Untitled - witz cultural

347THE POLITICS OFHYPERTEXTcame about after attendees at a conference in Casablanca, who had heard metalk about the case of Zimbabwean self-representation, asked if I'd put upsome oftheir materials. And so it goes.In the almost two decades since I began working with the cultural and educationaluses ofhypertext, I have not infrequently encountered skepticismabout its value. The way that the World Wide Web permits those in postcolonialcountries to represent themselves, thus partially redressing a majorimbalance in postcolonial studies, strikes me as one undoubted success.Infotech, Empires,and DecolonizationIt is perhaps fitting that hypertert and the Web, late-twentiethcenturyinformation technologies, offer some solutions to postcolonialdilemmas, since much eighteenth- and nineteenthcenturycolonialism depended on the imposition of writingand printing on indigenous oral cultures. According to Mcluhan, of all theclashes ofcivilizations that produce "furious release ofenergy and change,there is none to surpass the meeting of literate and oral cultures." In fact, thearrival of "phonetic literacy is, socially and politically, probably the most radicalexplosion that can occur in any social structure" ([Jnd.erstanding Media,55). Postcolonial fiction, which often describes this "explosion," takes differingapproaches to this change of information regimes.First, novelists like Yvonne Vera and Charles Mongoshi make the collisionof oral and writing cultures a significant part oftheir narratives. In Vera'sNehanda, a novel about the Chimurenga, Zimbabwe's nineteenth-centurywar of independence, the chief argues that his people's oral culture has a lifeand truth missing from "the stranger's own peculiar custom"-writingpaper. Sounding much like Plato's Socrates, the chief tells his listeners because"our people know the power of words,"they desire to have words continuously spoken and kept alive. We do not believe thatwords can become independent ofthe speech that bore them, ofthe humans whocontrolled and gave birth to them. Can words exchanged today on this clearing surroundedby wavin grass become like a child left to be brought up by strangerslWords surrendered to the stranger, like the abandoned child, will become alien-astranger to our tongues.The paper is the stranger's own peculiar custom. Among ourselves, speech is notlike rock. Words cannot be taken from the people who create them. People are thewords. (39-40)Vera makes the additional point that although the Shona do not possessEuropean alphanumeric writing, they do employ multiple systems of writtenon