These assumptions are habitually contradicted by the actual transformative processes of post-colonial experience. This 'solid rock' of authentic identity itself is in a continual state of becoming. It is 'post' colonial, constructed, political, even at its most authentic, because it is being formed within the inescapable historical reality of colonization and its consequences. In some cases, as in the assumption of an authentic African identity, the construction process has assumed mammoth proportions. Yet there is no doubt that now, a century later, an African identity is coming into being.
African identities are diverse and pluralist.
This contradicts the assumptions of both Pan-Africanist ideology and much Western ethnology. The heterogeneity of all identities, lies in the ways in which subjects inhabit the various locations of those identities. Appropriation Nevertheless, the problems African intellectuals have with the location of knowledge within power is real. African identity seems beset by ambivalence and contradiction. I believe there is and it is the example of literary writing which provides the key.