“Pushing upstream, the colonials are figured as traveling backward into anachronistic space: “Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world…. We were wanderers on prehistoric earth…. We were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone.” Within the trope of anachronistic space, the boilerman’s mimetic failure is less a discursive dilemma than a familiar element of the colonial progress narrative. Inhabiting the cusp of prehistory and imperial modernity, the “improved specimen” is seen as the living measure of how far Africans must still travel to attain modernity. In other words, the slippage between difference and identity is rendered non-contradictory by being projected onto the axis of time as a natural function of imperial progress.”