Tanure Ojaide is most acclaimed for his award-winning The Fate of Vultures (1990). This
Nigerian professor of Humanities is credited with numerous titles including Eagle’s Vision
(1987) and Labyrinths of the Delta (1986). But this study focuses on When it no Longer
Matters where you Live (1998). He has also made remarkable contributions to African
critical scholarship especially with his books, The Poetry of Wole Soyinka (1994) and Poetic
Imagination of Africa (1990). His poetry is defined by an unambiguous concern for the
neglect of his Niger-Delta people in Nigeria. But this is not to the exclusion of other issues
affecting Africa and the world in general.
Olu Oguibe is a professor of Visual Art and a rising voice in postcolonial theorizing. He has to
date a lone collection, A Gathering Fear (1988) which nevertheless has been acclaimed a
remarkable contribution in the generation, a fact attested to by the series of both national and
international awards he has received on account of the publication. Besides, the frequency of its
mention in critical circles is a testimony to this comment. It is a work in which the pains of exile
are unequivocally expressed while drawing attention to the equally frightening realities at home.
The distantiated condition notwithstanding, the love for home also defines this work. It is
interesting to remark further that his artistic concern for the condition of space and crossing with
respect to Africa is expressed in his edited theoretical and critical text, Crossing: Time , Space,
Movement (1997).
Kofi Anyidoho is easily Ghana’s most acclaimed poet besides the older Kofi Awoonor. His
collections include Elegy for the Revolution (1978), A Harvest of our Dreams (1984), EarthChild
(1985) and more recently Praise Song for the Land (2002). Like Olu Oguibe, he has also edited a
book on exile: The Word behind Bars and the Paradox of Exile (1997). This professor of literature
also has several other seminal critical texts to his credit, besides edited works. Among these are
Interdisciplinary Dimensions of African Literature (1982), The African Ideal in Literatures of the
Black World , (1989) and Oral Poetics and Traditions of Verbal Art in Africa (1990).
Jack Mapanje is a professor of Linguistics. He remains arguably Malawi’s finest and most
renowned poet whose debut, Of Chameleons and Gods (1981), as well as the controversy in which
it was caught was partly responsible for his imprisonment by the regime of the then president of