In other words, modernity’s first apprehension was to work within a binary of the “self”
and “other”, the progressive and the backward, etc. And by making a pretension to
altruism, it created for itself a moral ground from which to take off its operations in the
colonies. Yet it is ironical that early modernity, which was the Enlightenment, within the
western context was originally a reaction against the absolutism of the vestiges Roman
Empire as foisted way back in the Middle Ages through the extant epistemology of papal
supremacy. Indeed, it was a search for an alternative way of coming to terms with oneself
in Western Europe between the 15th and 16th centuries. Presuming to be able to hold its
own, Western Europe in the wake of the dissolution of Roman Empire arrogated to itself
absolute knowledge about all things. The aggressiveness with which it was carried out
remains to date strong enough a reason to question Michel Foucault’s (1994: 328)
assertion that: “since Kant, the role of philosophy is to prevent reason from going beyond
the limits of what is given in experience.”
If indeed Western philosophy was invested with the duty of moderating the tyranny of
absolutism of knowledge at all, its practical evidence must have been limited to the
mapping of the West. This is because one has every reason to disagree with this assertion,
as the comportment of the West in Africa during colonialism testified to the contrary.
That is, much as western philosophy might have aspired to extenuate the impropriety of
colonialism, and stressed the relativism of knowledge, its Cartesian advocacy in defence
of peoples of other cultures and the instantiation and practice of their epistemology
(Couze Venn 2006:50-51) failed to impact positively on the dynamics of colonialism. Of
course, there is a suggestion of the acknowledgment of the relativism of culture and
knowledge and the taking apart of the wisdom of imposition of singular knowledge as
given when he testified: “during my travels, having acknowledged that those who have
feelings quite contrary to our own are not for that reason barbarians or savages, but that
plurality of its understanding. This is when the question of alternative modernities arises. Cooper sheds
more light on this when he writes: “Modernity is plural. We have ‘multiple modernities’ and ‘alternative
modernities.’ These arguments either bring out the way in which non-Western peoples develop cultural
forms that are not mere repetitions of tradition but bring their own perspectives to progress. Or else such
interpretations focus on colonized intellectuals or leaders who explicitly engage the claims of Western
agents to represent all that was modern and seek to put forward alternatives that are forward-looking but
self-consciously distinct.” (p.114)