The point is not limited to non-Western peoples, or to those at the peripheries of the modern world system. The Tshidi fondness for viewing history in terms of a set of contrasts recalls an observation made by Raymond Williams. In his study of The Country and the City in modern English literature (1973), he notes that the rural/urban opposition served as a very general model for interpreting a radically changing social order. Inasmuch as this opposition lent itself to the expression of differing visions of English life, it evoked a complex discourse about society, production, class, and gender-a discourse, that is, about history. Just as, among the Tshidi, the madman and the migrant spoke in contrasting ways of the same theme, so it was with different English writers. Some appeared to take the gulf between city and country as a self-evident fact of life, and proceeded to explore its social and symbolic associations. Others stressed the in- terdependence of the rural and urban worlds, and insisted on tracing the contradictory relations that united them in a single order. It is not only in Africa that those caught up in processes of radical change come to terms with their history by means of suggestive oppositions