images of motion and movement to drive home the point about the dystopian state of an
oil-rich cityscape:
I wandered into Igbudu Market road,
a labyrinth of dishevelled uniform
ochre-painted, grey, and unlit.
I have seen an armada of fecal trash
assault with toxic blast that lays waste
the afflicted neighbourhood damp, sour air
that disperses death in the isolated ward.
I have witnessed bloated feet wade naked
through this slush of unlettered street
everywhere urinary, toilet, or vast spittoon;
I faced sweat-logged wraiths as easily knocked
down by motor-bikes as by fever and want.
I walked through malarial rot
fetid pools of floors, evacuated hearths;
pots rust from dearth of naira.
Can I, burning from thirst, drink from here
without contracting one of the many plagues;
Or ready for lunch split the leftovers
without a running stomach to contend with?
O heart sore from this graphic vision,
what love of residents of drifting detritus
will lead me to share that loaf
ever stale in the mouth, ever damp
but fills a million mouths?
I have encountered the raw end of another life,
the smothering mire I want destroyed.
And my song rises out of this haunting vision,
a vast net that’s caught so many
that they don’t even know how deep
and gone they are in the trap,
Igbudu Market road. (44)The case of “Igbudu Market road”, a symbol of economic and social capital in the city of
Warri, brings to the foreground the contradictory condition of the Niger Delta cityscape.
This is the more so when one reckons that, assessed against the backdrop of the global
capitalist consolidation of division of labour, the relevance of the city is in its
identification with the production of crude oil which is thereafter exported mainly to the
West with greater values to its buyers than for the seller. According to Garth Myers and
Martin Murray (2006:3-4), African cities, right from the earliest period of contact with
the West, had been central to the prosecution of global capital and commodity flow;
however, “the current phase of global economic restructuring has brought about a