The question of Africa's authentic voice within modernity can only be resolved within history. History contains both what is imposed upon it - often an ideology - and what confronts and transgresses it in an endeavour to maintain the ability of human imagination to create with total freedom. Although the former continues to prevail as the dominant discourse in Africa, as elsewhere, it is in what has been created by the latter that we find the true significance of Africa's achievement in modernity. I argue therefore that the historical achievement of Africa in modernity is not of a predetermined nature or contained within or by what is imposed upon it, but is owing to its own consciousness of itself as an emerging liberating force within modernity.
