be booby traps. So, usually the pattern is to have, as in “Hero and Thief”, a military hero
of “a nervous government/ [that] sits on our bankrupt stool/ wearing a gown of fantasy
and hope/ telling tales of foreign aid and godmothers/ at Christmas time” (14).
Another dimension to the sorrow of dispersal can be viewed through the desire for higher
learning. It has become a tradition since colonialism. It has intensified after independence
as a way of reacting to the repression of leadership. Not everybody however lives to tell
his tale. The travails and sorrows of such experience in a strange land in the West is the
focus of “for Kristofa”. Although Okpewho (71) argues that concerning scholarship the
decision to move to the West offers broader insights into the world of learning, not many
live to utilize this acquisition. In the case of Kristofa, “the cancer ate away his dream”,
and worse still, “they say he had no life-term insurance/ which is to say no coverage for
his death” (17). The implication of this is that the corpse cannot be brought back home
for burial. But return in whatever circumstance remains vital for Anyidoho’s musing and
it is painful when this cannot be achieved: “There is no place to die / but the piece of
Earth / in which we put away our old birth cord”. The desire to live above the economic
crunch of one’s land is part of what results in the exile of most Africans; however, it is
not for all of them that what Brooke-Rose (9) calls “springing forth into a new life,
beyond the boundaries of the familiar” is a reality. Death, as suffered by Kristofa, is one
such.
Regrettably, however, the pattern of dispersal especially of young minds remains a
phenomenon. The lamentation over the situation gets across in “Voices in our Home”:
Once there were many voices in our home
Today,
Across the infinite yawn of distances
of silence