Wilder than Polyphemus: On the postcolonial consumption of symbols

• Type of Material: Book Chapter
• Authors: David van Schoor, Emory University
• Language: English
• Date: 2022
• Publisher: Emory University Libraries
• Publication Version: Final Published Version
• Copyright Statement: 2022 African Minds
• License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Final Published Version (URL): https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/64083
• Title of Journal or Parent Work: (u)Mzantsi Classics: Dialogues in Decolonisation from Southern Africa
• Edition: 5
• Start Page: 207
• End Page: 239
• Place of Publication or Presentation: Cape Town
• Keywords: role and function; freedom; State as a Work of Art; Virgil; dialogue; Southern Africa; ubuntu; recolonisation; decolonisation
• Research Categories: Political Science, General; History, African

Abstract

More delicately, others will forge bronzes that seem to breathe (I believe it truly), they will draw living expressions from marble, Will plead cases better, and with their instruments will chart The motions of the heavens and predict the rising of the stars: You, Roman, hold in your mind the ruling of peoples in your power, (Your arts will be these), to establish the way of peace, Give mercy to the downtrodden and subdue arrogant men. It is one of the most famous passages of Vergil’s nation-building Roman epic. The ghost of the hero’s father Anchises is addressing his still living son in the land of the dead. He prophesies that, whilst other peoples will excel in artistry, speech making or sciences, the Roman’s special skill will be in governing. He will turn his domination of the world to good: peace, compassion and the subduing of the arrogant. It is a remarkable passage, and amongst other things it will call to mind Jakob Burckhardt in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy writing so memorably about the Italian conception of the ‘State as a Work of Art’. But in postcolonial Africa we read it also with all the irony and scepticism of people who have touched the grain of history and known that freedom has often meant going against it. Where are we Africans in the catalogue of different peoples and their assorted contributions; are we better suited to being sculptors of monumental bronzes, astronomers, speech makers, rulers or permanently ruled, all or none of these? Whatever Africa and the African polity is to be, a central question for African thinkers, just as it was for Vergil and his Rome, is the role and function of different qualities of political emotions and their place in our reimagining of African civilisation, in that imaginary African urbs, which is the precondition for the real, historical African polity we wish to see arising.