Colonial library and colonization of the African future
To many epistemologists, knowledge creates reality. This means that to imagine a future, knowledge plays a central role. But as noted by Valentin-Yves Mudimbe (1988, 1994) the African experience of colonialism left them with what he termed a ‘colonial library’. This colonial library is a central leitmotif of the colonial cognitive empire, which operated through invasion of the African mental universe so as to impose Eurocentric knowledge systems. What emerged as modern disciplines such as social science and humanities became driven by Eurocentric thought. This is why Chakrabarty (2000: 5) posited that:
This engagement with European thought is also called forth by the fact that today the so-called European intellectual tradition is the only one alive in the social science departments of most, if not all, modern universities. I use the word ‘alive’ in a particular sense. It is only within some very particular traditions of thinking that we treat fundamental thinkers who are long dead and gone not only as people belonging to their own times but also as though they were our own contemporaries.
At the centre of the colonial library are discourses for domination and miseducation as part of colonial governmentality. This is why Mudimbe (1973: 57) explained that ‘The West created the savage in order to civilize it, it created the concept of underdeveloped in order to develop, the concept of the primitive in order to form ethnology’. The consequences included changing the psyche and consciousness of Africans, particularly the African intellectuals, and making them purveyors of Eurocentric thought. Learning became a form of radical and aggressive assimilation of Eurocentric thought and knowledge. In the process African systems of meaning-making, dreaming, and imagining the future became replaced by meaning and categories from Europe. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986: 3) deployed the metaphor of a cultural bomb that is detonated at the centre of the African mental universe to capture the lasting implications of the colonial library:
The effect of the cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other people’s languages rather than their own. It makes them identify with that which is decadent and reactionary, all those forces which would stop their own springs of life. It even plants serious doubts about the moral rightness of struggle. Possibilities of triumph or victory are seen as remote, ridiculous dreams. The intended results are despair, despondency and a collective death-wish.
Taking all this into consideration, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o doubted the possibility of an African Renaissance succeeding as a utopic register of Afromodernity. This is how he expressed his doubts:
Is an African renaissance possible when we keepers of memory have to work outside our own linguistic memory? And within the prisonhouse of European linguistic memory? Often, drawing from our own experiences and history to enrich the already rich European memory? If we think of the intelligentsia as generals in the intellectual army of Africa including footsoldiers, can we expect this army to conquer when its generals are captured and held prisoner? And it is worse when they revel in their fate as captives.’ (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 2009: 121).
The major point from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s analysis is that of how African minds have been colonized and how this colonization of the mind inhibits authentic dreams of the future, the worst case being that of an African who ends up even dreaming in colonial language.