task for writers at the point in time, whether in diaspora or on the continent, was that of
the obligation to set the record straight. This much Chinua Achebe (1986: np) testifies to
in his conversation with Nuruddin Farah, that is, the need to refute stories falsely told
about Africans for Africans by the West. For, the ethnocentric frame of western
narratives inspired through travels guided the unfolding of many of the tales.
Thus in the imperial travel of Europe to the rest of the world, the first order of operation
became the denial of other peoples’ humanity and progress. This view in empirical terms
is the more illuminated in the reflection of Fredrick Jameson (2002: 1) about modernity
and the idea of the modern. It is indeed about:
the asceticism of the modern... or its phallocentricism; the authoritarianism and even the
occasional repressiveness of the modern; the teleology of the modernist aesthetic [ and by
implication imperialism ] as it proceeded on triumphalistically from the newer to the newest...The credo of modernity was characteristically domineering and intolerant of other forms
of ontology. If then here is a view of the modernity propagated by the West, especially
with postcolonial discourse, it becomes necessary to examine the substance of its
operation and the pragmatism of its agencies. Travel, that is, imperial travel, within the
context of this study, deserves some critique. Without doubt, travel was a heraldic agency
of colonialism. To put it in other words, the agenda of western colonialism in other
regions of the world from its earliest stage would not have been possible without the
recourse to travel and exploration of these regions. The substance of the triumph of the
various travels rested on one thing: the ordering of difference. It was basically about
casting the natives of any of the regions in bad moulds in order to justify the capitalist
tendencies of the travels. The natives had to be defined by their backwardness in order to
find a ground for the elimination and domination strategies that would follow. It was
through this way that travels heralded modernity, which then, as it is now was “always a
concept of otherness” (Jameson 211).
An excursion into the travel accounts of the imperial West reveals that perhaps the first
instance of the ordering of difference for the imposition of modernity was in the area of
naming of natives as cannibals. This has since become a vital aspect of postcolonial