Ethnic or Post-Ethnic Community for Africa? A Critique of Ahmadou Kourouma’s Critique of the Nation in the Suns of Independence
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Date
2013-12-09
Authors
Korang, K.L.
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Abstract
This essay proffers an assessment of the late AhmadouKourouma’s The Suns of Independence. It takes BiodunJeyifo’s observation in the epigraph above as a salient point of departure. The encounter of the different African peoples with one another that Jeyifo refers to has occurred within the continent’s recent domination by European colonial imperialism and has a postcolonial salience which flows from the same circumstances. Whatever their differences—ethnocultural and other—Africans encountered one other colonially as commonly subordinate relative to the dominant Europeans. How, then, were they to reencounter one another in circumstances where they would no longer be subordinate? This demand will produce the imaginings and practices in which Africans would foresee themselves newly encountering one another as a free people—and if so ideally as one people. In its resolution as a postcolonial question, Africa’s future encounter with itself would be in a mode where its different peoples live in community imagined in a nationalist form. Out of the many one: the post-ethnic nation is ratified as a vision of African postcolonial community.