no 14 - June 2000.
https://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP1400rsp.html
© Rajeev S. Patke
Rajeev S. Patke
National University of Singapore
I understand Professor Kom's position as addressing a situation that is in part specific to Africa and in part endemic to all the ex-colonial nations. As far as Africa is concerned, post-colonial nationhood seems largely to have failed to deliver on the promise that had subsidized nationalist struggles for independence. This failure can be described in terms of rule by corrupt mismanagement, administration by colonized mindsets, and economic policy by submission to global or neo-colonial exploitation. We could think of these features as symptoms or effects whose cause is to be identified if remedies are to be proposed. I am more in sympathy with Professor Kom's description of the failure than with some of his emphases. Colonialism dissembled many European norms as universals. But I don't think it is fruitful to think of scientific and technological progress (and of the need for such progress as bridging the gap created by the asymmetrical development of the world's nations ever since the industrial revolution) purely in terms of this suspicion. The failure of post-colonial nationhood might well be the failure of colonialism to export or promote the European dream of rational Enlightenment to Europe's colonies. But it is also the failure of the new nations of Africa (and to a certain extent Asia) to match what Alfred Crosby, in Ecological Imperialism, described as Europe's centrifugal drive and to catch up with Europe's relative maturity of social and political institutions, its pragmatic techniques of management, and modernizing of empowering technologies. Walter Benjamin remarked in the 1930s, that if justice is the criterion of ends, legality is the criterion of means. In this perspective, colonialism neither had, nor needed legitimation. The causal dynamics of Europe's systematic and sustained exploitation of its colonies may be described as a mutual feedback-loop between power (those who could do the colonizing) and asymmetry (those who ended up being colonized). Asymmtery was maintained by power, the power grew out of asymmetry. Nothing legitimated colonialism except the fact that it could be done. In this context, the urge to equate material and technological mastery of nature with the betterment of human life at the level of community or nation might well be a mistake. But if we look at the example of Japan, we must recognize the implication of the facts that Japanese society changed rapidly once its protectionist isolation had been breached; and that it was sheer hard work and not Zen pacifism that empowered Japan (both before and after the Second World War). Also, if we look at the case of India, Gandhi consistently opposed the European model of societal modernity and successive socialist governments tried to "protect" Indian technology and social consumerism from Western influences; but irresistibly and belatedly, India has been obliged to join the race towards development along lines that make the old opposition between colonial and colonized (or Indic and Western) obsolete. I believe that we must recognize that we live in a post-industrial, and assymeterically globalising world in which national boundaries are porous, and enclosed societies, economies, or mindsets cannot be sustained usefully for long; the power of science and technology to change life, once it has begun affecting the planet's history, cannot be avoided, bypassed, contained, or resisted by simply equating it with Europe or the West. I think that an argument that would like to see African research validated from within Africa slopes off into cultural solipsism. Little is gained by indigenising the norms of validity in fields like research. Indeed, the task of intellectual labour and the creation of new knowledge must be accomplished in the formerly colonized nations if they are to become more mature and able as nations and they must discover for themselves the reasons and norms for their own pursuit of knowledge; but that does not mean that localism and nativism are virtues in themselves. I think that localism remains in the realm of preferences, as a prejudice.
The American critic Yvor Winters castigated the literary and American version of this criterion as the fallacy of national mimeticism. The nationalist and indigenizing frame of mind may resent having to feel obliged to the Colonizer for its model of betterment; it may feel frustrated at its continued dependency on the Colonizer and it may be infuriated to find that the dream of the Universal gets realized only in terms of European versions of that chimera. Nevertheless, I think that the nationalist or indigenizing impulse is less committed to the legitimation of knowledge than to the legitimation of the indigenous through knowledge. Indigenization as an expression of the will to self-legitimate can become stultifying whenever the urge to individuate and the desire to progress along self-determined lines forces formerly colonised societies or nations into believing that they had better reinvent the wheel. Even if this were done, after much expenditure of energy, it would not legitimate the wheel of knowledge, but rather new nations that must overcome their own illegitimation.
I prefer those parts of Professor Kom's diagnosis that try to account for why so many formerly colonised nations (in and outside Africa) have failed to deliver on the promise of independence in terms of a combination of other factors such as poverty which breeds corrupt rule and administration; lack of education which traps entire classes of society in intellectual stagnation, social immobility and economic disability; poor social planning; the inability of administrators to free themselves from a colonial mindset (and the self-demonising that Fanon described as colonialism's Manicheanism); and the failure to sustain (or sometimes even to acquire) a pragmatic ethics (which is more a matter of a rational pursuit of competence, efficiency, and accountability than of religious idealism) in matters of governance and management. Two additional factors are worth noting, which perhaps affect Africa even more than Asia: the West's lead in secularizing and industrialising society has drastically (if not permanently) disadvantaged communities entering belatedly into nationhood; and natural disasters (such as disease, drought, flood, famine) and man-made disasters (such as genocide, manipulated communal strife) which have aggravated what is already a parlous state of affairs. Even if sentiments like Kipling's legitimation of Empire as "the white man's burden" are read as disingenuous hypocrisy, the evidence of so many ex-colonial nations' failure to administer themselves competently does place nationalism's cry for self-rule in a bitterly ironic light, confirming the truth of a remark such as Foucault's, that the "practice of liberation is not in itself sufficient to define the practices of freedom". Professor Kom concludes, "we have only ever had a superficial knowledge of the Other". I think that the failures of post-colonial nations need not be laid first at the door of the intellectual, because the fabric of society can be changed, not by the labour of any small, elite group, but by a transformation of society through the widest dissemination of knowledge. That would be the legitimation of knowledge.
However, I concur with his recognition that if we have been superficial in our knowledge of the Other, we have been even more superficial in our knowledge about ourselves and about what was entailed in making new nations legitimate grounds for the creation of new knowledge. But such recognitions inhibit me from invoking neo-colonialism as the principal enemy of legitimately autonomous knowledge in the new nations and from casting my thoughts in the old dichotomous mould of Us versus Them, and Centre versus Margin, whereas Professor Kom seems willing to fall back upon the same Manichean binarism that he had earlier identified as a hangover from a colonial mindset. I am also a little worried at Professor Kom's despair of "phantom States in search of an undiscoverable democracy". If we contrast the military repression of democracy for over half a century in a country like Pakistan with its costly survival in India, I should think that democracy is not altogether undiscoverable, and definitely preferable, despite all its problems. That some of them fail is not a good reason for throwing out democracy per se. Likewise, I am uneasy at Professor Kom's rejection of what he calls "extrovert economies", because the rejection seems to require, or point in the direction of a wilful and ahistorical isolationism, illustrated most recently by Malaysia's (perhaps partly, but only partly, justified) paranoia. If we accept modern economies as the diffusion of globalism across nations, how best to utilize the energies of the process for one's nation seems a more constructive plan than to reject it as neocolonial exploitation. I would not be so presumptuous as to think that I have some panacea at hand for all the distressing problems of post-coloniality that are at their ugliest in so many parts of Africa. But if nations like Japan can rebuild themselves and if smaller nations like Taiwan or Singapore can become economically prosperous, the reasons for their success do suggest possible lines of extrapolation. There can be no alternative to sustained self-discipline and hard work; there is no alternative to education. There are choices to industrialization as policy, but hardly to whether new nations should or should not walk that path. Of course, none of this would immediately eliminate corrupt rulers, lazy mindsets and communal divisiveness. But if anything can, eventually, I think it is the widespread dissemination of knowledge, accomplished in such a way as to avoid the schism between an aggressive-defensive localism versus a disingenuous universalism. We could distinguish between the types of knowledge that are universal and those that grow into localisms without having to serve an agenda or fulfil an idea as ideology.
Rajeev S. Patke was born in Poona, India. He gained his BA, MA from the
University of Poona, going on to do his M.Phil. and D.Phil. at the
University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He taught in India for a few
years and is currently Associate Professor in the Department of English
Language and Literature in the National University of Singapore. He has
recently completed work for the Open University on a multi-authored book on
Postcolonial Literatures in English; produced two audio Compact Discs of
local poetry from Singapore; and is working on a book which explores the
writings of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno viewed from a postcolonial
perspective. He is the author of The Long Poems of Wallace Stevens: An
Interpretative Study (Cambridge, 1985) and has co-edited Institutions in
Cultures: Theory and Practice (Rodopi, 1996). Recent publications include
"Postcolonial Yeats", in W.B.Yeats Critical Assessments, David Pierce (ed.): Helm Information, 2000, and "antinomial Walter Benjamin"in The European Legacy, 4: 4 (1999). Forthcoming publications include an article on the Indian Subaltern Historians in Colonies, Missions Cultures in the
English-speaking World, Gerhard Stilz (ed.): Tuebingen; "Is there any
intellectual in this room?", in Social Knowledge: Heritage, Challenges,
Prospects, Syed Farid Alatas (ed.): Singapore; an article on Benjamin in
Benjamin's Blind spot, Lise Patt(ed.); two articles on Benjamin in CD-ROM format from Haifa; and an article on "Asian Extrapolations from Adorno" in a book on The reception of the Frankfurt School outside Germany.
Back to [the top of the page] [the contents of this issue of MOTS PLURIELS]