THE COLONIAL STRANGER AND POSTCOLONIAL AGENCY: THE CONGO NARRATIVE

Abstract

In Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (1996), the Irish critic Declan Kiberd argues “postcolonial writing does not begin only when the occupier withdraws: rather it is initiated at that very moment when a native writer formulates a text committed to cultural resistance”. While I agree with Kiberd that postcoloniality cannot be said to be synonymous with post-independence, in this essay I extend his formulation by adding another subversive initiator of the postcolonial moment, the sympathizing radical activist within the metropolis. I use the American case in relation to the Congo context in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to foreground my argument, especially with reference to the anticolonial activism of the African-American Presbyterian missionary William Sheppard and his co-worker Samuel Lapsley, and the anti-imperial stance of the American writer Mark Twain.

• Ambivalence
• Anticolonial
• Colonial
• Congo
• Sheppard
• William
• Twain
• Mark

ORCID

Lokangaka Losambe http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6937-3417

Notes

1 Examples include recent protests against police violence in Furguson, New York and Maryland (United States), the solidarity marches that followed the murder of French cartoonist Charlie Hebdo in Paris, and the ‘free our girls’ protest that followed the kidnapping of more than two hundred girls by the religious extremist movement Boko Haram in Nigeria.

2 See also Said’s notion of writing from a ‘strategic location’ (1978) and Spivak’s idea of ‘strategic essentialism’ (2003).

3 Intrigued by Sheppard’s proficiency in the Kuba language, learned prior to his visit to the Kuba Kingdom, Lukengu and his council came to the mythological conclusion that he had to be an incarnation of previous Kuba royalty. They continued to believe so despite his insistence in telling them he was an American and not a Kuba. Lukengu’s response to his denial was that Sheppard didn’t know. Here is Sheppard’s account of his dialogue with Lukengu about his mythological provenance: ‘I leaned from my seat toward King Lukenga [sic] and getting his attention said briefly, “I understand, King, that your people believe me to be a Makuba who once lived here.” The King replied with a smile, “N’Gaxa Mi” (It is true). “I want to acknowledge to you,” said I, ‘that I am not a Makuba, and I have never been here before.” The King leaned over the arm of his great chair and said with satisfaction, “You don’t know it, but you are ‘Muana Mi' (one of the family)”’(Sheppard 1917, 113). Sheppard was subsequently named after an ancient Kuba king, Bope Mekabe, and accepted as kin by the Kuba people (see Kennedy 2002, 81–102).