and comments on the total human condition.The disillusionment engendered by the failure of the revolution created an elegy whose
lugubrious litanies are extended in EarthChild. Therefore in EarthChild one is confronted
with the hard consequences of the failed military revolution. It has created a “human
condition” which though universal, has a peculiar implication not just for Ewe
nationality, but for the entire Ghanaian world, and the African world in general. Thus it is
interesting to note that in putting up the collection for criticism, the understanding of the
human condition of displacement begins to get through when one applies one’s mind to
the logic of Ewe cultural history as recounted by the author himself:
African societies and communities of African-heritage people worldwide are rushing into
the 21st century in a state of despair and even panic. By certain ironies of history, they
were stampeded into directions they did not intend to follow. And now, breathless and
quite dazed they have arrived at a point where they seem to have lost not only a sense of
where they are or should be going, but even a knowledge of where they were before the
stampede. They are trapped in a state of stasis, in what has been described as “a culture of
survival not of development”. (1992: 45)It explains why as an anticipation of African and Black preoccupation in the 21st century
he forecasts that it will be nothing but “the problem of the line between death and life”
(45). Nevertheless, he unequivocally canvases for development. This returns the
discussion to that of a necessary probe of the “stampede” to which African peoples were
victims. It is also why the interpretation to which exile yields itself in the collection is as
dynamic as it is intricately complex. The indictment of the military could as well be
superficial in the face of the historical fact of western imperial entrapment of Africa. In
other words, going back beyond the immediate situation in which political generals are
deservedly demonized, one will surely arrive at the core of Ghana’s and Africa’s
diasporic problems generally. This first confronts one with the dialectic of
“moonchildren” as a commentary on the extent of western imperial project, which is a
seriatim on the continent. It was a capitalist project implemented against “earthchildren”
in various forms. The emerging subtext of the sequence of western imperialism is that
there is, on the part of the poet, an acknowledgement of a rootedness of Africans on the
continent. It has however been threatened and disrupted by the coming of
“moonchildren”. The compromise of the rootedness of the African world is perhaps most