It would be hard to think of a single intellectual project in post-colonial Africa¹ more central than modernisation. Some Africans would, I think, claim that decolonisation was itself a central project, and this is true. The decolonisation of the mind is a necessary process; and, despite many asseverations to the contrary, it has only just begun. But if decolonisation is important, it is as part of the project of modernisation; and those who regard intellectual decolonisation as a return to a pristine, traditonalist Eden, a return to the lares and penates of those shady beings we are in the habit of calling "the ancestors', are sentimentalists: dangerous, some of them, like many sentimentalists, but sentimentalists nevertheless.