and writing. It is against this backdrop that a reading of Mapanje’s “Sketches from
London” in Of Chameleons and Gods makes a compelling focus of discussion.
Modernity under Postcolonial Scrutiny in London
Most often read as a subsumation of the dominant criticism of a postcolonial Malawi,^38
the tendency is to gloss over the discreet argument that “Sketches from London” in
Mapanje’s Of Chameleons and Gods raises. To the extent that the section actually makes
sense within the dominant argument of postcolonial disillusionment and repressive
measures of the state, it can also be viewed against the discourse of modernity. By so
doing, it is possible to reclaim the discreet argument that the section raises on the merit of
the obvious questions it raises and explore the important issues that are immanently
implicated. The fact that the section provides an interlude in a long criticism of the
Malawian postcolonial state is in itself significant. If the nation is a product of a colonial
invention, it is important to examine how the dynamics of the imperial project try to exact
influence beyond the spatial enclave of the formerly colonized state. That modernity was
a product of the Enlightenment can as well be taken for granted; but that it makes its
point most clearly through knowledge is a fact that demands some engagement at this
point. The principle of “inner logic” (Habermas in Zach-Williams 2004: 22) by which the
Enlightenment evolved already indicates the tendency to impose a unilateral and
provincial ideal on the rest of the world as if it were inherently so. This was perhaps most
efficiently mediated through the agency of the knowledge of that “inner logic”, as a
measure by which development could be ascertained. The agency to which western
knowledge was put resulted in the presentation of western education as the ultimate for
the colonies. The travel or journey to the West by the formerly colonized then, as it still
applies today for the pursuit of education, is an indication of the readiness to participate
in a kind of universal orientation towards development. For as David Harvey has argued,
the teleology of modernity is made practicable in the application of accumulated
38
See Leroy Vail, and Landeg White, (199) and Landeg White (1995).