forced upon a land.
Nevertheless, the challenge is in being able to rise above the tide and make home possess
a magnetic pull by which migrant minds find their way back home. Above all, this
explains why despite the multiplicity of refraction indices billed against the nation-state
as patent variables of compromise in the age of multicultural transnationalism (Akhil
Gupta 1999: 196), the postcolonial nation may still be far away from approaching its end,
as some proponents of contemporary discourse on the purchase of globalization on the
nation would argue. And if measured against the background of Bhabha’s (1994: 212)
heuristic interrogation on the fate of “postcolonial discourse” the answer can as well be
that within the context of the postcolonial, such issues that remain at the core of the
discourse as they relate to “neo-colonialism” can hardly be compromised. To this
declamation EarthChild bears testimony, while engaging the question of exile.
Importantly, if return in Oguibe is necessary perhaps only at death to fulfil a
metaphysical desire, in Anyidoho there is a nationalist advocacy which espouses a return
alive to turn the nation around and make development an attainable goal, even on the
continent of Africa. On a last note from the angle of cosmopolitanism, if the notion
presupposes some kind of deterritorialization towards a Centre, the argument in
Anyidoho can thus be read to mean that through the virtues of individual productivity,
there can actually be an obliteration of the the divide between the centre and the margin.
This way every space becomes a centre in its own right. That is, each distinct world, no
matter its pedigree of marginalization can, through a return to the exploitation of its
resources by its returning peoples together with the resilient home-based population, can
produce a unique mode of cosmopolitanism and remain a centre in its own right. This is
the wisdom of return in EarthChild and a challenge that African citizens must take up in
an era in which modernity-inspired cosmopolitanism is a ruse to the Third World.
Conclusion
This chapter commenced by commenting on the historical epoch of overwhelming
military dictatorship in both Nigeria and Ghana in the 1980s. Noting the relevance of the
epoch to the issues with which the primary texts engage, the chapter demonstrated how