The veritable substance of this project of modernity mediated through imperialism was
the establishment and consolidation of Christianity and western forms of education.
Malawi under British rule was no exception. The acquisition of western education
especially during and after colonialism stood out as an in-ignorable index not only of
modernity but also of modernization. The presentation of the world of writing to the
colonies was significant for many reasons; not the least was the counter-factual values it
would later assume in the hands of the colonized. For if colonialism had thrived then on
the intended instruction to the colonized through the constructed utopia about the
imperial metropolis of the West, making it serve as a space, beautiful and urbanely
perfect, without the barbarism and cannibalism of the colony, it was also because colonial
literature romanticized the agenda as a symbol of western conquest (Ted Motohashi
1999: 85). The idea of the evolution of the metropolitan cities, Michel Foucault (1994:
351) reveals, was to equate and replicate the advancement of the culture itself. The
success of modernity however, also brought about a circumscription in the directions
travel could take. To aspire and acquire the best of modernity, travel had to also be made
by a privileged group of the colonized who were expected to find the preachments of
modernity in the West exquisitely faultless and confirm the civilization of the colonizer
as against the barbarity and cannibalism of the colonized. This trend has however since
multiplied in various other forms. This is because besides acquiring knowledge in the
former colonial capitals, postcolonial “figures who address the metropolis using the
techniques, the discourses, the very weapons of scholarship and criticism once reserved
exclusively for the European, now adapt[ed] [the techniques] for insurgency or
revisionism at the very heart of the Western centre” (Edward Said 1990: 29). The
implication of the foregoing is that the course of modernity now necessitates a global
nomadism propelled towards sites of primitivism and displaced premodern cultures,
(Greg Richards and Julie Wilson 2004: 5), that is, a renewed attempt to rediscover and
appreciate relics of cultures overrun by modernity, especially in the formerly colonized
spaces. By the same token, the implication also simultaneously and more importantly,
induces in the formerly colonized a nomadism committed to exposing and circumventing
the fault lines of Western sophistication made popular in the colonies through education
wang
(Wang)
#1