It is against this backdrop of the overwhelming socio-political situation of military
repression that Olu Oguibe’s A Gathering Fear and Kofi Anyidoho’s Earthchild will be
considered. The choice of poetry in this analysis is especially appropriate if one takes as
instructive the view that even up to this moment the holdovers of colonialism as the
genealogy of postcolonial disarray and trauma could find peculiar expression in poetry.
The works will therefore serve well to undertake a “worlding” of an “earthed” or
repressed postcolonial condition which attests to the effects of a collective unconscious
acquired in the process of the making of their repressed past. But more importantly, the
reputation of literature in giving “us insight into physical affect” (Khanna 158) remains
valid as these texts constitute a reinvention of postcolonial world whose vulnerability to
dislocation is best understood in terms of such “physical affect”.
Uneasy Double Attachment: The Agony of Home and Exile in Olu Oguibe’s A
Gathering Fear
Olu Oguibe’s A Gathering Fear is set against the backdrop of General Ibrahim
Babangida’s dictatorship. He had taken over power in August 1985 after staging a palace
coup against the regime of Major Generals Mohammed Buhari and Tunde Idiagbon, of
which he was Chief of Army Staff. The duo had dominated the nation’s political scene
after their overthrow of the democratic government headed by Alhaji Shehu Shagari in
- They did so, on the pretext that the corruption level of the politicians and their
dereliction of duties to the people had become unbearable. The achievment of what was
later to be labelled a two-man regime Buhari and Idiagbon was the level of discipline
and environmental sanitation the country witnessed. This was especially so in the then
capital Lagos and other cities. Theirs was an uncompromising stance on discipline. But
then whatever they achieved within the space of less than two years in terms of discipline
and sanitation was eclipsed by the level of their extremism and harshness in the execution