History, time and Afromodernity

We cannot approach the question of an Africa-centred epistemology without addressing the trauma of colonialism. Whether this period caused irreparable damage to African societies, or whether African subjects successfully appropriated and transformed the technologies and discourses of imperial powers (including the colonizing language), or both, frames a continuing argument in postcolonial studies. The example of literature is instructive, because the adaptation of a global language allowed writers to represent their own reality to a world audience. In turn, literary appropriations are a model for the transformed and transformative modernity created by Africans. Afromodernity is one model in which the past is folded into the present in much the same way that contemporary writers transform literary discourse. Traditional knowledges either inform or exist alongside the modern, in ways that demonstrate the irrepressible adaptability and transformative agency of cultures. Far from a sense of fracture or brokenness, which we might assume to be the effect of colonialism (Eze 2008: 25), the key to an Afro-modernity is a multiple or layered sense of time. Furthermore, the African novel has been critical in producing ‘knowledge’ of such layered time, and in the process disrupting our sense of what constitutes ‘knowing’ and what constitutes ‘time’.

The issue of knowing time is obviously tied up with the production of history. ‘What does the thought of history in fiction tell us about suspended histories of peoples, traditions, societies and cultures in modern Africa, including Africa’s experiences of its own pasts?’ (Eze 2008: 28). The novel provides a path to an answer by distinguishing between history as a source of facts, and history as a source of wisdom about the meaning of time. The question of ‘knowing time’, therefore, lies at the centre of a far more familiar question: ‘How can the novel provide a different way of knowing tradition, a broken time, to appear at another level of consciousness as intense, if suspended history?’ (Eze 2008: 34).

We might add: how can the novel provide a transformed knowledge of historical time without objectifying the past as the past? The problem with history-making is not merely its unavoidable objectification of the past, but the unavoidability of History – the master discourse of European imperialism.