in its devotion to the “exposing of modernism’s constructedness of knowledge as given”.
Also because what is central to this argument is the dynamics of power relations, the
recognition of Christ as the humble king, especially as found in his own personal
expression, requires validation from the perception the subjects have of him and the
interpretation of his exercise of power. As has been seen in Eliot’s “Journey...’ and
Blake’s The Everlasting Gospel”, the perception of his essence as re-enacted in these
poems may have presented after all a dimension which is in sync with Foucault’s (1994:
341) reflection on power relation as something requiring and capable of having effects on
others and thereby eliciting their reaction. In the end, their view (the subjects’) may be
just the opposite of the view of the figure of power.
Taking one back to colonialism, the true assessment of the effects of this project on the
colonies was the main reason for the eruption, almost cataclysmically, of anti-colonial
nationalism immediately after the Second World War. The “humility and civility” of “the
white man’s burden” came under serious scrutiny and criticism because while it might
have been perceived in the western home countries as the actualization of an altruistic
impulse of civilizing the primitive colonies, the assessment of the colonies that actually
bore the brunt of the action was radically contrary. The memory of the violence and the
depredation of colonialism remain an abiding element in the psyche of the colonies. The
haughty exercise of power which underwrote the dehumanization of the colonies became
inherited by the bourgeois class to which power was relinquished. Since the military elite
also formed part of this elite, it should be understandable why Oguibe’s reflections are
such that they navigate the power relations of the colonial past to show how it informs the
pattern of power relations in the postcolonial context. This is why the present texture of
power relations in the postcolonial encounter can be said, for that matter, to be
coextensive with the traumatic days of colonialism. This also explains why the picture of
the king painted in “The Triumphal Entry” is wide apart from what one finds in the
Synoptic Gospels. But rather, it is more attuned to what one finds in “The Everlasting
Gospel” and in the Millennial Reign as evinced in the Book of Revelations. For this was
what colonialism made of Africa and what it made of the postcolonial leadership,
especially the military: