of the African and Asian political elites to desire western modernity without a preparation
to yield to its terms of transformation. So for the non-western powers then, as can still be
attested now
Their characteristic response was an attempt at a defensive, conservative modernization,
moving from the purchase of modern weapons to seeking to develop the means of making
them. This selective modernity, taking from the West only what would sustain and enhance
their power. It was, however, grounded in the untenable contradiction of seeking the science
and technology that they believed was the basis of Western power, but rejecting the secular
culture of modernity that threatened to dissolve the hegemonic cosmologies, religious
systems, and moral economies on which their power and institutions were based. (7)If the above encapsulates the immediate crisis antecedent to the decisive colonization of
Africa consequent upon the scramble for and partition of Africa, the era of western
colonial occupation in the account of Berman further reveals that it was characterized by
collusion between the colonial officials and the local political elite whose understanding
of modernity was to institute “patron-client relationships” which subsequently “became
the dominant social relation of power, the fundamental idiom of politics, and the mode of
access to the resources of modernity” (8). Needless to say, the moral poser that arose
from this anomaly which granted privileges to a few powerful cliques during colonialism
remained unresolved. What is more, this tendency to preserve privilege for a negligible
few to the detriment of the masses was introduced and consolidated in the anti-colonialist
struggle that produced the idea of decolonization. The fault lines of this culture produced
all forms of ethnic identities by which the project of decolonization was prosecuted. And
being so flawed, only minimal “progress toward modernity appeared to be occurring
through the rhizomes of ethnicity and patronage that persisted even when elected
governments were replaced by military regimes and increasingly authoritarian civilian
governments” (11). The authoritarian regimes that run the African postcolonial states
nevertheless remain malleable to the capitalist goals of modernity as designed by the
West. Not being critical enough to be able to tell the difference between the intention and
action of modernity, the Third World is hooked today by what Mike Davis calls “the
brutal tectonics of neo-liberal globalization” (Berman 11). This illustrates the third unit of
the spectrum of the historiography. But more profoundly still, here lies the basis on which
one can agree with Laura Chernaik (1999: 86) that “We can argue that the modernity that
was called for never really took place, never really arrived”.