The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith

      Fundamental to most of the cognitive and cultural models considered above is the nature and function of language, not only in so far as language has the foundational role in our cultural and cognitive being, but also in that language may constitute a model or metaphor for the actual workings of both mind and culture. Culture itself is structured like a language – it is a semiology that may be acquired, read and interpreted like a grammar or a text. This is the essential insight of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967, translated 1974), which conceives of all cultural practices as versions of écriture.

      Language is not merely a means to describe reality but actually constitutes our version of reality, and does so differently in different languages with potentially alarming implications for cross-cultural endeavours (Grace, 1987; Green and Hoggart, 1987). Different cultures, contingent upon different languages, cut up reality in different ways, making some ‘grammars’ perhaps more amenable to negotiating transcultural encounters and conceptualisations than others. Such were the implications of the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the proposition of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, who in the early twentieth century argued that discrete forms of language ‘predetermine for us certain models of observation and interpretation’ (Handler, 1990, 891). The notion was further developed in Claude Levi-Strauss’s argument that given conceptual systems are linguistically orientated, and will thus always lie beyond the comprehension of other linguistic systems.

      Such thinking encouraged the widespread introduction into cultural studies of the notion of the ‘linguistic turn’, not only to explore the ‘grammars’ of culture, but to raise questions (indeed, misgivings) about how accessible the intricacies of one culture can ever be to ‘speakers’ or practitioners of another (Geertz, 1973). The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis may no longer be accepted (Albert, 1970; Cohen, 1993), but its anxieties are still with us, as suggested by the claim in The Empire Writes Back that ‘the power structures of English grammar … [are] themselves metonymic of the hegemonic controls exercised by the British on Black peoples throughout Caribbean and African history’ (1989, 48). Once again, so it would appear, some people are doomed by their linguistic, as by their cognitive, apparatus to be imperialists. In the field of postcolonial studies, such debates have fuelled the larger contention between cultural monodists for whom insuperable barriers between cultures would always exist, and cultural pluralists optimistic about the human capacity to acquire other ‘grammars’, whether in language or in culture. My own experiences as a bilingual South African have urged the latter position, but the ‘linguistic turn’ in cultural, cognitive and ethnographic discourse has suggested yet further useful possibilities.

      For Stephen A. Tyler, the ideal ethnographic encounter is a ‘hermeneutic process’ of ‘textualization’, leading to the outcome of a ‘negotiated text’ between observer and observed (1986, 127). Clifford Geertz (1973) has promoted the concept of ‘thick description’ inspired by and dedicated to the ideal of faithfully capturing an observed culture in the fullest possible linguistic and semiotic detail. In this way, ethnography might resist its almost irresistible bias towards repeating the appropriative dynamics of colonialism itself, as has been noted (Mason, 1990; Schwartz, 1994). John and Jean Comaroff, examining nineteenth-century missionary encounters in the Northern Cape of South Africa, propose ‘a complex dialectic of challenge and riposte, domination and defiance’, in which ‘the very act of conceptualizing, inscribing and interacting with the Other implies discourse as much as domination’ (1991, 1: 15). David Theo Goldberg has invoked the operations of grammatical parsing to indicate how not just the functions but the very fibres of racism might be exposed by ‘cutting up the body of racist discursive practices and expressions, stripping them to reveal the underlying presuppositions, embodiments of interests, aims and projections of exclusion and subjection’ (1990, xiii).

      On a lighter note, Malcolm Bradbury’s novel, Rates of Exchange (1983), speculates on a reality (ostensibly Heathrow Airport, but in fact the text under the reader’s eye) that is entirely a tissue of texts: ‘Here are subtle grammars, cases, declensions, and inflexions, an entire constructed universe that in turn constructs and orders the universe itself’ (1990, 31). Obviously, such insistence that reality is not only textually constituted but may, like a text, yield multiple readings has suggested yet more ways of engaging with the centuries-old library of Africa, itself the record of many attempts to decode the continent.

      Furthermore, if anxieties about our linguistic bondage have contributed to the various ‘crises of representation’ reviewed earlier, other aspects of language – its infinite inventiveness, its metaphoric reach, its cognitive repertoire, its transformative genius – suggest that it is precisely language that may be our most liberating ally in transcultural comprehension and expression. This is well understood in Africa. ‘Spoken words are living things like cocoa-beans packed with life’, writes Gabriel Okara in The Voice (1964, 110), a novel about just such power.

      That language is ‘arbitrary’ in a sense made famous by Ferdinand de Saussure (1915, translated 1959), in that the signifying function of language depends on an ultimately arbitrarily established relationship between sounds, signs and meanings, does not mean that we are the victims of a mindless system that speaks us, but rather that we have the power (and responsibility) to deploy language so as to achieve understanding. That ‘the outside world is always mediated by language and narrative, however much it is naturalized by the [assumed] transparency of realistic language’ (Currie, 1998, 62), is not a prison sentence but a challenge that may enhance insight. Mark Currie argues that Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) ‘is about the failure of language