The centre replies the empire: Post-Postcolonial perspectives on the historicity of Post-Independence Malawian leadership in Paul Theroux’s The Lower River

Abstract

Until recently, the enduring postcolonial discourses in Africa have been based on the binaries whose arrows pointed towards the West as that which bears the exclusive agency in Africa’s postcolonial woes. In line with the ‘re-practices’ that have, for a long time, characterised most humanistic discourses, some scholars have realised the imperative of revisiting and rereading the postcolonial theory and its East-West dialectics as motivated by the deconstructionist exegesis and praxis. The results have been, in most cases, a complete reversal of the postcolonial argument to the effect that Africa has long assumed agency in most of their conditions and that the West has little or no case to answer in terms of direct culpability. This paper utilises these deconstructive notions in the critique of Paul Theroux’s The Lower River as a Westerner’s response to the existing postcolonial hermeneutics as embodied in the troika’s work, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literature. The research analysis, which is anchored on the post-postcolonial approach to literary interpretation, upholds the emerging view that, going by recent events in post-independence Africa as exemplified in the Malawian context, African leadership has assumed Selfhood and thus should be the subject of direct postcolonial interrogation, rather than the West.