based imposition of the nation, by offering some latitude and liberation from
monopolistic nationalist strictures, the multiplicity of citizenship it espouses is not
without its shortcomings. These shortcomings constitute the grand paradox with which
transnationalism is identified. Modernity’s failure therefore stems from the knowledge
that rather than translating into a replication of developmental indices often espoused and
practised by the West so that its claim to universal values can be validated, it instead
results more substantially in a descent into underdevelopment of the formerly colonized.
As a response to this paradox of expectation in the postcolony the tendency is for
individuals to seek modernity’s pragmatic possibilities in the countries of the West
perceived especially to be its originators. The implication of this is that modernity’s
failure is immediately manifest in the failure of the postcolonial states. The transnational
contemplation that follows is thus best understood when one critically views its linear but
compelling historiography: “transnationalism and... its dynamic are conditioned by the
histories of colonisation, decolonisation and postcolonialism” (Laura Chernaik 1999: 80).
It, moreover, implies that if the postcolonial is today defined by a chronic vulnerability to
movement or spatial transgression, one must probe further into this historiography to
ascertain how its evolution directly and indirectly impinged on the African postcolonial
identity. To begin with, the informing teleology of colonialism was itself conditioned by
the precursory ideological order of modernity, which was itself inspired by the
Reformation and the Enlightenment in that temporal order. But in concentrating on
modernity in this discussion and how it impacted negatively on the history of
postcolonial states, Bruce Berman’s essay “The Ordeal of Modernity in an Age of
Terror” (2006) will be useful. Guided in the West essentially by a form of secularization
and radical transformation in the ascension of industrial capitalism, the culture of
modernity produced an epistemic order that radicalized its system and recorded some
leaps in the enhancement of living (3-4). The journey that brought modernity to the
colonies however was thoroughly compromised through the flawed foundation upon
which it was laid. Further discussion on this will no doubt reveal the multiple
complicities through which this was achieved. In the meanwhile, the basic contradictions
of the interaction with the itinerant culture of modernity were ingrained in the tendency