ABSTRACT
Kwame Anthony Appiah writes in his important In My Fathers House that Africans who employ western categories such as “literature" and “nation" and attempt to use them to oppose the west by creating “national litera-
tures" are doomed to failure; for Appiah, acceptance of these concepts means that “the terms of resistance are already given us, and our contestation is entrapped within the western cultural conjuncture we affect to dispute. The pose of repudiation actually presupposes the cultural institutions of the west and the ideological
matrix in which they, in turn, are imbricated."1
