implicated in the initial dislocation which the imposition of colonial rule engendered in
the colonies created through western imperialism. Therefore, whether in the colonial era
when various forms of resistance to colonialism were employed by the colonized, or
during the era of a predisposition towards conscious decolonization in the wake of the
Second World War, resistance to colonial experience can as well be summed as a
response to dislocation. For Africa, in fact, the antecedent of such resistance must be
recognized as dating back to the horrendous practices of chattel slavery which the West
in connivance with a few African collaborators inflicted on the continent from the 15th
century.
However, owing to the subtlety with which the practice of colonization was prosecuted,
the tendency, unfortunately, is to view dislocation and the exile that it exhibits as mainly
physical. This explains why Homi Bhabaha is quick to draw attention to the necessity of
recognizing “those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural
differences”, noting further that the idea of a “postcolonial perspective” also presupposes
“a recognition of the more complex and political boundaries that exist on the cusp of
[the] often opposed political spheres” of the formerly colonized people (cited in Kathleen
Flanagan 1998: 89). But as Flanagan contends, the “meeting of nations/cultures in
colonial and postcolonial moments affects social discourse” (89). The complexity that
arises from the location of colonial and postcolonial cultures speaks essentially to the
asymmetry that inheres today in the articulation of self identity. The crisis of self identity
was made poignant by the subtlety of the highly systematized colonial order of cultural
imperialism (Satish Aikant 2000: 338). Little wonder then that the realization of the
extent of the crisis and the need to reverse the damage done to the colonized, or the
formerly colonized, has often produced an articulation of recuperation which former
colonial powers oppose, claiming and arguing that in such antipodal responses of the
formerly colonized lies a suspicious mandate that goes against the grain of progress.
The mention of progress then leads to the “ refraction ” to borrow a word from Flanagan
(1998:89) which the imposition of colonialism has produced in the Third World. For
on the one hand, while the teleology of progress foisted upon the colonial world changed