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135
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


 
e ways in which a dominant ideology replicates itself include thegeneration of values taken for “common sense”—that is natural, nor-mative, self-evident, and even self-creating.
 
is holds as well for cul-ture, the basis upon which an entire panoply of shibboleths aboutAfrica has been generated over time. Culture, understood as that which is bound up in a particular people, requires an understandingof di
ff 
erent groups as having distinct or discrete identities. We havefor too long labored under the illusion of the culturalist and identitar-ian paradigm that has resulted in the division of Africans into di
ff 
er-ent people, discretely organized into “tribes” with names, assignedspecific traits, and located on the chart of world knowledge organizedby those who have set for themselves the task of understanding oth-ers.
 
is act of organizing knowledge did not come about by chanceor gratuitously, but rather in response to the exigencies of the times,the pressures that molded understandings along certain paths, pathsetched by the dominant tendencies within society.
 
is essay looks atIslam, orality, and the politics of cultural identities so as to challengeprevailing epistemological constructions of Africa.
ulture, understood as that which is bound up in a particular people,requires an understanding of di
ff 
erent groups as having distinct or discreteidentities. We have for too long labored under the illusion of the culturalistand identitarian paradigm that has resulted in the division of Africans intodi
ff 
erent people, discretely organized into “tribes” with names, assigned spe-cific traits, and located on the chart of world knowledge organized by those who have set for themselves the task of understanding others.
 
is act of orga-nizing knowledge did not come about by chance, or gratuitously, but rather inresponse to the exigencies of the times, the pressures that molded understand-
 
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136
ings along certain paths, paths etched by the dominant tendencies withinsociety. To think of Africa as a land occupied by di
ff 
erent peoples requires the divi-sion of its inhabitants into groups with identities that can be seen as di
ff 
erent.Igbo and not-Igbo is not enough; it has to be Igbo and Ijaw, or Igbo and Edo, with Ijaw understood as di
ff 
erent from Igbo, no matter how similar.
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us a bi-nary identity formation: us, them.
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is di
ff 
erence did not arise spontaneously.
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e investment in all naturalizing binary identity formations is an invest-ment in some position of power whose returns on the investment are to beprotected always through the disguised, or rather displaced, representation of that investment as embodying another, higher cultural function. And inevita-bly that function will take the form of innate qualities, the building blocks with which we construct identities.Culturalists can always be sighted beating the bush of shibboleths to flushout griots, tricksters, abikus, mammywattas, mermaids, doubles, twins, shad-ows, handsome or complete strangers, eshus, oguns, shangos, or myriads of other figures.
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ese have long since lost their cultural context and specificity,and been transformed into New World tropes: Brother Johns, signifying mon-keys. Instead of concerning ourselves with this seemingly inevitable process of culturalist production, we should turn to the originary concept on whoseground the bush is emplanted. And that identitarian notion is culture itself. To understand the role culture plays in the construction of African litera-ture, we might consider such texts as
e Palmwine Drinkard 
or
ings Fall  Apart 
. Both are early, foundational texts that originally appeared as novels, andthat now are presented as “authentic culture objects.”
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e authenticity of 
Palm-wine 
is that of the restored cultural artifact. When it was discovered that Tutu-ola’s original versions were altered by his British publisher to render the Englishmore comprehensible to a British audience, that is, less pidginized, the schol-arly community determined to uncover the original text and restore it for thescholars to appreciate. Its restoration placed it closer to the original text, and by extension to the “true culture” Tutuola was thought to have presented, or tohave embodied in his narrative and captured in his discourse.Similarly, the latest Heinemann annotated version of 
ings Fall Apart 
hastransformed the novel by mediating the experience of reading it so that now thereader is no longer free to imagine meanings, but is presented with the in-formed answers to whatever cultural questions he or she might put to the text.
 
e frame insures that the authenticity of the novel as cultural artifact is pro-tected, safeguarded against deviant understandings.It’s not that this is a bad thing, not that the uninformed reading retainssome kind of purity. It’s not even a question of an authoritative attempt tocontrol the reader’s response, because even with the cultural framing, meaning will be deferred, will be replicated with a di
ff 
erence, will wander along the
 
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tightest of chains of signifiers. It’s that those who construct the cultural frameitself, once again, in the act of presenting the truth about the culture, disguisethe processes by which culture itself is constructed—its constructedness hid-den by the act of making truth claims.
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e power of those making truth claimsis displaced onto the mechanisms of disciplinary authority that compel ouracquiescence in what is presented to us as natural and normal.
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is is the premise with which Christopher Miller begins his formidablestudy of African literature,
eories of Africans
, that is, with an apologia for theneed for the instrumental use of anthropology in reading and understandingAfrican literature. Miller writes,
 
inking programmatically about Western approaches to African litera-ture leads me to one major hypothesis . . . that a fair Western reading of African literatures demands engagement with, and even dependence on,anthropology.
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e demonstration of this point begins from the premisethat good reading does not result from ignorance, and that Westernerssimply do not know enough about Africa. (4)
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e problem I have with this is not the rejection of ignorance, but the assump-tion that knowledge can be accessed unproblematically, and even more, thatthe solution to outsider knowledge can be overcome by turning to insider cul-tural knowledge, that is, to African anthropologists.
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at anthropology restsupon an epistemology that is not independent, and from the start has not beenindependent, of the cultural and historical relations responsible for its creation(relations bound up in the projects of modernism and colonialism), means that we must shift the inquiry away from the question of knowledge and ignorance,and toward the questions of what has been responsible for the creation of ournotions of cultural truth and authenticity and what were the investments of those who framed those notions.If we resist this line of inquiry, it is because the processes that lead us toaccept our natural approaches to the text as normal are themselves governedby processes of domination in which we must be implicated by virtue of ourinevitable immersion in our own social matrices, and our previous interpella-tion with the pre-existent textualities of society—a two-way interpellation inthat we both read and write the texts, in Barthes’s sense, simultaneously.
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I’d like to get at this through two of the most obvious “truths” that emerge asAfrican shibboleths. First, the altogether “sensible” notion that Islam was im-ported into Africa as a foreign entity—call it the Sembène Ceddo shibbolethsince it sets the authentic, indigenous faith and customs of the Ceddo warriorsagainst the outsider Moor marabout who was responsible for imposing this
of 00

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MuslimVoices

This article was made available as part of the Voices and Visions Project of Indiana University. www.muslimvoices.org

reply11 / 03 / 2009
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