from Research in African Literatures Volume 32, Number 4Theory, Literature, and Moral Considerations1
Simon Gikandi
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In 1967, a group of prominent African writers met in Stockholm, Sweden, to discuss the role of the writer in the modern African nation. We were still in the early days of decolonization, and although disenchantment with what was later to be characterized as a compromised postcoloniality was beginning to enter literary texts, writers and intellectuals still believed that their works and words had an innate and functional capacity to intervene in everyday life and to transform the tenor and vehicle of political discourse. The artist had, after all, been an ally of the politician during the nationalist struggle, while becoming a writer had been one of the most important sources of legitimacy for the political class in Africa. For this reason, then, the African writers who were gathered at the historical Stockholm conference did not seem eager to make any distinction between art and politics; they had gathered to take stock of their situation within their respective polities and in relation to the then great dream of Pan-Africanism; they were not there to mourn the possible split between the artist and the political establishment, but to figure the character of the writer's commitment after decolonization. While the theme of the conference as it was recorded in Per Wästberg's The Modern Writer in Africa acknowledged a certain tension between the individuality of African writers and what appeared to be the collective mission of their art, the days when the writer would be pitted against the power of the state with sometime deadly consequences still appeared to be too far in the future. Indeed, when the African literary establishment turned to what might have then appeared to be the abstract question that had crept up at the conference-the "freedom of all men to express themselves without arbitrary restraint"-their condemnation was leveled at "the bans and prohibitions which have been imposed on writers and writings by the racist regimes of southern Africa," not their own governments (119). In those days, when the discourse of African freedom was articulated against the violence engendered by white South Africa, Rhodesia, and the Portuguese empire, there was still a lingering belief that the African artist occupied a special place in the order of things, that in the words of Per Wästberg, "the poet is there to celebrate and not to subvert society" (11).
But there was one powerful exception to this apparent displacement of the problem of terror on the infamous (racist) villains of the period. In his keynote address to the conference, Wole Soyinka, in his usual bold and provocative style, went to the gist of the problems confronting writers who had begun their careers as advocates of nationalism but had quickly found themselves at odds with the new political class. Soyinka was particularly concerned about what he saw as the inevitable tension between the literary concerns of writers and what he called an overwhelming pattern of reality. In the aftermath of decolonization, noted Soyinka, in new societies that had begun "the seductive experiment in authoritarianism," African writers had failed to inscribe their difference from "the mass direction" and had become props in the machinery of the postcolonial state (15). In the process, the writer had lost his or her moral vision-"the special eye and ear, the special knowledge and response" (15-16)-that had accorded art a special place in the politics of decolonization. Amidst the ongoing debate on whether African writers had a different social function or responsibility than their counterparts elsewhere in the world, Soyinka resisted the temptation to assign the African artist a distinctive role in the social order. Instead of insisting on the particularity of the African artist, he went on to connect the artistic vision to a specific narrative of universal freedom. The situation in Africa today, Soyinka argued, was the same as in the rest of the world: "it is not one of the tragedies which come of isolated human failures, but the very collapse of humanity" (16); if African writers seemed to be trapped in a state of failure, he claimed, it was because they had not yet come into a complete awareness of this generalized collapse of humanity and its global implications.
As the self-appointed guardians of the public good, African artists may have seemed to be imprisoned in a disintegrating discourse of nationalism; but the failure of nationalism was itself part of a universal crisis, a crisis that demanded a moral response, or what Soyinka called vision. In order for African writers to discover the essence of their vocation, they needed to be released from their fascination with their the past, or even parochial political concerns, and awaken to the historic and universal nature of their mission: "A historic vision is of necessity universal and any pretence to it must first accept the demand for a total re-examination of the whole phenomenon of humanity" (19). There was no doubt that Soyinka understood the essence of the artistic vocation to be essentially moral and humane. What the African writer lacked was not a commitment to humanity, but an inability to connect this concern to the universality of culture.
In reflecting on the African writer's apparent lack of vision, Soyinka touched on three major points that now demand our urgent consideration from the perspective of postcolonial failure: First, he was concerned that the African writer had abdicated moral responsibility to the politician, and he wondered whether this was not "a contradiction in a society whose great declaration of uniqueness to the outside world is that of a superabundant humanism?" (18). Second, Soyinka was concerned that the hijacking of the moral vision by the politician had forced the writer into a political activism that was, to say the least, debilitating: "Poets have lately taken to gun-running and writers are heard of holding up radio stations. In several independent states the writer is part of some underground movement; one coup at least in Africa is reputed to have involved a novelist and a poet" (18). The failure of politicians to live up to the mandate of decolonization had forced writers into political activism, and this was, for Soyinka, an unfortunate compromise because the wisdom of art-"its unique reflection on experience and events" (15)-could be located neither in superificial concerns nor metaphysical abstractions but in a profound engagement with "the ever-present reality" (16) that transcended the quotidian. In his brief differentiation between superficial cultural concerns and deep reality, Soyinka's operative premise was that if things had worked out as they were supposed to, if decolonization had fulfilled its mandate, then writers would have been left alone to secure the authority of the aesthetic as a mode of cognition outside the domain of a particular set of interests outside the orbit of the banal. Soyinka's third point, indeed one of the central claims in his aesthetic ideology, was that the artistic vision-and the province of art itself-was essentially moral and universal. Although he was referring to himself when he talked about writers holding up radio stations, Soyinka conceived the writer's resort to active politics as a necessary evil because, ultimately, the artist should not be engaged with the exigencies of everyday life but the totality of the human heritage.
For several years now a certain productive split in Soyinka's aesthetic ideology has intrigued me. In regard to politics, he is one of the most activist of African writers; he had been deeply involved in some of the most deadly events in Nigeria and Africa and the world, and he has suffered terribly from his activism. And yet, Soyinka has never presented his art as part of this activism; indeed he has often tried to separate his commitment to political causes from what he considers to be his artistic vocation; indeed the powerful political questions that animate his critical essays enter his art only indirectly. His essays contain some of the most powerful critiques of political, social, and cultural practices; but when they enter his major plays, these topics are allegorized or abstracted, transplanted from their everyday referents in order to perform a larger, universal, and, I would add, moral role, in the drama of human freedom, a drama whose primary goal is the rethinking of what it means to be an African in the modern world. I want to reopen this problem-the tension between the necessity for political action and the imperative for a moral narrative of human freedom-for two reasons. First, questions of moral consideration have been at the center of most of the new fiction coming out of Africa, a fiction that is often unnoticed in the West because it is published locally and rarely wins big prizes. In the works of writers such as Yvonne Viera, Festus Iyayi, Mandla Langa, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Nurrudin Farah, to cite just a few examples, a concern with political commitment is often mitigated by a desire to map out moral economies, which can be applied to a landscape that is often defined by what has come to be known as Afro-pessimism. Surprising-and this is my second point-the institutions of interpretation that now operate under the orbit of poststructural or postcolonial theory have proven incapable, or ill-prepared, for the conjunction between a particular politics and morality, some very powerful and hence unpalatable essentialist categories, in the making and unmaking of African worlds. This is one of the many reasons Africa has been absent in the dominant varieties of poststructural theory, especially postcolonial theory.
We should not, of course, attribute the absence of Africa from postructural or postcolonial theories to any bad faith on the part of the critics associated with these modes of reading and interpretation. We should, rather, focus on the lessons to be learnt from Africa's absence from the theoretical configurations of our time. At the bottom of this problem, I believe, is that the moment of theory, which enabled many of us to develop important critiques of Eurocentrism and its veneer of humanity, also excluded a serious engagement with the human values, which Soyinka was concerned with at Stockholm in 1967. If now, more than even before, an African tradition of letters is concerned with securing the humanity of the African, whose body and soul are now threatened by catastrophes unprecedented in the history of the continent, the narrative of human beings, rather than subjects, which recent African writing has foregrounded, seems at odds with some of the major claims of poststructural theory.
But my invocation of moral considerations is not simply a response to the African crisis. It also emerges from a set of questions and issues revolving around the difficult relation between the work of art and the politics of everyday life and the problem of reading structures of difference in places where they are inscribed and reinscribed without any serious questioning of their genealogies. Working within contexts in which the virtue of difference is assumed and is indeed encouraged, students of Africa in the modern world often find it difficult to make the simple point that the figuration of the continent as the site of difference is itself one of the most powerful inventions of European modernity. In exploring how Africa enters the discourse of modernity and its imagination, one is startled by the discovery that it is not unusual for the institutions of knowledge to value a peoples culture and art and to denigrate-or be indifferent-to their selves and bodies. In the 1930s, Evans Pritchard could write a lyrical narrative of the religion and social organization of the Nuer of the Southern Sudan unperturbed by the large-scale military operations that the colonial authorities had unleashed on the region. At the beginning of modernism, advocates of primitivism could celebrate the arts of Central Africa unbothered by the violent politics of colonialism in the region, from forced labor in King Leopold's kingdom in the Congo to the German ethnic cleansing of the Herero. How and why was it possible to celebrate a people's art and culture and be indifferent to their survival as human beings? One would have thought that since the philosophy of postmodernism was predicated on a certain valorization of difference that these questions would be at the center of its economy of debate. But as I have already intimated, postmodernist theory has not shown much interest in Africa.
There is, however, another dimension to this question. Like many other teachers and scholars of "other" literatures, I have been surprised by the unsettling way the "morality tale" in the African text can disturb and disorientate readers separated by time and cultural space from these texts. At one point in my career, I gave up teaching some crucial African texts because I could not provide satisfactory explanations for the moral predicament embedded in them or the questions these dilemmas provoked. I considered Things Fall Apart to be a foundational text in African literary history, taking up questions of colonialism and nationalism in unprecedented ways, and opening vistas to discourses about self and community, art, and gender. And yet, quite often, my students and interlocutors tended to be fixated on particular scenes, what I call the morality tales, which they considered central to the overall meaning of the texts than my experience and training could sanction. These scenes are, of course, familiar to most readers of the African text: Okonkwo's beating of his wife during the holy week (why do Africans beat their wives?) or the killing of Ikemefuna (why are these people so cruel?).
For a generation schooled in relativism and the virtue of difference, the questions in parenthesis were rarely raised directly, but they were never far beneath the surface. As a teacher and scholar trained as well in similar notions of relativism and difference, my response to these questions was to call attention to the multiplicity-and differance-of these texts and thus seek counterexamples that might displace the moral predicament. I would try to argue, for example, that Okonkwo was not, of course, a representative African; that there were many signs in the book that he was a unique, even alienated individual in the bourgeois sense of the term; that his activities were countered by crucial actors on the fringe of the narrative; that there were minor figures in the novel, such as father and Obierika, who represented two forces the aesthetic and morality that undermined the heroic ideal at the center of the novel. In addition, I would suggest, the killing of Ikemefuna was important not because of what it told us about African or Igbo society, but about Okonkwo's own anxieties about his power and position in the polity. As a footnote, I would add that the killing of Ikemefuna was fashioned after one of the most important narratives of sacrifice in the biblical tradition''Abraham's aborted sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22.
In order to provide a thick description for these economies of meaning as specific artistic responses to an imagined cultural situation, rather than an ethnography of the Igbo, I would dutifully teach Emecheta's Joys of Motherhood as a counterpoint to the masculine discourse of early nationalist literature. But here, again, I would find myself having to deal with another equally complicated moral dilemma-the killing of the slave girl. Faced with the inevitable question-why did Africans hold slaves and why did they treat them with such unimaginable cruelty?-I would try very hard to make the case that the killing of the slave in Emecheta's novel constituted an important intertextual relation to Achebe's novel: it raised the question of the fate of the girl who had been ransomed with Ikemefuna in Things Fall Apart and was thus an important indicator of how African women writers wanted to retell the narratives of African identity by rescuing the lives of women from the margins of nationalist discourse. In these pedagogical gestures, I was invoking the authority of difference to question the assumed unanimity of African cultures and the typology of its literature. And yet, what was surprising to me-and the source of tremendous angst-was the realization that this invocation of difference raised an even more complicated set of questions: why were my students, who were some of the most astute products of the poststructural moment, unable to translate theories of difference and diversity, or even the logic of anti-essentialism, to the African text itself? And why did my own invocation of difference and diversity, and the power of écriture, fail to break through the powerful representation of Africa in the colonial library? Rather than providing me with a rescue plan that would get me out of the trap of essentialism, theories of good difference (read diversity) seemed to enforce the logic of African alterity.
Nowhere was this logic more enshrined than in the politics of time and referentiality in the African text. How could one respond to the intractable problem, which I believe most scholars of "other" literatures face everyday, that the cultural signs and experiences represented in a Euro-American text, let us say Melville's Moby Dick, are read not as commentaries on Puritanism or whaling as a contemporary American practice, but an event distanced from us in time and space? No one reads Captain Ahab as the representative American man.Yet the protocols of reading seemed to change when we turned to the African text, which, though clearly set in the past, in a specific time and place, was often read as a commentary or allegory of an unchanging and communal world. The same problem arose with the morality tales mentioned above, where neither the invocation of difference nor universalism was very successful in dislodging the image of an Africa fixed in time and space. And so, every time I taught Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman I was forced into a certain defensiveness about the role of human sacrifice in tragedy, a position that never seemed to arise when I taught more canonical representations of sacrifice, patricide, or matricide, such as Medea or Agamemnon. Since the West had invented itself by claiming Greece for its own, why wasn't the discourse on Europe haunted by the questions that seemed to make Africans and Africanists so defensive of their cultural texts?
And why weren't these texts read just as texts? What these questions and problems seemed to imply was that when it came to questions of universalism (and all theories, even theories of difference, derive their authority from a certain claim to universality) either a different standard was being used for Africa, or that the notion of African difference was so deeply enshrined in the institutions of Western knowledge that it was difficult to dislodge. I began to suspect that the structure of alterity was so embedded in the imagination of Africa in the West tradition, that theories of difference were part of the problem rather than the solution. In the rest of this essay, I offer some reflections on theory and the dilemma of difference as just one tiny stone cast at the edifice of Eurocentrism. I will go about my argument in a round about way, but my basic premise is that poststructuralist theory-and its postcolonial variety, which initially held up the promise of deconstructing Eurocentrism, have actually reinscribed and reinforced it in both overt and surreptitious ways.
In 1990, Christopher Miller published Theories of Africans, a book that will be remembered as much for its meticulous exploration of the relationship between literary theory, ethnography, and literacy as what appears to be an incendiary claim: that there was an inherent connection between ethics and ethnicity, abstract ideas and violent political practices. In the third chapter of his book, aptly called "Ethics and Ethnicity," Miller initiated a provocative discourse, which was simultaneously a commentary on the role theory plays in the mapping of ethical positions in the contested politics of postcolonial governmentality and what appeared at the time to be an injudicious critique of the foundational narrative of decolonization in Africa. Miller's target was Frantz Fanon, undoubtedly one of the major theoreticians of the narrative of decolonization and a canonical figure in cultural studies and postcolonial theory: to what extent was Fanon responsible for the political deployment of his theory, especially his dialectic of violence, in the emergence and consolidation of the political dictatorship in Guinea? In general, to what extent were abstract theories on art and national culture implicated in the violent practices of everyday life in the postcolony?
Like a good product of the theoretical revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, Miller began his careful examination of the relation between ethics and ethnicity by insisting on the nature of difference as a theoretical imperative. He took the axiomatic (poststructuralist) position that difference was the condition of possibility of theory and that it was through differentiation, rather than analogical relationships, that we could deconstruct the way discourse functions in systems of domination. The inaugural question in the debate on ethnicity and ethics was whether difference was the condition of possibility of identity or its prisonhouse. Concerned with the need to foreground an almost immanent relationship between ethnicity and ethics, terms conjoined by the figure of Ethos, Miller's operative premise was that "the ignorance of difference is unethical" (31). But in making this claim, he was already caught in what the legal theorist Martha Minow has aptly called "the dilemma of difference": "when does treating people differently emphasize their differences and stigmatize or hinder them on that basis? and when does treating people the same become insensitive to their difference and likely to stigmatize or hinder them on that basis?" (20).
Miller was, of course, writing about a political and intellectual context in which francophone African intellectuals were reacting against how difference had been adopted by the postcolonial state as part of its official ideology and had been turned into an instrument of domination. This was as much the case in regard to the discourse of Negritude in Senegal as it was with the ideology of state socialism in Guinea. The terms that defined these discourses were perhaps antithetical, but they had the same theoretical ambition: as is well known, Negritude, as the official discourse of Senegal under Senghor, involved the translation of extroverted European theories on the African into introverted theories of African identity. Senghor's major achievement was his ability to convince certain influential circles within the African intelligentsia that economies of representation borrowed from European discourse on the African were actually rooted in an African ontology. And while this masking of European discourse with African figures has now come to be dismissed as a form of mystification by critiques of ethnophilosophy such as Paulin Hountondji, this mythologizing was a major source of legitimation for Senghor and other conservative leaders of his generation (33-46). Similarly, despite his invocation of science, Marx, and Lenin, Sekou Toure's claim to legitimacy depended on the mythical connection he sought to establish between himself and the legendary Samori Toure. In both conservative and radical regimes, then, the political leadership cult was performed through the invocation of a mythical past, which was, at the same time, the African mask for Eurocentric ideas.
In these circumstances, Miller's interrogation of the meaning of difference in the culture of decolonization, and his focus on the relationship between abstract ideas and violent political practices, were crucial in any mapping of an ethics of culture, as was his impressive exploration of the "tensions between a transcendent, totalized, ethical truth on the one hand, and on the other, political and literary practice in black Africa, which tends to be very close to ethnic issues" (51). But Miller's privileging of ethnicity, which has to be considered, in an African context, as the radical sign of difference, raised difficult questions about the nature of ethics in general: what exactly was the moral or ethical imperative that the ethnic other, the subject of difference, was asked to bear in this constellation? What made difference (in this case ethnic difference) a categorical or moral imperative and thus the central term in the mediation of truth, political practices, and literary production? These questions are difficult but inevitable if we are to clear a space for reflecting, as I do later in this essay, on the violence that ensures when ideas of difference collide with the bodies of others. At what point do both theories of difference and identity become folded on themselves to threaten the selves whose integrity they were supposed to secure?
This is the kind of problem that Miller had in mind when he turned his attention to Fanon's theory of violence and its political consequences. The locus here was the famous chapter "Concerning Violence" in Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. In his powerful adumbration of the moral geography of colonialism, Fanon's initial interest had been both descriptive and conceptual: he wanted to understand the Manichean allegory that defined spatial and social relationships in the colonial city; the dialectic of violence that mediated the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized; and the more troublesome association of a regimen of truth with the violent breakup of the colonial order. Fanon's categorical claim was that in a colonial context in which there was no immanent "truthful behavior," truth was "the property of the nationalist cause": "Truth is that which hurries on the break-up of the colonialist regime; it is that which promotes the emergence of the nation; it is all that protects the natives, and ruins the foreigner" (50).
The crux of the problem here-the moral dilemma, as it were-was not so much Fanon's assumption that a decolonized regimen of truth could only be established through the violent overthrow of the colonial order; rather, Miller's concern was the "consequence and the future of Fanon's discourse of violent tantalization": "If the concept of truth is subordinated to the immediate political situation, then the analysis of that situation is all the more crucial; questions must be asked. Who decides what favors the emergence, and for that matter, who has decided what kind of 'nation' shall emerge?" (51). Did Fanon's apparent occlusion of a normative truth foreclose moral judgments in the narrative of decolonization? Could a truth defined as the property of the nation transcend the modulation of power in the postcolony?
There were two key linkages between truth and violence in Fanon's discourse: one could be found in the connection he made between culture (or the aesthetic) and the narrative of liberation. Fanon had, after all, made the influential claim that culture, more specifically narrative, was the instrument through which the truth of the nation could be realized. The other linkage took the form of two postcolonial subjects or figures eternally conjoined in Fanon's discourse on culture-the poet and dancer Keita Fodeba and the nationalist politician Ahmed Sekou Toure. As Miller was quick to note, Fanon had opened his chapter "On National Culture" with a epigraph reciting Toure's claim that the grand narrative of nationalism overdetermined the identity and function of the postcolonial artist. At the same time, however, Fanon had singled out Keita as the exemplar of a poet who had reinterpreted "all the rhythmic images of his country from a revolutionary standpoint" (227). In Fanon's narrative of decolonization, Sekou Toure was the political actor who would recreate the national body, the new vehicle for the practice of truth; the poet, Keita, would be the figure that would presence the truth that only art could embody. The circularity involved in this yoking of art and the national narrative was an intriguing one: the nationalist would construct the Lebenswelt in which the nation's longing for form could be realized; the artist could produce the aesthetic objects that would, in turn, reinterpret the rhythmic images that accorded the new nation its founding mythology.
Fanon's essay on national culture was predicated on the unification of art and politics on the stage that nationalism had made possible. But this, of course, is not how things worked out in the end because although the ambition of the aesthetic in the modern world, or rather since Kant, has been to produce a mode of cognition autonomous of the world of lived experience, the truth embodied by art is often powerless when confronted by the practice of power. In postcolonial Guinea, for example, the poet Keita and the nationalist Toure came to play out a now familiar drama of postcolonial violence: wielding the discourse of power and violence, the politician would have the poet arrested and executed for imagined conspiracies against the postcolonial state. With Keita's execution, it became hard for nationalist intellectuals to argue that the work of art had any of the power assigned to it by modern culture.
But something more than power was at stake in this confrontation of the aesthetic and the politics of everyday life. This was the question of moral judgment and ethical responsibility. Miller presents this problem clearly: "Does the fact that Sekou Toure wrapped himself in Marxist and Fanonist discourse make Fanon responsible for the reign of terror in Guinea? The question is reminiscent of debates on the relation of Nietzsche to Nazism: to what extent is an author responsible for readings and misreadings of his or her texts?" (62). Miller's questions were answered quite judiciously by V. Y. Mudimbe, who, in a careful review of Theories of Africans in Transition, asserted that to associate Fanon's theories of violence with Toure's "political madness" would open a theoretical can of worms:
The question is important: if we allow that Fanon is culpably implicated by the putative (and really quite mystifying) relation between his work and Sekou Toure practice, then where should one stop in shifting responsibilities and indicting people? Whom to condemn-Aristotle, or his European disciples who concocted, in his name, elaborate theories justifying the slave trade? Whom to charge-Saint Paul and Thomas Aquinas on the one hand, or, on the other, Christian churches' centurieslong anti-women ideologies and practices? Whom to vilify, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural anthropologists who invented African tribes and models, or, on the other hand, their African disciples who exploited these contrivances for their criminal policies of "authenticity"? (66)
The issue raised here-the intellectual's culpability in evil-is not new, and Fanon's example is perhaps not a particularly good one for exploring the relation between good theory and bad practice because he never sought to dissociate his ideas from political action; indeed, for Fanon it was in the sphere of political action that abstract theories were asked to justify themselves and their authority; but this did not imply that he would be the handmaiden of the madness of the political actors who had chosen to invoke his ideas. Nevertheless, the larger claim that once Fanon's abstract ideas had been put into practice they would inevitably turn against the ideals he professed has important implications for theory in general and the moral economy of intellectual work. While it might be expedient to insulate intellectuals from the actions of their disciples, I am not entirely convinced by Mudimbe's suggestion that Aristotle and St. Paul should entirely be absorbed from the practice of their theories. The issue for me is not so much one of blame and responsibility; rather the question I would like to explore here is the extent to which ideas or theories-because they are abstract-are susceptible to madness, or even appeal to mad actors in political dramas precisely because of this abstractness. At the heart of this debate lies a simple, but intractable question: what is the connection between great ideas and evil?
In order to engage with the relationship between ideas and evil, a question that has preoccupied both proponents and opponents of modernity for a while now, it is useful to reiterate three points that are central to the theoretical enterprise as it has been sketched out in the modern period.The first point is nested in the enabling condition of modernity itself, or rather its desire to institute its authority through the elision of difference, which it confined to invented margins or zones of irrationality. Because of this elision, postmodern theory, reacting against modernity, was predicated on a valorization and celebration of difference: it was only within theories of difference that a critique of humanism and its omissions could be undertaken. The second point, however, concerns the unique position of Africa in the discourse of modern identity, for in regard to the African, the claim that "modern criticism conspires to elide alterity-the Other as such-and to erase, with this elision, the very object of criticism [. . .] from history" (Dougherty 11) needs to be questioned. For rather than eliding African or black difference from its economy of debate, modernity-and hence modern criticism-have tended to foreground the continent's character and location as the site of radical alterity. Modern criticism may have sought to suppress difference within its imagined Europe, but it anchored itself on the presence of the Other. While modernity was premised on its invocation of universal reason, this rationality was structured by counterpoints located elsewhere.
The third point is that one of the basic principles that has undergirded theoretical or intellectual work-what Arendt called the "activity of thinking" (8)-is the belief that good ideas condition human beings against evildoing, that knowledge and good conscience go hand in hand. If stupidity is, in Kantian terms, caused by a wicked heart, it is assumed that knowledge leads to a good conscience; in this sense, ideas, theory, philosophy, what Arendt calls "the exercise of reason as the faculty of thought," is the only instrument we have to "prevent evil" (13). It was because she had been a witness to the tragic consequences of modernity, that time when knowledge seemed to be incapable of "interrupting all ordinary activities no matter what they happen to be" (13) that Arendt insisted on pushing the Kantian distinction between thinking and knowing to its logical conclusion; the best kind of thinking, she concluded, was not concerned with "a final code of conduct"; its goal was not the arbitration of good and evil; serious thinking was "resultless by nature" (16).
The problem with the Arendtian project, however, is that theory, especially literary theory, has come to blur the distinction between thinking and knowing by dismissing them as part of the totalizing systems we are asked to call into question in order to be postmodern subjects. Because we find it difficult to reconstruct the idea of critique in the absence of the normative values that enabled it in modernity, theory has tended to become the symptom of bad conscience, the handmaiden of what Arendt would call "ready-to-hand-principles" removed from the faculty of judgment. In the circumstances, theory-especially the theory of difference-seems to have become a banister that provides easy resolutions to difficult questions and even forecloses the experience of difference itself (see Vala 192). Thus, while there is a widespread feeling in the American Academy that the rise of theory has led to the politicization of the humanities, theory appears, on closer examination, to be a symptom of the failure of the human disciplines to intervene in the politics of everyday life. It is indeed telling that in a world dominated by stories of terror and genocide, stories that defy interpretation, intellectuals, having renounced meanings, rules, and moral judgments, have not proven to be of much practical use. For a generation conditioned to believe that difference is the essence of identity, how does one make the point that this difference is also the source of some of the most ghastly events of our time?
One may counter this rather moralistic discussion by saying that it is not the business of ideas to interfere in the affairs of the world. In this case we don't have a place in which "theory as such might be concretely convicted of the anachronisms it is suspected of, now as before" (Adorno 3). The problem with this postulation, however, is that when literary scholars took up the question of theory, they claimed, much to the chagrin of philosophers and social scientists, that they were better placed to rethink the political, or to provide a critique of power structures not bound by traditional methods, rules of consistency, and rationality. The tremendous influence of literature departments in the contemporary academy has depended as much on their traditional claim to be defenders of the national culture as their claim to have a better (theoretical) grip on a life (defined by difference) than the other disciplines. If theorizing justifies itself by its capacity to come to grips with experiences in an analytical, critical, or descriptive manner (each claim depends on the school of thought involved), then literary theory cannot escape the challenge presented to it by ghastly modern events such as slavery and genocide. This challenge, has been posed most vividly by René Lemarchand, a scholar of genocide in Rwanda and Burundi: "To move beyond the realm of conventional historical description is essential if we are to grasp properly the moral rupture involved in genocide" (5). The hermeneutic problems these horror stories demand-"How should we think about such events? What should we do about them?" (Shute 3)-need to be placed at the center of the theoretical enterprise.
But why should we expect this kind of deep hermeneutics from theory, especially the theory of difference? For one, because the atrocities that define our times have been committed in the name of one theoretical enterprise or another and have been pegged to some ideology of difference; as Zygmunt Bauman has argued, it is through theory that elementary modes of racist behavior are transformed into dominant forms of antisemiticism or racism (79-80). Also, since difference has become the conduit through which postmodern theory seeks, in Gillian Rose's words, to "redress for the false claim of reason to universality and disinterestedness" (5), theorists might be better suited to the kind of self-reflective gesture that such events demand. A useful starting point, in this regard, is one I have already suggested in my previous discussion: a recognition that theory is not anterior to such stories of horror but connected to them in complicated ways. Theory is, of course, not responsible for horror and terror, nor can it be equated with them; but in order to grasp the moral ruptures involved in the events we have come to call evil, it is perhaps imperative for us to engage with the theories that underpin, but rarely undermine, the practice of evil. Has there been a horror or terror without its favorite philosopher, its favorite theory? It is perhaps easy to take the common tact and argue that theories are misused by the practitioners of evil, but we still we need to consider the possibility that there is something that makes abstract ideas attractive to the technicians of power. In Africa, there were, of course, leaders who were philosophers and intellectuals before they became politicians; there were many who had scholarly ambitions before the call of politics; but more often than not, even half-literate tyrants wanted to be recognized as philosopher kings with their own theories on subjects ranging from authenticity (Mobutu) to military science (Idi Amin). While I will not claim that theory has an immanent relation to evil, I want to explore the possible embedment of the abstract idea in the performativity of such evil events as slavery and genocide.
Let me take up take up one remarkable instance of the embeddedness I have in mind here. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the English explorer John Huntington Speke, traveling in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa, was struck by a social enigma that did not seem to fit neatly into European theories of identity or difference. He noticed, as did other nineteenth-century European travelers to this region, that the society was organized into three distinct social classes-the Hutu, the Tutsi, and the Twa-but this preponderant social differentiation could not be explained by rules of language, ethnicity, or caste. All these groups spoke the same language and often intermarried. How, then, could we explain or rationalize their claim to difference? When he came to write about his experiences in his Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile in 1863, Speke developed what he called his "theory of conquest of inferior by superior races": from his observations in the interlacustrine region of Central Africa, he deduced that the ruling classes-the Tutsi or the Bahima-had been the bearers of a superior civilization that had invaded the great lakes of Central Africa and developed the monarchical and other state institutions he had observed in the area.
Soon after, other travels took up this theory of a superior invading race, and aided by the racial science that was dominant in the nineteenth century, they developed an elaborate narrative that was to become the basis of German and Belgian colonial policy in Rwanda and Burundi. The superior race was described as essentially Caucasian in its features, with a lighter color than the lower classes, and what were described as "beautiful Greek profiles side by side with Semitic and even Jewish features" (qtd. in Prunier 7). And thus the narrative of the Caucasoid Tutsi or Bahima entered the colonial library as a derivative of the mythology of racist thinking in the late nineteenth century. The Tutsi and the Bahima, who had no prior knowledge of European economies of race, were dutifully informed that their ancestors had came from a place called Egypt and that what made them superior to their Hutu and Twa neighbors was their Semitic origin. Indeed, the Tutsi came be accorded some of the most dominant Semitic stereotypes as a mark of their difference: "Their intelligence and delicate appearance, their love of money, their capacity to adapt to any situation seem to indicate a Semitic-origin," noted one commentator (qtd. in Prunier 8). That such outlandish theories of origin and difference came to be the basis of colonial policy is not surprising: having been invented as prototypes to fit a certain racial type, the Tutsi were accorded special privileges, such as greater access to education and jobs, in the culture of colonialism; marked for greatness in the culture of colonialism, they were also marked for death in postcoloniality.
But my concern here is not how rumors of difference became institutionalized as governmental policies, nor how Speke's theory of a Caucasian race in the middle of Africa seemed to fit into mid-Victorian racial categories. I am trying to understand how theories, even the most bizarre theories, come to acquire institutional respectability, and how intellectuals and their disciplines are crucial in the transformation of bizarre conjunctures into high theory. In the case of Rwanda and Burundi, the key link between Speke's low theory and the high theories of the German and Belgian academies seems to have been the science of linguistics, more precisely the work of Carl Meinhof, one of the most distinguished linguists of his generation. But in order to understand Meinhoff's role in this process, we need to underscore two points. First, that for Meinhoff and other linguistics in the colonial sphere, the science of language derived its authority from its claim to be a purely theoretical enterprise, that is, its amazing ability to formalize itself as a practice not bound by specific referents. And second, that linguistics was crucial in the invention of racial categories in colonial Africa.
In regard to the first point, Meinhof had argued in his An Introduction to the Study of African Languages, first published in 1915, that the study of primitive languages, when conducted according to what he called "sound theoretical knowledge" could bring us face to face with the phenomenon of primitive cultures in its simplest forms; it was in the scientific examination of African languages that we could undertake a comparative study of culture in its "pure and unaltered form-not disfigured by foreign importations" (8). Language was thus posited as the custodian of African difference; it was in the study of grammar and phonology that the distinctive identity of each group could be established; the scientific study of language would yield racial categories that would in turn be written into the cultural history that was to dominate the study of Africa in the colonial period. Once the uniqueness of each African language had been established, different cultures could be classified and be adduced with distinctive characteristics.
Meinhof's contribution to the latter task was undertaken in his most influential work, Die Sprachen der Hamiten (1912). Working primarily through resemblance of verbal conjugation, initial consonant alterations in nouns, and gender classes in nouns, Meinhof isolated a group of African languages that he defined as essentially Hamitic. But he didn't stop at simple classification: he went on to establish an a priori cultural correlation between the Hamitic languages and the racial characteristics of the people he called Hamites. The most important of these characteristics was the claim that Hamitic speakers belonged to a racial type that was primarily Caucasian and that this race, unlike their Negro neighbors who were sedentary agriculturalists, had an inherent inclination towards cattle herding and military conquest (see Greenberg 30). This is how the cultural history of Africa came to be read as the movement of conquering Hamites establishing their civilizational authority and pastoral habits over an inferior agricultural people: "Apparently in the course of history it has repeatedly happened that the Hamitic peoples have subjugated as a ruling people [Herrenvolk] dark pigmented Negroes who spoke languages different from that of the Hamites," concluded Meinhoff (qtd. in Greenberg 50).
Now, as Joseph Greenberg was to show in his important revisionist work, The Languages of Africa (1966), Meinhof's linguistic and philological project on the "Hermites" was based on erroneous data and analysis. But this kind of error appears minimal when we consider how the linguistic terms he created came to stand in for racial characteristics that, in turn, were to overdetermine colonial and postcolonial events. Indeed, Meinhof's linguistic project established the framework for C. G. Seligman's book, The Races of Africa (1930), a work that was indispensable in colonial anthropology and governance. And thus the musings of a troubled English explorer would be formalized in the writings of a German philologist, which would in turn frame the work of a distinguished English anthropologist, and through him a generation of colonial administrators and native informants. Worse still, the theory of difference that Speke had developed almost casually in his travel narrative would come to be accepted by both Tutsis and Hutus as the basis of their identity, and in predictable and deadly waves, in 1959, 1972, and 1994, these communities would launch ghastly genocides against one another in the perverse dance which the science and theory of difference had made possible. In this negative example, we can at least have a glimpse of the role theory plays in what Charles Taylor calls "the theology of ordinary life" (233).
But what makes ordinary life theological? What accords the quotidian such a monumental power that the simple prejudices of the Hutu and the Tutsi can be transformed into justifications and explanations for mass slaughter? In his discussion of the road leading from heterophobia "to sophisticated anti-Semitic theories of universal ambition," Bauman has presented what appears to me to be the best explanation for the transfer of ordinary prejudices into monumental theories of difference: his claim is that simple anxieties about boundaries, social contamination, and difference in general need sophisticated system building and theoretical formulation in order to become explanations and justifications for evil (80).
The dilemma inherent in theories of difference, especially in regard to Africa, is even more complicated: on one hand, a sophisticated theoretical apparatus was developed within Eurocentricism to invent Africa as the site of radical difference; on the other hand, it is through the theories of dissimilarity associated with poststructuralist thinkers such as Jacques Derrida that we have come to recognize difference as a constitutive element of theories of identity and domination. One of the reasons difference has been so attractive to advocates of multiculturalism is because it appears to go to the very heart of Eurocentricism and its foundationalism; by valorizing difference, multiculturalists fall back on the powerful claim that it was precisely through the negation of difference that the great evils of our time were committed. In this regard, argues Todd May, the rejection of difference, which occurred in "the name of an identity, a sameness" demanded that those who did not conform to the norm be evacuated from the site of identity (4-5).
What compounds this argument, however, is the fact that in order to determine who fitted and who didn't (and thus to set the terms of identity), systems of domination needed a theory of difference, a universal theory that would mark its victims as a threat to distinctiveness and sameness. Considered to be the greatest threat to cultural authenticity and racial purity, difference was simultaneously the justification and explanation for the evil actions directed at those who did not fit. As I have already argued, it is impossible to think about instances of evil, all the way from African slavery to the Jewish genocide, were not underwritten by a theoretical apparatus.
In the African setting that has been shadowing my essay, the Tutsi elite needed, during the massacre of 1992, to accept the European theory of Semitic superiority in order to evacuate the Hutu from the scene of identity; conversely, in order to institute Hutu hegemony, the Interharamwe, the agents of the 1994 slaughter, needed to turn the theory of Semitic superiority upside down, reverse it into the antisemitism that made the Tutsi the source of social contagion. The important point in all these horrendous scenarios, then, is that they could not have taken place without a theoretical foundation. Some measure of heterophobia might have defined ordinary relations between Hutu and Tutsi, but the social boundaries between these groups were also quite fluid. Genocide could not be carried out in the name of local prejudices built on such mundane things as one's height or shape of nose; a larger explanation was needed, and this had to be theoretical in character. In other words, a justification and explanation needs to be total and universal in order to accomplish its theoretical ambition.
Faced with scenes of crisis such as the Rwanda genocide, the African intellectual has no choice but to confront two urgent questions. The first question regards the efficacy of Western theory and its translation to other sites of analysis: theories of difference, for example, appear to be attractive instruments of deconstructing the edifice of Eurocentrism, its foundationalism and claim to a unified identity; but in Africa, theories of difference are relentless used to marginalize social groups because of their ethnicity, region, or sexual orientation (just as they do in the West!). Even in the age of globalization, difference is invoked in every major conflict on the continent, from the Western Sahara, to the Tuareg regions of Mali and Niger, to Casamance, to the Northern Cape. In almost every region of the continent, year after year, countless Africans are denied political rights because of their parentage or ancestry.2
The second problem calls attention to a certain disjuncture between the places of theory and practice: this is the simple fact that theories that appear imperative and liberating in one situation have no agency, or are quite dangerous, in another. It is, perhaps, in the interest of minorities in North America or Europe to use the valorization of difference in Western thinking to create new spaces of self-representation; undermining the foundations of Englishness, Frenchness, or Americanness can hence be considered a pre-condition for diversity. By the same token, however, if we are going to use theory to respond to the African crisis, a crisis whose most important symptom is the collapse of institutions, the violation of bodies, and the absence of an ethics around which social practices might be organized, then it is perhaps imperative for us to rethink the usefulness of theories and categories that have fallen out of favor elsewhere, such essentialist categories as community, being, and morality.3
NOTES
1. This is a slightly revised version of a keynote address given at the 26th Annual African Literature Association Meeting, Lawrence, Kansas, 13 April 2000. Previous versions were presented at the University of Michigan and Wisconsin.
2. A recent tactic in African politics regards the rewriting of laws of citizenship to exclude political opponents from the democratic process. Thus Alassane Quattara could not be Ivorian because one of his parents was born in Burkina Faso; at one point Kenneth Kaunda, the founding father of the Zambian nation, was excluded from the political process in his own country because his parents had been born in Malawi.
3. This essay is written in memory of my sister, Grace Wangare Gakure (1962-2000), and my friend, John Mugo (1957-2000).
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