spatiality, they, contrary to popular assumption, owe their origin to the world of the
living, the postcolonial nation state. It thus negates whatever optimism of “autonomy and
autarchy” that anybody would want to accord the dead. The reason for this, to Serote, is
simple and he lays it out without any modicum of ambiguity: “for heaven is forever a
strange place to live/ because we know nothing about it now” (52). Therefore, within the
context of the conception of the South African nation, not for Serote the dismissive
submission of Kwame Gyekye (1997: 257) that “Africans ... pay unnecessarily excessive
and incessant attention to their ancestors ... One reason for the excessive veneration of
the ancestors is the belief that, having gained a spiritual status that presumably is invested
with power that human beings do not possess but that they can exploit to enhance their
mundane interests and welfare, the ancestors are believed to be in a position to bestow
honors on their living descendants.” Needless to say, if the dead in their “going” must
remember this patch of the earth that is their home, then, it is the more so for the living
for whom the tide of the global times turns and beckons to consider the attraction of other
lands. In such circumstance, the deterritorialization that results certainly produces various
categories of diasporic identities (Chambers 1994: 110).
Therefore, for both the living and the dead, the blurring of the line between the various
categories of temporalities and spaces is total. As a matter of fact, the situation is one in
which every time, past and present, rather than being considered irrelevant, assumes a
place in a temporal system that is functionally cumulative. This brings up the need to
reflect further on the title of the collection itself; that is, the idea that history is essentially
constituted by place. There can be no question about the centrality of place to history.
This explains why where relating or recounting events and issues having to do with the
past, there is always a stress on specific places in order to bring the contexts of specific
narratives to bear and invest every expression about the past with credibility. This much
is apparent in the title. Yet the location of time at the other end of the spectrum in the
conundrum that the title poses cannot be ignored. So, if “history” becomes “home
address”, the assumption is that contemporary postcolonial identities are framed by
history, and if history, it is then logical to deduce that they are framed by time as well. It
will thus be besides the point to consider any form of postcolonial time past as irrelevant.