The waiting room of history

Colonial rule rarely said never. It said not yet: not yet ready for self-government, not yet mature enough for the franchise, not yet developed enough to decide. Dipesh Chakrabarty called this the waiting room of history — a room in which some peoples were asked to sit while others, already modern, went ahead.

Fanon's answer was about tempo: the refusal to accept the schedule itself, the insistence that the timetable of emancipation is not something the coloniser gets to set. Between these two positions lies the provocation — is the 'not yet' a stage of history, or a technique for keeping people in a room?