THE COLONIAL STRANGER AND POSTCOLONIAL AGENCY: THE CONGO NARRATIVE

Abstract

In Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (1996), the Irish critic Declan Kiberd argues “postcolonial writing does not begin only when the occupier withdraws: rather it is initiated at that very moment when a native writer formulates a text committed to cultural resistance”. While I agree with Kiberd that postcoloniality cannot be said to be synonymous with post-independence, in this essay I extend his formulation by adding another subversive initiator of the postcolonial moment, the sympathizing radical activist within the metropolis. I use the American case in relation to the Congo context in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to foreground my argument, especially with reference to the anticolonial activism of the African-American Presbyterian missionary William Sheppard and his co-worker Samuel Lapsley, and the anti-imperial stance of the American writer Mark Twain.