African continent. This is essentially because of the tribulations that have dogged the
lives of the African diaspora in the West. Of course, while this view is a basis for why
Africa remains crucial in the discussion of Black diaspora, it does not fail to inspire
counter-critical perspectives which interrogate this view as one may find in articulations
of the sentiments of the Black Atlantism as advocated by Paul Gilroy and others in this
school of thought. In this case, Black Atlantism, among other things, seeks to transcend
the question of race or soul in the contemplation of Africa and its diaspora (Michael
Echeruo 1999:3). How this precursory experience of the Black diaspora is expressed in
its literature will be explored later in this section; suffice it to say the discussion will
return to exile experience in the continental Africa of modern times.
However, to say that persecution is all there is to the configuration of African diaspora in
the West is to miss the mark. The point returns the discussion to the “Black presence”
phenomenon especially in America, which Okpewho (1999: xiii-xiv) contends is
manifest in every area of the American configuration: from culture to literature to the
making and consolidation of the American capitalist economy. To the extent that there is
a measure of logic in the foregoing argument, exile with respect to the conditions of
African diaspora originally formulated through the historical antecedent of slavery must
as well be considered from an angle that transcends the calamity that defines the initial
expulsion of people from their homeland. To echo Nikos Papastergiadis (1993: 1), the
apprehension of exile must transcend inflections of political banishment and incorporate,
among other things, “the dislocation of peoples by economic pressures and [more
substantially as in the case of the bulk of Black diaspora] the redefinition of values and
norms through cultural transformation. In this sense exile embraces the totality of
ruptures that pervade the mechanisms and constitute the dynamism of social change.”
Exile and Modern African Poetry
If so far the attempt in this introduction has been to establish the genesis of African large
scale migration/ exile to the West, it is also important to incorporate the memory of the
trade and its aftermath for African exile. This is in order to show what subsequently