Ethnic or Post-Ethnic Community for Africa? A Critique of Ahmadou Kouroumas Critique of the Nation in The Suns of Independence

Abstract

Taking Biodun Jeyifos observation in the epigraph above as a salient point of departure, this essay proffers an assessment of the late Ahmadou Kouroumas The Suns of Independence. The encounter of the different African peoples with one another that Jeyifo refers to has occurred within the continents recent domination by European colonial imperialism. Within those same circumstances of domination the encounter acquires a postcolonial salience. 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, meanings, 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 an ethical vision of African postcolonial community.