The struggle to redefine a purportedly lost national ēthos, discussed in the previous chapter in relation to the British estate novel, is apparent in various forms throughout the contemporary Anglophone world. It is complicated in many postcolonial contexts, however, because national boundaries were typically imposed by colonial powers without any regard to traditional tribal, ethnic, or cultural affiliations. Particularly among African nations, the articulation of a precolonial solidarity cast in national and/or continental terms has been crucial to independence movements. At the same time, the nostalgia underlying many nationalist narratives has encouraged the idea that a national homeland is the special provenance of a particular people. The civil strife, war, and genocide that have characterized so much of postcolonial Africa testify to the dangers of such claims. The 1994 genocide of an estimated 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis and moderate Hutus provides only one graphic example of a connection between nostalgia and what Reed Way Dasenbrock calls “a politics of genocide.”

Dasenbrock's assertion points to a nagging possibility that has haunted African political theorists, activists, and artists alike since the 1960s: namely, that the past provides a source not of inspiration and guidance but of trauma. The idea that the colonial encounter inculcates a kind of collective trauma subsequently replayed in the postcolonial context was articulated as early as the 1950s by the Martinique-born psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, whose work during the French-Algerian war led him to diagnose a variety of psychic disorders resulting from colonial policies.