through a journey in pursuit of higher learning naturally induces some measure of envy,
curiosity, condemnation of whoever has failed to take the advantage of it, among others.
This is exactly the import of the expletives that parents pour on their wards for “Getting
out through the school window, shaming me!”; or the casting of the acquisition of the
knowledge as an acquisition of a goldmine through which “overflowing calabashes” are
expected to bee brought back for the “The Chief”. It then stands to reason why apologies
pour from every corner over delays arising from logistics of transit itinerary, which
possibly explains the allusion to the Idi Amin and the question of “the pass” released. On
this score, experiencing modernity first hand in Britain for African citizens that were
formerly colonized people should just be as promising as it is exciting. On the one hand,
it appears to enhance the status of the beneficiaries, and on the other, provides an
opportunity to behold the concrete beauties of modernity from “the source”.
But as Jane Jacobs (1996: 2) observes, the Manichaean binary that colonialism constructs
through the demonization of the colonized, and by implication, the construction of the
metropolitan self as refined and desirable, cannot sustain its fixity. This is precisely
because the colonized other in the process of his journey to the western metropolis does
not act true to type in endorsing the perspective of the colonizer. In other words, the
construct of civilization and urbanity, made most potent through racial sentiments of
superiority, is threatened in the metropolis by the colonized. The metaphoric urge to
drink from the “source”, which is expected to begin with arrival in London cannot but
take a counter-productive turn. Reflecting on this further, one realizes that once the
colonized transcends the boundaries of indigenous knowledge, he would have cause to be
critical of the received notions about empire. This in itself is not so much because he just
has to circumscribe the formerly internalized conception, but because the realities often
present themselves to the contrary. The subsequent poems in this section illustrate why
this critical position of the colonized is justified. In the opening stanza of the eponymous
poem, “Sketches from London”, the persona cannot help but make the following remarks
in reaction to the construct of London as the “source”:
The source: flaming cardboard boxes with squeaking
Staircases. Like smoked cockroaches we sneak out