aFRica

dimensions in Alcoff‘s treatise on the
pitfalls of speaking for the native, the
oppressed, or the gendered subject. What
happens if Africa is the subject that is
spoken for or represented, albeit in the
ideological resistance mode of Afroradicalism
and nativism, by the privileged
African intellectual, especially the writer?
African feminism‘s critique of Négritude‘s
treatment of African woman and African
womanhood provides part of the answer.
We must all remember that Mariama Ba
and her contempories, writers and critics
alike, got tired of Négritude‘s constant
conflation of Mother Africa and the
mothers of Africa. Yet, in the beautiful and
memorable lines such as ―Négresse, ma
chaude rumeur de l‘Afrique‖ and ―Femme
noire, femme nue‖, the Négritude poet
actually believed that he was conferring
agency on his subject.
In his earlier cited essay, Mbembe
approaches this part of the agency
question in a manner which allows me to
offer possible windows into the dilemmas
of representing Africa‘s agency by writers
in my generation. ―Over the past two
centuries,‖ writes Mbembe, ―intellectual
currents have emerged whose goal has
been to confer authority on certain
symbolic elements integrated into the
African collective imaginary.‖
I think my problem as an intellectual arose
that morning in Isanlu when a momentary
cognitive scission occurred and denied me
the ability to ―confer authority‖ on the
intrusion of a symbolic element such as a
blackberry into the imaginary of palmwine
as I used to know it. It was immediately
obvious to me that what was happening
was beyond what could be explained by
the usual recourse to the traditionmodernity
binary, with the attendant
intimations of how Africa negotiates
modernity by gradually appropriating,
domesticating, or integrating it within her
own orders of experience.
From the top of his palm tree, my
palmwine tapper was articulating his own
agency and self-representing in ways that
are miles ahead of the imaginaries which
underwrite my work as a writer and critic.
That, I posit, is the problem of African art in
the current age of social media and MAC,
my acronym for mutually assured
communication. The fact that he phoned
me from the top of a tree in the bush
rattled and unsettled me. What if, God
forbid, my Baba Elemu had also recorded
videos of himself at work and posted it on
youtube as these new possibilities of
agency now afford him? What if he tweets
his conversation with me from the top of
that tree? What if he makes a photo of
himself at work the cover of a Facebook
page dedicated to tapping? What if…
questions, questions, questions.
In a way, I think the writers of Négritude
and cultural nationalism, escaped these
dilemmas not because they shared
coevality – or restored it where it was
denied – with the palm wine tapper but
because they operated as artists in the age
of mechanical reproduction which, as
revolutionary as it was, still allowed the
possibility of a certain ―inert‖ version of
Africa that could be ―rescued‖, ―rerepresented‖,
and ―spoken for‖ in their
texts. My second submission is that this
inert version of Africa, on behalf of whom
Afro-radical and nativist discourses and
praxes were articulated, now speaks for
itself in ways that perpetually confound art
and the imagination. Coping with an Africa
which no longer needs your powers of
metaphorical mediation to articulate novel
forms of agency which have the added
power of immediate global circulation is
one of the most formidable dilemmas
facing the generation of African writers,
artists, and intellectuals to which I belong.
Chris Dunton and I have edited some
special issues of journals in which we
described these new writers, in the case of
Saraba | Issue 13 | Africa 64