Reading Our Ruins

Abstract

The essay enquires into what is accepted in academic and political circles as ‘post-colonial’ reality and questions some of the assumptions about its imagination, narratives, and edifices. It does this through the lens of moments taken from lived ‘post-coloniality’, mostly out of Kenya, which, like most ‘independent nations’ presumed a cut-off point between ‘colonial’ and its ‘post’ in the solemn ritual act of swapping flags one midnight. That the world, its presumptions and assumptions, certainly regarding civilizational apotheosis, is today in a state of befuddlement is no mystery. What is mysterious is the persistence of hollow ideas of the character of relationships among peoples, and the distribution of terminologies to refer to these—first world, third world, developed, undeveloped, colonial, post-colonial, neo-colonial, immigrant, expatriate—in a time when these neither make sense nor offer anything meaningful to the world. The essay finally retreats to the ‘autopsy table’ for inspiration: it imagines that the contradictions and confusions of the present era could also be read as an invitation to humanity to ‘look at itself again and really see’, and to, perhaps, this time, do so with that long-absent courage, truthfulness and humility that speak to human realities and allows for an examination of debris from unexplored past and present relationships that now disorder the human future.