ABSTRACT
At the centre of modernity emerged onto-epistemic struggles of who was ‘modern’, what does it mean to be human, who belonged to the future, what constituted knowledge, how society was to be organized and how power was to be conceived and configured. Under Euromodernity only the Europeans claimed to belong to the future. To sustain this monopoly of the future, Europeans not only colonized space, people and knowledge but more importantly time. Time became bifurcated into two – the pre-modern and the modern. To sustain this sense of time, Euromodernity invented such nomenclatures as indigenous, tribe, primitive and black as it drove towards distinguishing those who claimed to be modern (to be in the future) while actively working to confine other human beings to the past (primitivity/backwardness). Here was born a modern world in which those who had been pushed to the categories of indigenous, primitive, tribe and black, were questioned and rejected as human beings. Here was also born the painful reality of a people who became defined as a problem and a people who through such initiatives as colonialism were exiled from their knowledges, cultures, and even from themselves.
