In ‘Postmodern illusions and performances’, the fourth essay in A Future for Africa, Emmanuel Katongole argues that postmodernism is unlikely to prove the blessing for Africa that many had hoped. He accepts that it continues to have some usefulness as an intellectual style that casts suspicions on ‘classical notions of truth, reason, identity, and objectivity; of the idea of universal progress or emancipation, of single frameworks, grand narratives, or ultimate grounds of explanation’ (Eagleton). But in its various cultural expressions it barely constitutes an advance on the crudest forms of modern western self-interest as most starkly illustrated by Kurtz’s ‘final solution to the problem of difference’ in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: ‘exterminate all the brutes’ (74-75).

I have started reading Emmanuel Katongole’s A Future for Africa: Critical Essays in Christian Social Imagination as preparation for the Amahoro conference in Johannesburg in a couple of weeks. Katongole is a Catholic priest from Uganda who is now associate professor of theology at Duke Divinity School and co-director of its Center of Reconciliation.

His broad argument, as stated in the introduction, is that what Africa needs to overcome its various intractable social problems – ‘poverty, violence, instability, tribalism, and so forth’ – is not more good advice, not ‘abstract principles and recommendations’, but a new imagination. Christian ethics for Africa has been so preoccupied – understandably – with the ‘search for realistic and pragmatic considerations and solutions’ that it has failed to grasp the fact that the problems are ‘wired within the imaginative landscape of Africa’.