"Z IS FOR ZERO AND N IS FOR NIGGER"

You can't judge a book by its cover, goes the saying.¹ However, the disturbing cover illustration of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's book, A Critique of Post-colonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (Harvard University Press, 1999) says a lot about its content. I will save comments on the cover until the concluding section of this commentary. The first response to Spivak's book is, what, no Frantz Fanon or Kwame Nkrumah in a book that promises to critique postcolonial reason? Just a bunch of dead white men after another bunch telling us about universal reason! Since these theorists had very little to say about colonialism, Spivak could have presented a better and clearer analysis from the perspective of victims of colonialism. Consider the intellectuals that Spivak dismissed as migrant "native informants," Chinweizu, Amina Mama, Ifi Amadiume, Nuruddin Farah, Ama Ata Aidoo, Biodun Jeyifo, and Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, to name but a few African theorists that were conveniently silenced. This strategic silencing is perhaps based on the fact that the book announces itself as a feminist text, an alibi that fails to wash because many of these authors are gender sensitive while many of those given pride of place, because they are not Africans, are undoubtedly chauvinist pigs. As Spivak (1999, 6) puts this hostile self-loathing that explains her scornful attitude to Africa more than her gloating love for Asia:

Spivak makes a passing reference to Valentin Mudimbe's The Invention of Africa² (by Europeans) as a good example of the depth and breadth required in a text before embarking on a critique of imperialist reason by Others. This good example of hers seems to be ignored by the author herself in her enthusiasm to insult Africa in every direct reference to the continent in the book. Perhaps she is suggesting that the intellectual giants from Africa are all ethnographic, lacking breadth or dept, and therefore do not deserve the kind of attention that she pays to European theorists who all but ignored imperialism in their own theories. Now, how about the patronizing nod to bell hooks in the preface (as her theoretical wet nurse in the preface, p. xi) without indexing references to hook's work? There is no reference to bell hooks in the index because there was none in the book. Could the author not find one African feminist to cite directly or are they not postmodernist enough for what she calls her "uncertain scholarship?"

In postcolonial studies, Fanon is highly regarded for example in the works of Edward Said and Homi Bhabha.³ In this book, Spivak plays with the phrase, "third world" without reference to Fanon who coined the phrase in The Wretched of the Earth. Also, the author defines neocolonialism in exactly the way that Nkrumah⁴ did but without mentioning him even in passing. The only exception here is the extensive attention paid to Samir Amin⁵ by Spivak who relies on his critique of Eurocentrism in Unequal Development to show that what Marx called the Asiatic Mode of Production is not entirely Asiatic given instances of this formation in precapitalist Africa during the epoch when imperialism successfully disarticulated the communal mode of production by forcing African peasants to become tribute paying laborers of imperialism.

This example from Amin that enriched Spivak's book illustrates what she missed by adopting what she called the book's "appropriation and hostility" to (African, because this does not apply to any other region represented in the book) modes of intellectual work. Of course, her book would probably be less troubling if the author had limited the scope to India or Euro-Asia about which very much was said in the book. Such a book about colonialism in India could still work even with one or two references to African theorists but such a book cannot masquerade as a general History of postcolonial theory. However, Asian theorists such Aijaz Ahmad⁶ are critical of postcolonial theorists like Spivak for failing to engage with Asian writers seriously, especially if they do not write in colonial languages. Spivak makes much of the fact that she speaks Bengali but this is not reflected in the book by bringing up Bengali theorists as much as she flashes German and French authors. Even if she does not speak a particular Asian or African language, there are translations and original publications in the European languages she privileges. In other words, if Spivak had paid attention to postcolonial literature from outside Europe, she could have learnt them and used them the way she studied and appropriated European authors. The point being made here is not that it is wrong to cite European authors, the point is that it is dubious scholarship to neglect postcolonial writers and promote colonial ones while claiming to write about postcolonialism.

Spivak justifies her attention to Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx with the suggestion that it would be intellectually dishonest to turn her back on them when much of what she is writing was copied from them. The suggestion above is that she copied as much from the despised (African) "native informant" but chose to snobbishly turn her back on them when it comes to the extensive footnotes on Euro Asian texts the way colonial anthropologists caricatured the native informants that they left anonymous. Incidentally, readers can ignore Spivak's bulky footnotes at first and return to later as endnotes or some kinds of subchapters of her bulky chapters. It might be that this reading of Spivak's text is "mistaken" in the sense that she admits that her attempt to read anthropology into the moral philosophy of Kant might be mistaken but, as she concluded, what is dismissed as a bungling mistake by some could just be a useful intervention.

Spivak's critique of Kant's philosophy of freedom, a view that freedom is produced as pleasure through reason and that reason is a product of culture which is denied to the natural, uncooked, raw Other is grossly inadequate and could have benefited enormously from the anti-colonial philosophy of Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o,⁷ to name just three African theorists who saw culture as a weapon in the human struggle against dominant imperialist reason (not simply as an aesthetic work of art or an ancient text). In other words, freedom is not just an idea and reason is not just for freedom since domination has its logic while the practical struggle for freedom has its own reason and logic, be it in a state of nature that Kant saw as being characterized by raw inequality or in a civil society supposedly governed by Universal Reason. It is gangster philosophy that sees the victim as the fall-guy, the stupid fellow who was not smart enough to avoid being duped.

Instead of mentioning bell hooks in passing, reference to her Outlaw Culture,⁸ especially the essay on "Gangsta Rap..Who Will Take the Rap" (hooks, 1994, 115-24), could have sharpened her critique of hegemonic western philosophy of gangsterism. Instead Spivak turned her critique into a celebration, without even naming the inherent `epistemic violence' (1999, 205) as she would put it herself. George Bernard Shaw⁹ did what Spivak failed to do in the preface to his play, John Bull's Other Island (Shaw, 1938, 441-474). In this polemical preface, he informed his English audience that although some of them wrongly justify their rule over Ireland with a superiority complex, every available evidence points to the moral and intellectual superiority of the Irish and only to the greatness of the British as brutish bullies. Everyone knows that the schoolyard bully is rarely the most intelligent pupil. Spivak could have deepened her critique of Kant by emphasizing that colonialism was not based on superior Enlightenment but simply on superior force.

Spivak's superficial critique of Kant is extended to her reading of Hegel who dismissed Africa as having produced no great work of art in spite of the great pyramids. To Hegel, Asia produced great literature in the form of the Gita but the detailing of virtues by Krishna (a black skinned god, mind you) was simply proof that Asian people were incapable of pushing history further and were therefore condemned to stagnation until Europeans came to their rescue. According to Spivak (1999, 43):

Spivak goes on to review the poetry of the Gita and comment on revisionist "Third Worldist" critique that saw India as being superior to Europe spiritually while acknowledging European superior achievements in material terms. Nothing in this superficial critique recalls the fundamental observation of Marx that poor Hegel was standing on his head and therefore could not see history straight until he is forced to stand on his two materialist feet to see that it is not ideas that make history but people who make history under conditions that they do not choose. Spivak reviews the content of the Gita and finds that all the castes, including her own privileged high-caste Brahmins and the so-called untouchable black Indians were supposed to derive equal pleasure from their unjust social statuses. Readers would expect a self- professed Marxist to go beyond this and document the resistance of the untouchables to the caste system or expose the ideological means by which they are kept under oppression by the Brahmins. It seems that Spivak's ecstatic Karma Sutra with the ghost of Hegel has forced her to stand on her own head too and so she shares the idealist view of history with which Hegel's dialectics was cursed.

The third section of the chapter on Philosophy is devoted to Marx but unlike the sections on Kant and Hegel, Spivak spends more time on the biography of Marx, suggesting that "woman" was for Marx the "native informant," before jumping into a critique of the idea of an Asiatic Mode of Production. Spivak's woman and native informant in Marx is unconvincing because there is no evidence that Marx obtained his information primarily from women that he failed to name and unlike colonial anthropologists, there is evidence that Marx was committed to the liberation of men and women from colonialism. It is in this section that Spivak appropriated what she called Samir Amin's greatest gift to the general reader, his focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Spivak contrasts Amin with the view of writers like Fredric Jameson that the whole of Africa relates to capitalism through a "tribal mode of production." She failed to acknowledge that as an internationalist, Amin was concerned with global imperialism and not simply speculating, according to Spivak, on "primitive communalism" in Africa.

The type of materialist critique that she reserved for Marx is exactly the kind of critique that could have helped her content analysis of Kant and Hegel. Such activist critique is required by the topic of her book, a critique of postcolonial reason cannot dwell on aesthetics and ideas alone but also on practical struggles by the colonized to overthrow colonialism. Even if she does not want to refer to the rich anti- colonial literature from Africa, the literature of the Vietnamese resistance to colonialism alone could have offered a better context for the evaluation of the relative relevance or otherwise of Kant, Hegel and Marx. In spite of Spivak's almost patronizing attention to Amin, the chapter concludes by deferring to European theorists who have devoted less time to the struggle against colonialism in their work. In this way, Spivak fulfilled her own opening prophecy in the chapter:

Incredible as it might seem but consistent with her Afrophobic perspective, Spivak actually tried to illustrate what she means here by dismissing a work in which her intellectual hero, Jacques Derrida,¹⁰ expressed his admiration for Nelson Mandela. Concentration on the representation of the colonized appears forbidden in Spivak's postcolonial studies but her concentration on the representation of the European colonizer is the worst example of what Chinua Achebe¹¹ called colonialist criticism. Achebe defines colonialist criticism as the idea that all theories of anti-colonial culture must be judged and validated according to the standards of Eurocentrism. Spivak's book promised a critique of postcolonial theory but the author relatively ignored counter-colonial theory perhaps because she believes that such heroic traditions belong to a disappearing present of the subtitle. This is not a convincing alibi for dwelling on her pet project – a struggle to be accepted as an upper caste Indian theorist of equal ranking with the European Wise Men that she has made a career of appropriating.

ILLITERATE LITERATURE

In the chapter on literature, the subversive strategy of Spivak becomes clearer to the reader. This strategy suggests that since the colonial anthropologist relied on the native informant for the "worlding" of colonialism, the postcolonial theorist can rely on the native European informant for what could be called the wording of postcolonialism. Spivak is silent on this subversive strategy, probably because she is aware that it is simply a weak alibi for giving pre-eminence to the voice of the hegemonic European and denying the voices of the subaltern. The political and sociological contexts of power are different in the colonial and the postcolonial contexts. Spivak, despite her pretensions, lacks the power resources of the colonial anthropologist who is taken very seriously by the colonial administration. No government on earth is going to base its policy on the diversionary performative texts of Spivak and so why does she delude herself that she has equal power with the colonial anthropologist, not just any anthropologist, mind you? The problem is compounded because the literature that she chose as exemplars of the colonial condition appear relatively ignorant or illiterate of the essence of colonialism.

First of all, we are treated to a content analysis of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre¹² simply to tell us that there was a Negro woman in the novel and there was sexual tension or conflict between the Negro and a white man. An attempt to move beyond a European voice ended up with yet another Euro Caribbean author of the Wide Sargasso Sea¹³ trying desperately to write patois or to speak for the subaltern. If Spivak had consulted Fanon's Black Skin White Masks,¹⁴ she would have been educated on the basic fact that colonialism is not primarily about who is having sex with whom, although this deserved some explaining.

In this chapter, Spivak also made a pathetic attempt to represent African literature but strategically chose the novel Foe¹⁵ as an example, announcing gleefully that it was written by a white South African based on a European classic, Robinson Crusoe by Defoe.¹⁶ This lame excuse for African literature on the colonial situation is overwhelmingly illiterate on the subject for assuming that Robinson Crusoe was the Other and not man Friday, that South Africa was a sort of desert island on which a solitary Friday was discovered and named by a white woman who saw her salvation only in terms of returning to Europe with the noble savage in tow. Surely, Ngugi's The River Between, Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood¹⁷ tell the story of colonialism better from the African point of view.

The other examples of illiterate literature of colonialism in this chapter include Frankenstein¹⁸ who was created by a European woman and given a criminal mind to justify his repressive policing. Although this is a good analogy for colonial policing, it is grossly misleading because the crude biologism of Frankenstein's brain transplant is not necessary in the colonial situation nor is Frankenstein put to work as a slave of Shelley. If Spivak had gone beyond her narrow definition of literature in this chapter to consult non- fictional literature by people of African descent, for example, Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa¹⁹ or Cyril Lionel Robert James' The Black Jacobins,²⁰ she could have written a more intelligent chapter. Even if she had to draw from European sources for the sake of methodological consistency, she should have paid special attention to the anti- imperialist literature from Ireland such as George Bernard Shaw's plays, John Bull's Other Island, The Inca of Perusalem, The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, The Black Girl in Search for God, The Dark Lady of the Sonnets,²¹ to mention but a few. However, unlike Ireland, Vietnam and the other inexplicable silences in her book, Africa was mentioned almost always in pejorative contexts.

She must have been aware of the illiteracy of her literature for she feebly attempted to introduce non-fictional material but only in the form a memo of the Indian Trading Company forbidding the employment of Africans, Native Americans and "mulattoes" and making exceptions for educated native Indians. Anyone who has read the history of colonialism in Africa will tell you that the problem is not that of discrimination in employment opportunities but that of forced labor against which African fought heroically. The reason why Spivak chose to marginalize clear African voices of postcolonial theory while hawking what Derek Walcott²² has dubbed the smelly rotten fish of French theory was not explained in her book but if she has a justification, we are waiting to hear it. Does this have anything to do with what bell hooks called brown racism against black people? This question is appropriate because Spivak spends some time in this chapter trying to prove that chromatism or skin colour is not a scientific basis for classifying people but she did not say a word about racist practices that actually discriminate especially against people of African descent based mainly on the colour of their skin.

In this context, it is important to recall a strange report provided by bell hooks about a Third World Feminism conference. Without naming names, perhaps because everyone knows who she was talking about, hooks said that people at the conference expected sparks to fly because black women were expected to be vicious in the critique of one another's work. She said that she could not relate to this expectation because her mother had taught her and her five sisters the importance of being respectful towards one another. I have always wondered who produced the only sparks flying at that conference but now I am sure that it is you-know-who, a certain Third World feminist guru who had the habit of putting down especially women of African descent. According to hooks, this diva "was always quick to point out perceived intellectual inadequacies in their comments" though she did not respond to white women in the same way (1992, 93).²³ This was difficult for hooks to take because you-know-who blamed the black women for causing the insults she was heaping on them. Secondly, hooks found it more difficult because she really respected the work of this "Third World diva" so much that other black women started attacking hooks for not taking you-know-who to task. This is how hooks (ibid., 93-94) reflected on this Afrophobic tendency after the conference:

HUMPTY DUMPTY WAS PUSHED INTO HISTORY

From the beginning of the chapter on history, Spivak announces to the reader that it is not about history but about a couple of stories that would help "metropolitan feminists celebrate" Europe as the Other. This is the clearest statement of her unconvincing strategy of subverting Eurocentrism by relying on the native European informant. Here she confirms our earlier comment that this strategy displays what she now calls "the contemptuous spuriousness of the project" (1999, 206). In spite of this admission, her critique of postcolonial theory remains a celebration of Eurocentrism due mainly to the fact that she ignored the authentic voices of especially African critics of colonialism. For example, instead of relying on the weak comment that the Hollywood films, Gandhi and Out of Africa, presented present- day rural India and rural Africa as representations of colonialism, Spivak could have done a more critical job by allowing Sembene Ousmane's film, Camp de Thiaroye²⁴ to tell her readers what the strategic essentialism of the colonial situation in Africa was like.

Instead, Spivak returns to the "literature" of the East India Company as a reliable source of the history of colonialism. She contrasts her preference for a reading of the "facts" of archival records constructed by officials of the company as literature with the preference of some other writers to privilege literary criticism in the search for knowledge about colonialism. Aijaz Ahmad pointed out in his book, In Theory,²⁵ that both the privileging of colonial archives as literature and the privileging of Eurocentric literary criticism are symptoms of the alienation of migrant scholars who have lost touch deliberately with the rich traditions of critical literature, criticism and archives being constructed by writers and activists in the Third World. The main reason for this deliberate "contemptuous spuriousness," as Spivak put it, is because postcolonial theory is addressed to the West in search of privileged faculty positions in elite colleges and not to those struggling against the recolonisation of the Third World.

This chapter on history brings out clearly, the slightly chauvinist methodology of Spivak. She hesitated about whether "one" should venture "into the arena of exploitation" in today's world characterized by globalization in which "Masters and Mistresses try as little to neutralise epistemic discontinuity" with poor women and girls "as did the Company's functionaries within the Rani" under colonialism (1999, 208). In other words, it pays for the migrant scholar not to identify too much with the exploited because the masters and mistresses are still watching and would likely punish such continuities or at least refuse to reward it with offers of plum jobs in the "Company." Hence Spivak tries to apologize for even using India as an example. The reason is not because she identifies with the exploited people of India but because she was educated in India, she speaks Bengali and she has concrete experience that equips her with awareness of the historical canvas of India and made up for her lack of training in the discipline of history.

That is a snobbish excuse for not extending her focus to Ireland, Africa, the Caribbean, Vietnam, Australia, Native Americans, African Americans, Korea or China. It is not enough to say that the Indian example should not be generalized to other postcolonial locations and it is not enough to claim that she is not a historian. She did generalize gangster philosophy to postcolonialism, she is not a trained philosopher either (neither was Marx a trained economist), and the way she took time to study the archives of an imperialist company is the way she could have read the works of people of African descent. There is nothing "ethnicist" or "primitivist" in the rich anti-colonial samples of literature available contrary to Spivak's blanket rejection of "the Third Worldism currently afloat in humanistic disciplines" in the United States. Even Reinventing Africa by Ifi Amadiume²⁶ simply argues that the disarticulation of African culture was never complete and that there remain democratic traditions that survived the acculturation influence of colonialism especially from the point of view of African women. To dismiss such claims as primitivist without directly engaging the text in a debate is nothing short of the triumphalist claim by people like Francis Fukuyama that only gangster philosophy is suitable for the global village.²⁷

The second story in the history chapter, apart from that of the East Indian Company, is that of Bhubaneswari, a young girl who hanged herself while menstruating for failing to carry out a political assassination assigned to her during the nationalist struggle in India. Spivak compares her suicide to the self-immolation of widows who ritually burnt themselves on the funeral pyre of their husbands. This story raises the question of authenticity when it comes to historical facts. Spivak seemed to forget momentarily that what she was analyzing was socially constructed and not social facts sui generis as Emile Durkheim would put it.

It could be the case that someone pushed Humpty-Dumpty and made it look like suicide. How do we know that "self-immolation" is self-willed altruistic suicide rather than homicide? How do we know that the colonial authorities did not force Bhubaneswari to confess before hanging her and making it look like suicide to encourage other fighters to commit self-immolation rather than continue the struggle? Spivak has no answer here because, just as she scornfully refused to consult any literature on the African resistance to colonialism, she neglected the voices of Indian women who may have survived "self-immolation," who could have told her how much pressure is put on them by patriarchy to take their own lives and some of whom may have been dragged, screaming and kicking, to be immolated by Others.

CULTURE VULTURES

"When someone says `my people' with a specific stress on the blackness of those people, they are after kingdoms and permanently child- like slaves." This is how Spivak continues her Afrophobia in the chapter on culture (Spivak, 1999, 403). Once again, the only reference to an African writer happens to be a passing reference that is out of context and abundantly insulting. Why is Bessie Head's credit to her "mad" white mother in A Question of Power²⁸ used to ridicule any claims to unity by black people whereas Spivak can announce "our culture" (or "our epoch" according to Derrida) or what she called the present at the beginning of the chapter, without irony?

The African reader of this prejudiced text will soon find that Africa is not part of the "our" collective perhaps because there are no poststructuralist or postmodernist (whatever the hair-splitting differences between those incestuous terms) writers from Africa. Yet bell hooks has written about "Postmodern Blackness" in reference to the abundant skepticism in "our world" regarding white postmodernist claims to authenticity and relevance. She argues that postmodernism would become more relevant to blackness if the theorists engage more with the theories and practical struggles of African people. As she put it: "Postmodernist discourses are often exclusionary even as they call attention to, appropriate even, the experience of `difference' and `Otherness' to provide oppositional political meaning, legitimacy, and immediacy when they are accused of lacking concrete relevance" (hooks, 1991, 23).²⁹ There is no hint that Spivak is aware of this as she goes on to wheel out Fredric Jameson, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Van Gogh, Andy Warhol, without a word about Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Haitian genius that Warhol appropriated.

No hint in all this about the stolen legacies of black culture that is represented as white culture and no mention of the severe critique of this colour blindness by Toni Morrison in her booklet, Playing in the Dark.³⁰ When Morrison is mentioned in the appendix on methodology, it is with reference to her ironic comment in Beloved³¹ that the trans Atlantic Slave trade is not a story to pass on even though she has devoted her life's work to doing just that. In the same light of irrational hostility to Africa, when Spivak pointed out that Derrida often announces that he was born in Africa, the reader can sense a scolding of this territorial attachment by the intellectual guru of Spivak.

What has Warhol, Van Gogh, or Foucault got to say about the colonial or the postcolonial situation that Tshibumba Kanda-Matulu did not say loud and clear? In the book, Black Women and the Criminal Justice System: Towards the Decolonisation of Victimization³² the paintings of Colonie Belge by Kanda-Matulu were used to interrogate Foucault, Durkheim and other criminological theorists but none of them had an answer to the question of what to call the practice of victimization as mere punishment. Spivak should have been more systematic in the choice of works of art that could be used to critique postcolonialism and she should have been more respectful of African art otherwise she would keep missing the way the culture vultures of Europe stole the style of Cubism from African mask sculptors without crediting the original artists.

We have nothing against the prioritization of the work of Japanese designers by an Indian theorist but when such examples are used to illustrate postcolonial culture, we are entitled to ask, in what sense? We have no quarrel with authors who ignore Africa even when African knowledge could have enriched their work but when almost every reference to Africa and Africans is ridiculous, we are entitled to ask, how did Africa wrong the author? When a self-proclaimed radical writes about postcolonial theory, we are entitled to search for lessons in her work that can inform the unfinished project of decolonization whereas if such a work is written by a white supremacist, we can afford to ignore it with the question, what do you expect? Terry Eagleton dismissed the eclectic style of Spivak as a symptom of the U.S. commodified culture in which gaudy supermarkets are licensed to sell everything. As he put it, "The Line between post-colonial hybridity and Post-Modern anything-goes-ism is embarrassingly thin."³³ However, Eagleton failed to point out that even in the gaudy supermarkets of the US, anything is not necessarily everything: just as Spivak discriminated against African sources in her text, the big supermarkets that are open 24 hours do not stock African food stuff!

What we expect from a radical analyst of culture is the kind of classic work produced by Horace Campbell on Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney.³⁴ Spivak should be advised to bend down low, to ground with the common people instead of assuming a priori that they lack the technology for theorizing. That was the example that European theorists demonstrated by relying extensively on "native informants" for their sources of knowledge in service of domination. Walter Rodney learnt that lesson by holding Groundings with my Brothers³⁵ in Jamaica to overstand and overcome the postcolonial shitstem. Campbell follows this tradition by analyzing the lyrics of reggae music to show the importance of resistance to Rasta philosophy and culture.

None of the artists that Spivak wasted her time analyzing could have told her readers as much about postcolonialism as one song of Fela Kuti, Sista Netifa, Peter Tosh, Miriam Makeba, Bob Marley, Queen Latifah, Buju Banton, Erika Badu, Sizzla, Mcka B, Mutabaruka, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mzwakhe, Alpha Blondi, or even the blues of Billie Holiday (as Angela Davis has shown in Blues and the Legacy of Black Feminism³⁶ ) and the non-misogynist RAP of Lauren Hill, Tupac Shakur, NWA, or B.I.G. (RAP is otherwise known as Radical African Poetry). In other words, Spivak impoverished her book by adopting what seems to be an irrationally hostile attitude to the work of Africans and an obsessive taste for French high theory.

CONCLUSION: THE COVER-UP ALIBI

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's book contains a generous dose of contempt for Africa that bothers on what she calls "epistermic violence." Right from the cover picture credited to Kalobaran Laha depicting a black child. There is no doubt about the blackness of the boy in what appears to be a photograph being coloured over incompletely by a shade of blue. To show that the child is black rather than brown or Indian, the blue shade does not make the white pigeons covered much darker than the ones not touched by the broad blue line and the brown earth covered by the blue is still a lot lighter than the blackness of the child. The black child is all but eclipsed by white pigeons, the reader gets the ominous impression that this book is an obituary for Africa and Africans. This photograph is so ominously morbid that it reminds us of Alfred Hitchcock's apocalyptic film, The Birds, in which mostly black birds attack white people (especially children) the way this black child is being attacked by white birds.

Although the white pigeons and the black child's white sleeveless shirt signify the white flag of peace, the iconography of the cover suggests that it is peace that is vanishing into the light blue (sea, like Atlantis?) shade of colour line that overtook the child in a scramble to colonise, discolour or erase the blackness of the earthly space that the child was walking towards. As Peter Tosh would say, this is the type of peace that is a diploma awarded in the cemetery. Here is a solitary black child, an endangered species, overwhelmed by numerous white birds. The child is caged by the broad light-blue colour line whereas the birds enjoy more freedom within the blue line and outside it.

The subtitle, Towards a History of the Vanishing Present, seems to be a direct reference to the common pessimism in bourgeois publications these days regarding the `hopelessness' of the African continent. The pigeons that dominate the picture of the black child are carefully arranged in a Z shape and what comes to mind immediately is that Z stands for zero, especially given the insulting subtitle that suggests (directly or indirectly) that black presence is vanishing from history. If you turn the book to stand on its opening side with the spine upright, the Z line-up of the white pigeons transforms into an N and everybody knows what the N word stand for - Nigger. The black child in the picture is literally vanishing into a pigeon hole on the ground where the black feet are completely invisible while one white pigeon gives him (looks more like a boy) the ghostly image of an angel and his open mouth and downcast eyes suggest mourning.


	Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1999). A Critique of Post-colonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present, Harvard University Press.


	Valentin Y. Mudimbe (1988) The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.


	Edward Said, (1993). Culture and Imperialism, London, Chatto and Windus and Homi K. Bhabha. (1994) The Location of Culture, London, Routledge.


	Kwame Nkrumah (1968). Neo- Colonialism: The Highest Stage of Imperialism, London, Heinemann.


	Samir Amin (1976). Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism, New York, Monthly Review Press.


	Aijaz Ahmad, 1992, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, New York, Verso.


	Frantz Fanon, 1979. The Wretched of the Earth, London, Lawrence and Wishart; Amilcar Cabral, 1973. Return to the Source, London, Monthly Review Press; and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, 1985. Barrel of a Pen, London, New Beacon.


	bell hooks, 1994. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, London, Routledge.


	George Benard Shaw, 1938. Prefaces, London, Oghams Press.


	Jacques Derrida, 1987, "The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, in Admiration" in J. Derrida and M. Tlili, eds, For Nelson Mandela, New York, Seaver Books.


	Chinua Achebe, 1995, "Colonialist Criticism" in B. Ashcroft, G. Grifiths and H. Tiffin. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, London, Routledge.


	Charlotte Bronte, 1960. Jane Eyre, New York, unknown publisher.


	Jean Rhys, 1966. Wide Sargasso Sea, Hammondsworth, Penguin.


	Frantz Fanon, 1968. Black Skin White Masks, London, MacGibbon and Kee.


	J. M. Coetze, 1987. Foe, New York, Viking.


	Daniel Defoe, 1975. Robinson Crusoe, New York, Norton.


	Ngugi wa Thiong'o. The River Between, London, Heinemann; Chinua Achebe, 1985. Things Fall Apart, London, Heinemann; and Sembene Ousmane, God's Bits of Wood, London, Heinemann.


	Mary Shelley, 1965. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, New York, New American Library.


	Walter Rodney, 1982. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Washington, DC, Howard University Press.


	Cyril Lionel Robert James, 1980. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, London, Alison and Busby.


	G. B. Shaw, 1938, Prefaces, already cited.


	Derek Walcott, 1989, `Caligula's Horse' in Stephen Selmon and Helen Tiffin, eds, After Europe: Critical Theory and Post-Colonial Writing, Mundelstrup, Dangaroo.


	bell hooks, 1992. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, Boston, Turnaround


	Biko Agozino, 1996. "The Third Debt to the Third World: The Representation of Law and Order in Camp de Thiaroye," in Third Text, vol. 36, Autumn, 3- 13.


	Aijaz Ahmad. In Theory, already cited.


	Ifi Amadiume, 1997. Reinventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion and Culture, London, Zed.


	Francis Fukuyama, 1992. The End of History and the Last Man, New York, Free Press.


	Bessie Head, 1974. A Question of Power, London, Heinemann.


	bell hooks, 1992. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, Boston, Turnaround.


	Toni Morrison, 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, London, Pan Books.


	Toni Morrison, 1987. Beloved, London. Pan Books


	Biko Agozino, 1997. Black Women and the Criminal Justice System: Towards the Decolonisation of Victimization, Aldershot, Ashgate.


	Terry Eagleton, 1999, "In the Gaudy Supermarket" in London Review of Books, vol. 21, No. 10, 31 May, also at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n10/eag12110.htm


	Horace Campbell (1985). Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney, London, Hansib.


	Walter Rodney, 1969. Groundings With My Brothers, London, Bogle L'Overture.


	Angela Davis has shown this in Blues and the Legacy of Black Feminism: Gertrude 'Ma' Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, New York, Pantheon, 1998.

West Africa Review (2000)

ISSN: 1525-4488

"Z IS FOR ZERO AND N IS FOR NIGGER":
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY OR THEORY OF RECOLONIZATION?

GANGSTER PHILOSOPHY

ILLITERATE LITERATURE

HUMPTY DUMPTY WAS PUSHED INTO HISTORY

CULTURE VULTURES

CONCLUSION: THE COVER-UP ALIBI

West Africa Review (2000)

ISSN: 1525-4488

"Z IS FOR ZERO AND N IS FOR NIGGER": POSTCOLONIAL THEORY OR THEORY OF RECOLONIZATION?

GANGSTER PHILOSOPHY

ILLITERATE LITERATURE

HUMPTY DUMPTY WAS PUSHED INTO HISTORY

CULTURE VULTURES

CONCLUSION: THE COVER-UP ALIBI

"Z IS FOR ZERO AND N IS FOR NIGGER":
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY OR THEORY OF RECOLONIZATION?