Is the ‘Post’ in Postcolonial the ‘Post’ in Postpone?

A Reading of Dreams Deferred in Peter Kimani’s Before the Rooster Crows

Abstract

In the 1950s and 1960s, nationalism was still regarded as the feature of the victorious anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa…By 1970s, nationalism had become a matter of ethnic politics, the reason why people in the Third World killed each other…in cruel and often protracted civil wars…The leaders of African struggles against colonialism and racism had spoiled their record becoming heads of corrupt, fractious, and often brutal regimes (Partha Chatterjee 1999). For JaramogiOginga Odinga nationalism lost its glamour in Kenya when Kenyatta, the founding father of the nation and who was generally perceived as one of the foremost nationalist in the continent failed to mention the role played by the nationalists in his  speech ushering independence. He reminds us that "Kenyatta’s own speech inexplicably made no mention of the people who had laid down their lives in the struggle, the fighters of the  forests and the camps who have been in danger in Kenya of becoming the forgotten men of freedom fight because it suits the ambitions of the self-seeking politicians to divert our people from the real freedom aims of our people" (p.253).