Morning yet on Creation Day, insightfully captures the political economy of naming
which colonialism brought to bear on the African continent, when significant
geographical sites got named after monarchs and aristocrats of Britain. Ngugi recently
advances the analysis of this dispossession that came with the arrogance of naming
African spaces by colonists. The colonists and other western self-serving adventure
seekers and explorers simply forgot, or rather discounted the fact that indigenous people
had already named these places long before the so-called feats of exploration and
discovery of these sites by the West. Analyzing the malaise of colonial naming from a
linguistic point, Ngugi says, “Somewhere in the process, the original text and memory of
place is lost or becomes forever buried under that of Europe, for at the end of the process
a European language becomes the only store of knowledge about the place.” Instances of
the relics of colonial naming as painful reminders of the overbearing tendencies of
western migrancy still abound today everywhere the colonial havoc was wrecked from
River Niger to Lake Victoria to Rhodesia.
Again, in some instances where race is not a factor, migrancy becomes beautiful
altogether. For once the ideological undercutting of migrancy is scrutinized, epiphanies
other than the obvious begin to emerge. For certain, it begins to dawn on us that the
frantic efforts to package the abstraction in a way that appears to reprieve exiles from the
tribulations of dislocation to the West is an attempt for the migrant subjects from the
subordinated parts of the world to seek integration into the mainstream of their countries
of destination. At the same time, the condition induces migrants to maintain a certain
predominant measure of ambiguous or adaptable identity which prospectively purports to
offer some hope of acceptance and identity assertion. Their rootlessness thus signals an
assurance of compliance and conformity to host nations of the West and at the same time
provides evidence of absence of threat to these host nations. Whereas the affirmation of
identity was one way by which colonialism thrived in the colonies, the migrancy of
formerly colonized people in the Western metropolitan countries requires a shedding of
such affirmation of identity, ostensibly as a way of getting around the invocation of the
binary of the “self” and “other” in order to live as comfortably as the hosts do.