ABSTRACT
The imbrication of memory and the future in postcolonial literatures raises the particular issue of the function of history in African colonization. Since the nineteenth century, Africa’s place in history has carried the unwelcome burden of an ahistorical past. Hegel’s notorious abolition of Africa from his Philosophy of History is well known,1 but neither he nor Africa are alone in this. Karl Marx thought Asiatic and African societies to be ahistorical, as well Slavic countries, Latin Europe, and the whole of South America. But the consequence of this has been that Africa, like the rest of the world, wants to enter history, because, as Ashish Nandy puts it “Historical consciousness now owns the globe … Though millions of people continue to stay outside history, millions have, since the days of Marx, dutifully migrated to the empire of history to become its loyal subjects” (1995: 46). When colonial societies are historicized they are brought into history, brought into the discourse of modernity as a function of imperial control – mapped, named, organized, legislated, inscribed. But at the same time they are kept at history’s margins, implanting the joint sense of loss and desire. Being inscribed into history is to be made modern because history and European modernity go hand in hand. As Dipesh Chakrabarty says:
So long as one operates within the discourse of “history” at the institutional site of the university it is not possible simply to walk out of the deep collusion between “history” and the modernizing narratives of citizenship, bourgeois public and private, and the nation-state.
