Looking backward to the ‘new South Africa’-J.M. Coetzee’s exploration of the protocols of travel writing'

This paper discusses J M Coetzee's deconstruction o f the discourse o f travel writing in "The Narrative o f Jacobus Coetzee". It contends that the novella foregrounds this colonialist genre’s ethnographic inscription o f the contact between coloniser and colonised in order to expose its role in the implication o f Africa in the European plot o f history. The paper also ar­ gues that the novella reveals the manner in which this mediation o f the colonial encounter by western language and narrative systems pro.^pectively determined the course o f South African history. In the process, it re­ lates this w ork’s understanding o f history to the contemporary South Afri­ can reader’s times.


In tr o d u c tio n
Referring to early colonialist literature in general, Abdul JanM oham ed (1985:65) makes the point that " [i]nstead o f being an exploration o f the racial Other, such literature merely afTimis its own ethnocentric assumptions, instead o f actually depicting the outer limits o f 'civilization', it simply codifies and preserves the structures o f its own mentality". In this paper 1 shall argue that J.M . C oetzee's novella "The Narrative o f Jacobus Coetzee", which is presented as a travelogue from "the great age o f exploration when the Hliite man first made contact with the wative peoples o f o u r interior" (emphasis added, 1974:115), suggests as much about the ethnocentricity o f early South African travel w ritin g .2 Being a pro foundly metarepresentational work, it foregrounds those strategies by which Europeans represent to themselves their others, hi making this point, I sliall trace the novella's thematisation o f the mediation o f the contact between the European self and the African other by language and the narrative systems o f western culture. I shall also, as is suggested by the title o f this essay, analyse the part played by the text's shifting temporal perspective in relating the consequences o f this mediation to the contemporary South African reader and his/her times.

D isc o v e r in g A fr ic a
When Jacobus C oetzee leaves 'civilisation' and ventures forth into the unsettled wilderness, he encounters a worid o f things, what he refers to as an "undif ferentiated plenum" (108)3 without polity. This w odd, elsew here referred to as consisting o f "interspersed plena and vacua" (88), is depicted as a void, the antithesis o f all human sign systems. In order to com prehend this chaos o f raw African matter. Jacobus Coetzee transforms it into human constructs, a trans formation described as follows: "hi his w ay Coetzee rode like a god through a world only partly named, differentiating and bringing into existence" (124). The analogy here between colonisation and divine creation ex nihilo suggests that the Africa which Jacobus Coetzee encounters and explores in the course o f his expedition has been invented rather than found; instead o f exploring a new worid, he creates a discursive world on the base o f a natural one. Furthennore, the linguistic terms in which this analogy is couched imply that the natural African reality is contingent and can only be rendered accessible to European minds by being settled conceptually through language. It follows, then, that in his account o f his travels. Jacobus Coetzee does not represent Africa as much as present it for the first time and constitute it in his European reader's mind as a verbal construct.
This act o f linguistic and conceptual transformation forms the basis for an active scheme o f mediation and settlement by additional, secondary system s o f social ordering. It is the first step in a process o f literal colonisation aimed at containing "The N arrative o f Jacobus Coetzee" is the second o f the tw o narratives which form D usklands. Since they are presented separately, the reader is invited to treat these narratives as independent novellas.
There are, how ever, num erous integrative links between them which suggest that they might be approached as episodes in the sam e story. N o doubt, the generic am bivalence here is quite deliberate and could even point to a parallel between the disruption o f the reader's expectations in relation to the literary text and the disruption o f Jacobus C oetzee and Eugene D aw n's expectations in relation to the racial other. For the purposes o f this paper, though, I shall regard "The N arrative o f Jacobus Coetzee" as a novella.
Page num bers refer to Coetzee, J M. 1974 The N arrative o f Jacobus Coetzee. In: D usklands Johannesburg : R avan the land aiid rendering its infinitude finite by reducing it to an assortment of computable acres: We cannot count the wild. The wild is one because it is boundless. We can count fig-trees, we can count sheep because the orchard and the farm are bounded. The essence o f orchard tree and farm sheep is number. Our commerce with the wild is a tireless enterprise o f turning it into orchard and farm. W hen we cannot fence it and count it we reduce it to number by other means (85).
As this passage makes clear, the African landscape is perceived not in terms o f its dasein but in terms o f the human principles o f profit and gain. At stake here, though, is not simply the conceptual settlement o f African territory through language and its mediation by European categories o f trade and social use but the extent to which such mediation implies a certain conception o f time and history (see Franklin, 1978: 27-28, 82 andPratt, 1992:61, 178). In being mediated, colo nial space, which is unordered in the present o f observation, is transformed and given a "prefigurative order" (Franklin, 1978:27), that is, it is codified in the terms o f a Euroexpansionist, capitalist future. Thus it is clear in the examples cited above that for Jacobus Coetzee the future consummation o f the colonial project and with it the victory o f European order in Africa is always extant in the moment o f observation: instead o f seeing wilderness, he sees orchards and farms. Upon being "bound to the future" (85) in this way, the raw colonial matter, which is contingent and unapproachable on its own tenns, becomes part o f a larger pattern and process and accordingly gains significance. The colonial habit o f perception evinced by Jacobus Coetzee thus narrativises Africa and implicates it in the European plot o f colonial history.
Once narrativised in this fashion, Africa becomes a tenn in a plot which is highly detenninistic because the syncopation o f time which occurs with the conflation of present and future in the colonial mode o f perception prospectively detennines the course o f history in predicating a fixed, teleological line o f development. Because there can be no deviation from this narrative line, all possibility of change is eliminated and history becomes a relatively simple affair, an inexorably advancing narrative which seeks its own end, that is, its lelos -the realisation o f imperial intention in Africa. Any colonial material which challenges this comic ending to the colonial story is consequently elided from the narrative. N ow here in the novella does this conception o f colonial history emerge more clearly than in Jacobus C oetzee's encounter with the Khoi. Describing him self as a "tool in the hands o f history" (114), he makes it very clear that the Khoi threaten the European story ni Africa with teleological disorientation and must therefore be removed from "If the Hottentots comprise an immense world o f dehght, it is an impenetrable world, impenetrable to men like me, who must either skirt it, which is to evade our mission, or clear it out o f the way" (113). So, in order to preserve the end-directedness o f the European plot. Jacobus Coetzee resorts to prospective plotting, a process which culminates in the elision o f corrosive material from the tale. The fixation with its own completion which the colonial plot manifests here, is foregrounded by the iterative structure o f the novella. In the text. Jacobus C oetzee's travelogue is followed by an afterword in which S.J. Coetzee, an historian who is presented as a twentieth-century descen dant o f Jacobus Coetzee, repeats his ancestor's actions by effacing all rival views from his own account o f Jacobus C oetzee's expedition: "The present work ... offers the evidence o f history to correct certain o f the anti-heroic distortions that have been creeping into our conception o f the great age o f exploration when the Wliite man first made contact with the native peoples o f our interior" (115). By eliminating "antic-heroic distortions" from his record, S.J. C oetzee protects the colonial plot from dissenting histories which challenge its centricity. W here his forebear, the frontiersman, engages in prospective plotting by mapping out future events, S.J. Coetzee, the historiographer, engages in "retrospective plotting" (Franklin, 1979:13) by ordering events that have already occurred. In both cases the ordering process aestheticises history by rejecting material which does not fall into the ideal pattern o f European experience in Africa.

T h e im p eria l sy n ta x
These exercises in retrospective and prospective plotting reduce the dialogic nature o f history to a monologic story in which the subject o f Empire acts upon and predicates docile colonial objects. The imperial syntax which underpins this story and which installs this binaric relation between the European self and the colonial other is laid bare in the novella by Jacobus C oetzee's following descrip tion o f his allegorical joum ey: I become a spherical reflecting eye moving through the wilderness and in gesting it. D estroyer o f the wilderness, I move through the land cutting a devouring path from horizon to horizon. There is nothing from which my eye turns, I am all that I see (84).
The image o f the travelling, disembodied eye and the pun on "eye" and "1" here, suggest that the collocations o f subjects, verbs and objects in the text are thematically significant, and that the plot is infonned by an imperial syntax in which the subject o f the narrative sentences is the explorer, the joum ey the verb.
W hat I refer to as "tcleological disorientation", here, is closcly related to W ayne Frankhn's conecpt o f "term inal disorientation " ( 1979:13) and African matter the direct object (compare Franklin, 1979:122, 141). This imperial grammar is not only confined to the particular story o f European reaction to African space which the novella recounts, but also infonns a much larger process. Afier all, the story o f Jacobus Coetzee clearly allegorises the entire co lonial project by presenting an explorer-hero as embodiment o f European order on a journey o f discovery which instead o f 'discovering' anything merely sub sumes raw colonial matter into prior categories and so confm ns and celebrates the ability o f European cognitive structures to contain African events and objects. Since it contains the seed in which can be detected the outlines o f the concluded story, the imperial syntax could be said to constitute the narrative fonnula which informs the entire colonial effort. If adhered to, this fomiula regulates colonial history by excluding mordant matter from its plot and by placing those events which it does subsume in an acceptable relation to others, thus making them part o f a single, inclusive line o f action which leads inexorably to the lelos o f Euro pean success in Afi-ica.
J.M. C oetzee's point here seems to be that colonial representations o f Africa and aestheticisations o f history are dictated by this imperial grammar o f narrative.
The iterative structure o f the novella, for example, shows that it is the basic fomiula to which both Jacobus and S.J. Coetzee reduce the infinite variety of Africa. At the same time, however, the novella's structure, in juxtaposing Jaco bus C oetzee's document with that o f S.J. Coetzee, foregrounds the historio grapher's elision o f the explorer's "sojourn" (71) with the Khoi from his account o f the expedition. Upon closer examination, the reader is able to see that S.J. C oetzee's dismissal o f this episode as an "historical irrelevance" (128) can be ascribed to the fact that it constitutes a momentary departure from the grammar which infonns the rest o f Jacobus C oetzee's narrative and that it introduces an other aesthetic governed by an-other syntax. Indeed, the episode is distinguished by the suspension o f the journey o f conquest and by the subject's loss o f control over the world o f objects whicii it had hoped to order. Ignored by both the villagers and his servants. Jacobus Coetzee spends his time convalescing from illness in a hut reserved for menstruating women. This passive position inverts the highly active, heroic role he assumes in the various scenarios he imagines upon first meeting the Khoi: ... the order to follow, the inner debate (resist? submit?), underlings rolling their eyeballs, words o f moderation, calm, swift march, the hidden defile, the encam p m en t... finn tones. Peace! Tobacco!, demonstration o f fireanns, m unnurs o f awe, gifts, the vengeful wizard, the feast, glut, nightfall, murder foiled, dawn, farewell, trundling wheels (70).
This scenario and the ones which follow it are easily recognisable as standard variations on the fommlaic plot which characterises frontier writing (see Gardiner, 1987:181;Dovey, 1988:86-90;Haarhof, 1991:218-219), a plot in which the imperial syntax clearly manifests itself. Jacobus C oetzee thus positions him self in relation to the Khoi according to expectations created by European co lonial discourse. In this regard it is significant that the entire encounter between explorer and native is described in aesthetic rather than existential terms, a description which constructs a reflexive analogy betw een the colonial encounter and the literary encounter o f reader and text: just as the reader's approach to the text is conditioned by the codes and conventions o f the literary intertext, so too is the coloniser's encounter with the native conditioned by the corpus o f colonial discourse. Given this mediation, no direct contact takes place when Jacobus Coetzee meets the Great Namaqua. Instead o f the actual Khoi, he encounters the verbal construct constituted in his mind by colonial discourse, a construct which occludes them. It is therefore quite obvious that he expects his encounter with the Khoi to ritualistically re-enact the classic plot o f European expansionism.
In marked contrast to this expectation, however. Jacobus C oetzee is reduced by this encounter to a figure o f endurance rather than one o f achievement, a process which starts when the Khoi do not adopt the position o f submissive colonial objects. Rather than confirming the expectations contained in the various inter actions he imagines, they act contrarily to them and therefore undermine them. Thus, when he addresses the N am aqua "as befitted negotiations with possibly unfriendly powers" (71), they merely become bored and drift "out o f [his] finn but friendly line o f vision" (71); when he anticipates an attack, he finds that they display "no organized antagonism" (74). Finally, the epic flight which he envi sages in one o f his scenarios, becomes an abject scramble in which he is debased to a cancature o f the intrepid "tamer o f the wild" (82) that he imagines him self to be: "Held in position by Klawer I evacuated m yself heroically over the tailgate" (80).
This disjunction between the treatment he expects from the Khoi and that which he actually receives is a measure o f the extent to which Jacobus C oetzee's encounter with the Khoi differs from the ideal plot o f European success in Africa, Instead o f confirming the heroic themes that it sets out to affm n, his journey threatens the colonial plot with teleological disorientation. Not surprisingly, then, S.J. Coetzee, despite the fact that Jacobus C oetzee's eventual annihilation o f the Khoi village reasserts the imperial syntax and thus constitutes a return to the original design o f European intentions in Africa, deems it necessary not only to exorcise this evidence o f radical discontinuity in the coherent colonial plot, but to rewrite the record in such a w ay that it reproduces the imperial syntax: On the fifth [day] he emerged upon a flat and grassy plain, the land o f the Great Namaqua. He parleyed with their leaders, assuring them that his only intention was to hunt elephants and rem inding them that he came under the protection o f the Governor. Pacified by this intelligence they allowed him to pass (128-129).
Thus rewritten, this episode becomes syntactically identical to the fonnulaic plot which generates Jacobus C oetzee's expectations in his encounter with the Khoi. Once again, he occupies the subject position in the imperial sentence and is able to negate the actual Khoi by reducing them to his barbarous other. So, through the historian's intervention and artifice, that which did not match and promote the ideal plot in fact is made to do so in fiction.

A n a lte r io r sy n ta x
Although the original pattern o f the colonial narrative is reasserted following Jacobus C oetzee's encounter with the Khoi, this momentary lapse from its im perial syntax is enough to foreground a dissonance between the contingent space o f the African w ilderness and the imported schema o f European order. For a moment, the resistance to reification o f the Khoi transforms the plot o f history from one that represents Africa as a realm o f imperial success to one that speaks o f an-other Africa which blocks artificial, European designs and which denatu ralises the seemingly seamless connection between the verbal constnict 'Africa' constituted by colonial discourse and its referent. The consequence o f this frus tration o f European intention is the collapse o f the European plot in Africa and the disintegration o f the appearance o f totality it produced. Once this is accom plished, that which has been misrepresented and repressed is discovered, namely the boundless world in which the Khoi live. Jacobus C oetzee describes this world o f unconfined Dionysian flux as "an immense world o f delight" (113) "without polity" (104).
Significantly, it is only af\er he fails to "find a place for them in [his] history" (103), that is, after he fails to comprehend them narratively by reducing them to the objects o f the aggressive verbs in his imperial sentences, that Jacobus Coetzee is able to see and describe the N am aqua in this way. Since it is unmediated by the schemes o f European order and by the subject-object cognition o f the imperial syntax, this is his first contact with the actual Khoi. As a result, this discoverer now makes his first true discovery, namely, o f a seemingly tim eless realm com pletely antithetical to w estern conceptions o f selfliood and history, a world which does not recognise and affimi those oppositions, such as that betw een subject and object, out o f which history erects itself (see Coetzee, 1988:2-5). Thus Jacobus Coetzee com es to suspect that European man seeking his telos is an irrelevance to the Khoi: "To these people to whom life was nothing but a sequence o f accidents had I not been simply another accident?" (104). The implication, here, is that the K hoi's resistance to his imperial endeavours is not premised on adopting an oppositional position, on reducing him to an object. Accordingly, they do not see him as an object and this, in turn, suggests that their stnictures o f perception are informed by an alterior grammar, one entirely different from the imperial syntax. In this regard, J.M. C oetzee's description o f a middle-voice practice which situates itself between the active and the passive voice is interesting. He con tends that middie-voice practice does not construct the sharp divisions "between subject and verb, verb and object, subject and object" (1992:95) that transitive and active voice syntax does. The importance o f this difference is that the blurring o f these divisions prevents the self from assuming the subject position necessary to predicate the other.
This distinction between a syntax based on a clearly differentiated subject and object and one based on their interconnectedness also em erges in the novella when Jacobus Coetzee, in an attempt to define him self against the Khoi, does so by singing the following ditty: "Hottentot, Hottentot, / I am not a Hottentot" (101). He tells his reader that he chooses Dutch as the medium for this exercise in self-affirmation because "It was neater in Dutch than in Nama, which still lived in the flowering-time o f inflexion" (101).^ Since it erects divisions between sub ject, verb and object, the syntactical structure o f the European language accom modates notions o f cultural superiority and inferiority more readily than does the highly inflected structure o f Nama.
If Jacobus C oetzee's encounter with a syntax and structure o f perception appropriate to Africa, such as that o f the N am aqua, w ere to culminate in his rejection o f the imperial syntax, Africa would become a site o f regeneration; instead o f being filled with the recognisable fonns o f European understanding by the European mind, it would prompt a decolonisation o f that mind, a restructuring o f its cognitive character and so induce a new epistemology, a new w ay o f seeing, understanding and imagining. Following his expulsion by the Khoi, it at first seems that Jacobus Coetzee will accept the rhetorical challenge o f devising an alterior syntax appropriate to Africa by "set[ting] out down a new path [and] implicat [ing] [him]self in a new life ... the life o f the white Bushman that had been hinting itself to [him]" (105). The very existence o f his 'narrative', though, in presupposing his return to European society and reaffirmation o f its social orders, indicates that the outcome o f this challenge is a collapse o f the historical imagination. Reduced to a "pallid symbol" (113) by the failure o f his plot in Africa, Jacobus Coetzee does not dissolve into the w ilderness in a final disintegration o f the divisions betw een subject, verb and object. Instead, he recuperates his self narratively by devising possible endings for the plot o f his journey o f discovery. W hile this self-conscious attem pt "to translate [his] self soberly across the told tale" (105) indicates that he is an author o f sorts, it also shows that rather than being an auctor, in the sense o f an originator who devises a new aesthetic and identity, he is an author in the demystified post-structuralist D avid Attwcll describes this passage as a "W horfian moment" w hich "reflects the M anichaeism o f the colonial situation -Jacobus C oetzee is defining h im self against the O ther, but m ore successfully in his own, the colonial, language" (C oetzee, 1992:143). sense, one w hose choice is dictated by the closures o f the forni o f narrative history.

. L o o k in g b a ck w a rd to th e 'n ew S o u th A fr ic a '
The success o f Jacobus C oetzee's endeavour to reinscribe his self in narrative is suggested by the fact that the third section o f his travelogue constitutes a syntactical transfomiatioii o f the previous section: it rew rites his encounter with the N am aqua according to the dictates o f the imperial syntax. In so doing, it re constitutes him as a subject and eliminates all "anti-heroic distortions" (115) from the account. Indeed, the following citation invites the reader to read the genocide o f the Khoi tribe as an epic battle in which Jacobus Coetzee is the hero: "WE D ESCEND on their camp at dawn, the hour recommended by the classic writers on warfare" (107). This reassertion o f the imperial idiom, o f course, means that rather than becoming a site o f regeneration Africa remains a site o f conquest and the critical historical juncture at which its unconfined and complex plural reality presents itself is relegated to a minor episode in the eventual success o f European intention.
Jacobus C oetzee's failure o f the imagination also constitutes an act o f prospective plotting which strives to ensure the realisation in future histoiy o f the original design o f the colonial plot. By rehabilitating the imperial syntax, he entrenches a single, inclusive, converging action which cuts through the centuries and leads to the present. The suggestion here that Jacobus C oetzee's actions may provide the narrative gerni or blueprint for the twentieth-century South African reader's times and identity and that he, in a sense, 'authors' the reader, challenges the latter's ontological reality. In a metaleptic reversal, the reader is confronted with the thought that s/lie may be a character in the narrative o f Jacobus Coetzee, a product o f his failed imagination.
The novella's temporal and genealogical structure contributes to this metaleptic effect. For the most part the text consists o f a succession o f docum ents purpor tedly written by members o f the Coetzee family over a period o f two centuries. The fact that these characters all share the same name does not simply signify a familial affinity, it also indicates that the corporate identity which Jacobus Coet zee restored by reinstating the colonial plot has remained stable and intact over the centuries. The name "Coetzee" thus comes to signify the white, European identity inscribed in colonial history. Indeed, Dorian Haarhof, in referring to the recurrence o f this name in the text, contends that "[t]hese Coetzees constitute the family frontier lineage o f white South Africa incorporating space and zone over three hundred years o f colonisation " (1991:222). Significantly, in this regard. Jacobus C oetzee is referred to by S.J. Coetzee as "one o f the founders o f our people" (115). The question which the genealogical structure o f the novella poses for the white South African reader in the late twentieth century is therefore w hether his/her identity fornis part o f the genealogical line established by Jacobus Coetzee, that is, whether s/lie is a character inscribed in the plot o f white conquest.
In a final metaleptic manoeuvre calculated to implicate the ever-shifting present o f reading, J.M. Coetzee leaves the reader to assum e that the date o f the Trans lator's Preface which frames all the other docum ents is also the date o f publi cation o f the novella, that is, 1974. This period in South African history was distinguished by the rise o f the Black Consciousness movement, a movement which, as Stephen Biko's following w ords show, w as intensely aw are o f the ex tent to which discursive practices infonn oppression: ... attention has to be paid to our history if we as blacks want to aid each other in our coming into consciousness. W e have to rewrite our history and produce in it the heroes that formed the core o f our resistance to the white invaders (1973:44-45).
The fact that this novella, which emphasises the importance o f narrative continuity to the national plot, should ostensibly both originate and conclude in the early 1970's, a period during which a threat o f discontinuity to that plot em erged, should be deemed significant. In intimating a departure from the ideal plot o f colonial history, it suggests that this plot may be a truncated tale, a tale which, given its obsession with its own completion, is therefore ironic in form. Ultimately, however, the novella, in an ateleological gesture, leaves it to the reader to determine the outcome o f this dislocation o f the telos o f the colonial plot. In so doing, it positions h im^e r as the author o f history -his/lier actions or lack thereof in the arena o f history will decide whether this deviation from the original design o f the European plot in Africa constitutes its ultimate perversion and collapse or w hether it is simply another minor episode in the eventual success o f white intention. With regard to the white South African reader, the novella thus places him/her in a position which is analogous to that o f Jacobus Coetzee, that is, s/he is prompted into making a choice which will help determine the future course o f history. If this parallel between Jacobus C oetzee and the white reader w ere to hold and s/he w ere to re-enact Jacobus C oetzee's failure o f the ima gination by rehabilitating the monologic plot o f colonial history, s/lie would answ er the question posed by the novella's structure by becoming part o f its genealogy. Like Jacobus and S.J. Coetzee, s/he would be an author (in the demystified sense) engaged in the preservation o f the colonial plot. And since history plays a constitutive role in the text, this authoring o f history, if successful, would provide an ending for the novella, an ending which would continue its iterative structure, its seemingly endless replication and therefore validation o f the imperial syntax.
Another ending, however, is possible, one to which the course o f the South African national narrative over the nineteen or so years since 1974 has tended. In a manner o f speaking, then, the rest is history. Rather than being a momentary lapse in the teleological momentum o f the white plot, the trends o f the early seventies led to A frica's sustained obstruction o f the apartheid State's unreal designs. So, for example, they were followed by the Soweto uprising o f 1976-1978 which initiated a period o f low intensity guerilla warfare in South A fiica in the seventies and eighties. The State's response to this period o f teleological disorientation w as, o f course, to attempt through physical and verbal exorcism to recuperate the telos o f white history. Thus, in successive states o f emergency, black political organisations were banned, their leaders detained, tortured and in many cases killed. A concerted effort w as made to stifle black expression in general by banning the work o f black writers, by restricting their publishers, by closing down new spapers directed at a black audience, and by silencing the media in general -restricting in particular their coverage o f political unrest in the black townships. In effect, then, these material realities o f apartheid point to a discursive intent, that is, to delete competing stories from the coherently single plot o f the national narrative.
These other tales, however, have proved inerasable and, following the release of Nelson M andela and the unbanning o f the African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress in 1990, the potential for a vastly different national plot has becom e evident. In responding to the novella's ending from the perspective o f 1993, one can therefore say that white history is indeed a truncated tale, for the present is clearly a time o f interregnum in which the old plot is dying and a new one is struggling to be bom. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the contours o f an alternative tale can be detected, a failure o f the imagination is still possible. After all, an interregnum is, by definition, an open period with numerous aesthetic possibilities. Confronted with a large, diverse and complex order in which com peting views abound, it remains for the contemporary South African reader and his/lier com patriots to originate an aesthetic which represents the multiplicity o f centres in southern African experience instead o f replicating yet another exclu sionary scheme o f cultural dominance. In other words, a truly different nation hood and identity have yet to be imagined. And that is another journey, a difficult one along which altera Africa still aw aits discovery.