a conceptual grid of violation in which language with its own coercive dynamic towards enforcing difference plays the major constitutive role. Thus ‘the nexus of power involving literature, language, and a dominant British culture’ (4) meant that the very process of encrypting the ‘other’ into a text was already a violation, an imposition and a disempowerment of the subject. All writing – and most especially all transcultural writing – was in a sense illicit, and, in the colonial context, expropriative. It would appear that none of the European texts about Africa that I had been studying should even have been written. If I seem to be lampooning The Empire Writes Back – its insights were widely respected and are still cited – it is not to discredit its scholarship, but to indicate how a punitive discourse of postcolonial rectitude was itself heading for a speechless abyss even as it increasingly refined and redefined the kinds of question one had to ask of Eurocolonial texts.

      The unease generated by the uncompromising stance of The Empire Writes Back is codified in its style. A lexis of violence articulates its thesis – language, we are told, intrudes, invades, subverts, intervenes, seizes, demands, asserts, disfigures, oppresses, dislocates, denigrates and violates everything it used to be thought of as merely imparting. In this, the work echoed its Fanonist and Foucauldian inspirations and anticipated other critiques of a manichaean cut. So, for instance, Sara Suleri’s The Rhetoric of English India (1992), despite promising a more nuanced reading of Eurocolonial discourse, is marked by a discursive pathology of such vehemence – ‘anxiety of empire’ (13), ‘epistemological terror’ (15), ‘cultural terror’ (17), ‘discursive terror’ (18), etcetera, all the way to ‘imperial horror’ (112) – that it could only confirm what it had set out to challenge. ‘The astounding specificity of each colonial encounter’ (13) that it promises to celebrate reveals only ‘a binary rigidity … which is an inherently Eurocentric strategy’ (4).

      For several decades, the bleak binarism displayed by works such as these echoed through the discourse. Jan Nederveen Pieterse assembled an exhibition in the Tropical Museum, Amsterdam, and wrote an accompanying text to demonstrate ‘how much of Western culture is made up of prejudices about other cultures, how much of Western identity is constructed upon the negative identity of others’ (1992, 9). Benita Parry has devoted several studies (1987, 1992, 1997) to an apparent critique of the relentless construction of ‘a model of colonial discourse overwhelmingly concerned with processes of othering’ (1987, 33), yet has been unable to free herself from talking about ‘imperialism’s epistemic violence’, its ‘agonistic space’ (29) and its ‘valorizing gladiatorial skills’ (54). Indeed, her call to arms is uncompromising: ‘The common pursuit of all who engage in the study of colonial discourse [must be] to reveal the limits of a Western modernity which had accommodated slavery and colonial genocide and was complicit with the imperial project’ (1997, 10).

      Yet some champions of Said’s Manichaean model of colonialism nevertheless managed to open up spaces in the binarist severity of his thesis. Homi Bhabha (1982, 1994), once referred to by Robert Young as forming with Said and Spivak the Holy Trinity of postcolonialism, posed important challenges to Saidean doctrine, notably in his notion that the colonial subject, despite always being mediated through the lenses and pages of the coloniser, could frequently disrupt colonialist assurance through parody, mime and unguarded reportage. In my own reading, I had come across many instances of such delightful one-up-manship on the part of reported African subjects. One example comes from Guy Tachard’s account of a Khoi servant from the governor’s household at the Cape of Good Hope who in the 1680s had deserted,

      saying that he would not submit to the rack of a regular life, that the Dutch and such other nations were slaves to the earth, and that the Hottentots [Khoikhoi] were the masters of it, that they were not forced to stand with the hat continually under the arm, and to observe a hundred uneasy customs; that they ate when they were hungry, and followed no other rules but what nature had taught them (1688, 72).

      An even more striking spoof of colonialist presumptions occurs in an early seventeenth-century Dutch source that records a local response on the Gold Coast to European traders’ complaints about theft: ‘[They said] we are rich and have great stores of wares, and brought ships full unto them, and took great pains and labours to sell it, and were so long before we sold it, that they thought it fit to help us therein, that we might the sooner be rid thereof’ (Artus, 1600, in Purchas, 1625, 6: 318). A sharper local response was recorded by Charles Wheeler, who in the early eighteenth century had spent ten years in West Africa:

      The discerning natives account it their greatest unhappiness that they were ever visited by the Europeans. They say that we Christians introduced the traffic of slaves, and that before our coming they [had] lived in peace; but, say they, it is observable that wherever Christianity comes, there come with it a sword, a gun, powder and ball (Smith, 1744, 266).

      Although these utterances are all of the ‘they say’ variety, and Gareth Griffiths has warned that there is always ‘a real concern as to whether what we are listening to is really a subaltern voice’ (1994, 75), there can be little doubt about the immediacy and authenticity of the voices just behind these reports. They once again confirmed for me that the Orientalist paradigm was wide of the mark regarding a significant sector of the Western discourse of Africa.