From this point on, the desire is to make a return to the homeland in the wake of the
explosion of the myth of American and American city’s Utopia: “ Sometimes I cry my
eyes red for night in bed./ Wetin my eye don see for here pass pepper/ make me de
prepare to go sweet home.” (Sometimes I weep sore in bed/I have been witness to
peppery persecution / I had better prepare for a return to sweet home)(106). The idea of
“sweet home” returns the discussion to the home within a home that the Niger Delta
cityscapes presuppose for people from this region; but also presupposes return to the
nation and could apply to any other part Nigeria. The implication of the subnationalist
consciousness as “a distinctively African cultural emphasis on respect for locally specific
autonomy within a set of territory-wide identities” can thus not be ignored. The very
deployment of pidgin for the articulation of the desire to return, as explained earlier,
reinforces this claim.
Conclusion
In all, this chapter has engaged with the question of exile from the viewpoint of African
cities and urbanscapes and the way this question is impacted upon by the phenomenon of
globalization. It has also dealt with the consequences of exclusion of the masses from
economic and social benefits in Africa and how the exclusion breeds exile beyond the
boundaries of the continent as victims migrate to western cities in hope of better
conditions of living. By so doing, it has exploded the myth of the concentric or “annular”
study of Western cities as prosperous global metropolitan centres that are beautiful all
together. The utopian narrative that is woven around these cities in Europe and America
has, therefore, come under the scrutinizing lenses of a counter-narrative approach by
which the historical antecedents of imperialism that dog these Western spaces of
urbanity, described in contemporary parlance as global cities of North, deserve re-
conception once their relationship, both historical and contemporary, with cities in the
global South is taken into account. Emphasizing in particular how the migration of
Africans is engendered by capital flight to the North, the dynamics of contemporary
capitalism mediated through globalization is brought to the fore. More particularly, by
focusing on Odia Ofeimun’s London Letter and Other Poems and Tanure Ojaide’s When
it no Longer Matters where You Live , the chapter has explored these dynamics of