But whether the commitment of African intellectuals to the mandate of speaking to these
binaries in the perceived “exaggerated” way is worth engaging or not is a matter of
opinion. This is why for now it will be more important to consider how the binaries and
their interrogation have served to illustrate millennia-old practices that have done more to
maintain division and mutual suspicion among various groups and peoples of the world
than they have united them. This also accounts for why the challenge of resisting
capitalist imperialism in the present fashion, especially as it relates to the migration of
postcolonial African resources to the West, requires that we take first and foremost an
inward look at the situation on the ground within the African space. It is only after this
that we can begin to relate to others within the global scheme of things and manage, if not
put in check, the uncritical reception of a universal ethos of humanity which, even at its
best, remains exclusionary. Again, Boehmer’s (10) observation that the postcolonial
world for all the arguments put forward against it with respect to the way it expresses
reservations about universalist ideals of aesthetics, remains, and rightly so, anchored first
and foremost on the primacy of objectifying the (postcolonial) world. On this score,
“there is that within an aesthetic that we might call postcolonial
that draws in the postcolonial world, imbibes its affect, constellates and reconstellates its
meanings through reading of it, our participation in it” (16). Perhaps one work that best
bears out this remark is Serote’s History is the Home Address in which we are reminded
among other things that even where “going away” in the contemporary age has become
imperative, we should not forget that “we can bring nothing else to the global village/but
what we dream and what we bring from home” (22).
If as has been noted, the primacy of the postcolonial world and the mode of
representation it authorizes cannot be compromised at the expense of aesthetic, it is then
possible to contend that the Western imperial structures by which the postcolonial world
is categorized as the Other in the new global order deserves to be dismantled. Achieving
this while remaining relevant in the planetary dynamics must thus be seen as placing a
responsibility of endeavouring to take a look at the steps taken so far and to ask like
Achebe, “where the rain began to beat us” (1975:70). This order of morality is obviously
at variance with the materialist proposition of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri who