criticism. Cannibalism as a concept dates back to Columbus’ travel to the Americas in the
15 th century and his identification of the native Indians as ‘Canibals’, an apparently
innocent term that has acquired all manner of negative denotations and connotations ever
since. If the Spanish traveller in his account shows the reaction that comes with an
encounter with a strange people, for modernity to have his way, the native Arawaks were
divided by Columbus’ typology which eventually placed a negative tag on the Caribs,
who in actual fact put up an opposition to the incursion on their land by strangers, as
against the Arawaks, who were ready to accept the supremacy and capitalist posture of
the travellers. This in the words of Ted Motohashi (1999: 84) was an illustration of
“naming and reciprocity.” And it does not matter afterward when the British, as late
adventurers into the project of imperialism, launched a foray into the same continent. If
any reason was ever given for the elimination of the natives, it was, one way or the other,
because they were cannibals, men cast in the mould of primitivism to the extent of
consuming fellow human flesh. The elimination was thus justified by the need to
propagate modernity and universalize progress.
If the above is appropriately gleaned within the categorization of what Steve Clark
(1999: 81) terms “prefigurations of empire”, the manifestation of modernity’s
propagation in Africa from the 19th century up to about the first half of the 20th century
cannot be separated from its acceleration through what in Ernest Mandel’s estimation was
capitalism of machinery revolution which unfurled in three epochs (Fredrick Jameson
2004: 567-8). In specific terms, it produced a transmutation of travel-based modernity in
the epoch of Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade into territorial occupation that brought about a
full-blown execution of the sentiments of modernity in Africa as it was in other parts
especially Asia. Indeed the idea of progress was about the imposition of the linearity of
western knowledge (Vilem Flusser 2007: 20) upon all after the land had been mapped out
and branded based on the whims and caprices of colonial powers. Modernity, considered
from this angle, blended with the notion of imperialism and served Europe’s
condescending imagination as “civilization taking an outward journey” (Andrew Smith
2004: 244).