CHAPTER FOUR
FROM CITY TO CITY: EXILE AND AFRICAN URBANSCAPES IN
OFEIMUN’S LONDON LETTER AND OTHER POEMS AND OJAIDE’S WHEN IT
NO LONGER MATTERS WHERE YOU LIVE
The geography of globalization contains both a dynamic of
dispersion and centralization.Saskia Sassen, “Analytic
Borderlands: Race, Gender and Representation in the
New City”
I see globalization as basically a phase of imperialism or
capitalist modernity.Biodun Jeyifo, “Globalisation and
Afropessimism: Some Preliminary Observations”
In fact, remarkably few of globalization’s fence-out people turn
to violence. Most simply move: from countryside to city, from
country to country. And that’s when they come face to face with
distinctly unvirtual fences, the ones made of chain link and razor
wire, reinforced with concrete and guarded with machine
Naomi Klein, “Fences of Enclosure, Windows of
Possibility,”
But there is enough blame to go around Anthony Appiah,
CosmopolitanismThe anxieties over globalization are as legion as the multiple meanings that the concept
itself generates. This chapter engages one of such concerns as it relates to cities and
urbanscapes both in Africa and the West, exploring in specific terms how the discourse of
exile is implicated in urbanization. To achieve this, the chapter focuses attention on
questions such as: how is the notion of globalization received in its various conceptual
drifts? How can we perceive the conditions of African cities? What is the relationship
between the dystopian conditions of African cities and western cities? To what extent
can a meaningful demarcation be drawn between African cities and western cities?
Where exile becomes the option for Africans as they migrate from African cities to cities
in Europe and America, to what degree can this movement be blamed on globalization?
Therefore what are the internal dynamics in African cities which account for the
continual movement of Africans to the West? How then may we perceive the notions of