white and the black– to refer to the divisive plague of racism in other words– the
overwhelming mediation of all this through the prosecution of a capitalist and imperialist
order cannot be ignored. The permutations constitute the more visible constituents
through which capitalism’s impact is felt on the postcolonial world. They further account
for global inequality, which is reflected for instance in the imbalance in the flight of
resources from Africa and indeed the rest of the postcolonial world to the West. It
therefore stands to reason that in a bid to confront the sub-structural factor of capitalism,
the extent to which these permutations account for global inequality should not be
undermined. On this score, the task at hand compels us to explore for the last time the
dynamics of the binary in order to come to grips with the way the permutations have
compromised the development of some parts of the world to enrich and enhance the
development of others.
Yet in so doing, we must not lose sight of the fact that a view as the above runs into
collision course with the position of Anthony Appiah (2006: xxi), whose self-imposed
mandate is that of discounting such permutations, collapsing the binaries as he goes, in
order to formulate a new cosmopolitan ethos in which the apparent divisive lines will
disappear for a new world order to come astream. However, such a conceptual
formulation as Appiah’s, much as it aspires towards the development of a universal
framework for humanity with a leveling of differences, fails to take into account the
dissections that have been previously created in the historical formation and sustenance
of these binaries. To be more direct in the engagement, Appiah has in the introduction to
his work Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers presented the challenge before
us: “the challenge, then, is to take minds and hearts formed over the long millennia of
living in local troops and equip them with ideas and institutions that will allow us to live
together as the global tribe we have become” (xiii). In response to these binaries, he
however admits of their existence but not without the intention of indicting the
intellectual class: “we’ve been encouraged, not least by well-meaning intellectuals, to
exaggerate their significance by an order of magnitude” (xxi).