Cross-Currents: The ‘New African’ After Cultural Encounters

Abstract

There are any number of ways to describe or classify the attitude of African writers towards their experience of cultural encounters — which, for a start, is a euphemism. Many would prefer simply to call it a one-sided affair of cultural imperialism. Considering the major writers, some five or six categories immediately suggest themselves. But first, it is necessary to recall the identities of the ‘alien’ cultures, their properties and values as they affected — and still do — what we may describe as the authentic sensibilities of the various cultural groups which make up the black continent. Because of European domination of the principal techniques of dissemination, which means of course the control of education and information, there is more to cultural imperialism in Africa than what can be attributed to Christian Europe. Effectively sealing off all cultural contact with Asia, so that the major Asiatic cultures remain, even today, to the majority of African intelligentsia, only something that Coleridge or Hollywood occasionally dreams up, Europe found it had not only to contend with but often to collaborate in Africa with, another powerful alien culture — the Arab-Islamic.