Rumor has it that Henry Morton Stanley perplexed over a quandary facing colonialists: "we cannot justify our presence among "natives' if we do not educate them; but I suspect that we are not prepared for what they will say about us when and if we do teach them to write."¹ Stanley correctly predicted that "natives' would have different understandings of the colonial act and that what appeared to the colonizers as virtues and necessities may well appear to the former as weaknesses and acts of barbarism. Stanley's ruminations also show that the colonial act was accompanied by anxieties over the eventual prise de parole by natives, that is their self-conscious expressions of thought on colonialism. The core of these anxieties has been whether postcolonial discourses can be aligned on the rationalizations of the colonial act by its agents.