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).