of the Atlantic Slave Trade. The subsequent division of the continent into colonies and
the imposition of western ontology upon Africa are a result of the travel. But travel in
itself becomes a symbolic and vital pointer to its agential significance, not being an end
in itself, but a means to an end, which was the imposition and transformation of a western
notion of modernity into an empirical practice in Africa.
Modernity as a concept will therefore require some preliminary engagement at this
juncture. There is admittedly the angle of multiplicity to the understanding of modernity,
yet a predominant and often cited view of it is the idea of progress which, ordinarily is
identified with every human society. However, colonialism, especially from the 16th
century,^36 tends to arrogate to itself the singularity of the production of modernity both in
terms of origin and propagation. It presents the West as its originator with an attempt at
propagating modernity around the world in sentiments of singularity. Colonialism
becomes the easiest way of achieving this: the denial of other peoplesother than
Europeanstheir understanding and practice of progress, and the imposition of Europe’s
notion of it and ultimately imposing and creating a value system based on this and
investing it with the privilege of universalism. As a “claim-making concept” (Fredrick
Cooper: 2005: 115), it has been put forward from its originating base at various moments
to others in distant and discreet places as the ultimate for progress, thus subscribing and
sublating at the same time natives’ idea of progress. Colonialism was one such moment
and the pragmatism of its propagation comes up in form of an audacious teleology.
Regarding this Fredrick Cooper says:
Imperial ideologues, at various points in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, put forth
either transformative or static versions of a modernity argument: that bringing the backward
into the modern justified colonization, or that Europe’s essential modernizing capacity
compared to Africa’s inherent backwardness justified long-term rule over Africa. (115)^37
36
In his book, Silences in African History: Between the Syndromes of Discovery and Abolition (Dar Es
Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers: 2005), Jacques Depelchin contends that colonialism could not be said
to have started only in the 19th century. For it dates back to the era of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Therefore,
to begin to distinguish between colonialism and the Slave Trade is to wittingly or unwittingly collude with
the West to extenuate the enormity of imperialism.
(^37)
It must be stated, however, that much as an attempt is made to impose a singularity on the concept of
modernity through what Elisio Salvado has termed an “ethnocentric” standpoint, given the manner in which
it arrogates modernity to some point in European history, scholars and critics have always contended for a