of the colonial intellectual, and following from that, the problem of
colonial nationalist intellectuals ‘indigenising’ themselves.THE PROBLEMS OF AUTHENTICITY AND MODERNITY
Phrased in various ways, and part of the internal polemics of anti-colonial
nationalism, the problem ultimately boiled down to this: how repre-
sentative were the nationalists of the people they sought to represent –
the ‘masses’? Were they not spokesmen for ‘foreign’ values, beliefs and
institutions that had been forced into being by an alien power, and ought
to have no place in an authentic, indigenous political framework? This was
a polemic that came to be extremely useful in discrediting communists
as agents of a foreign power; but it was also, for some, a more genuine
problem.
Once again, the problem can be seen to have been dictated by the
nature of the struggle: allegedly, for a colony to legitimately claim the
right to independence, it had to ‘qualify’ in the eyes of its metropolitan
rulers. And the qualification then recognised was a properly developed
national consciousness. It was not adequate to question the criteria of
such qualification, or indeed the metropolitan rulers’ right to decide what
the criteria were, or when they had been achieved: practically speaking,
short of open opposition or anti-colonial war, nationalists had to put
forward the claim that such qualification had been attained – even if
subsidiary points in their argument might include a challenge to the
ruler’s right to decide the criteria, not to mention the timing.
On the imperialist side, the ‘right of nations to self-determination’
(proclaimed by Woodrow Wilson as the principle behind a post-First
World War settlement, after the triumphant Russian Revolution had
made it one of its own central principles) was interpreted as meaning ‘in
the fullness of time’, when the colonies had learnt enough about the
institutions given to them to ‘qualify’ for self-government. In the mean
time, a principle of ‘trusteeship’ would operate: the imperialist powers
would administer a country or a people not yet capable of having its
own nation-state. Nationalists in these states, according to the ‘trustee-
ship’ argument, although they might exist, could be discounted as an
inauthentic minority cut off from the people they claimed to represent by
the elite education they had received under colonial rule itself. The rule of
a (benevolent) outside power was therefore, according to the imperialist8 INTRODUCTION