Imagination, reason and traditional African poetry

Abstract

One phantasm of the colonial experience in Africa is the spirited search for an African identity, which Eurocentrism tried to blot out through different ways, ranging from the denial of its existence to an outright replacement of it with accounts that revert to the occidental for validation. As a contribution to this identity-crisis management project, Afrocentric scholarship, from ethnophilosophy to present-day decolonial discourses, has tried to challenge that dominant narrative based on suppressed facts and logical reasoning. Studies of these kinds generally swing between oppositional scholarship and equalization schemes, without investigating Africa per se from a non-oppositional stance. Thus, this study, which is qualitatively descriptive and logically analytical, in addition to being deductive and synthetical in design, investigates the imaginative in a typical African poem. Aided by Derridean deconstructive strategy, the study reconstitutes an image of the African as more than rational, thereby implicating the imaginative functioning as a possible condition for cultural re-engineering and engagement of reality beyond reason.