of misrule and bungling on the part of the military forced the fate of exile upon citizens
either directly or indirectly. In addition, the chapter examines the irony and the paradox
that exist between the thought of escaping hardship by the exiles as they move to the
West and the realities that await them in their countries of destination. In this analysis of
the representation of exile as the logical consequence of political misrule, the chapter will
also comment on the poets’ artistic virtuosity in the articulation of their thrust.
Focusing on Mapanje’s “Sketches from London” in Of Chameleons and the Gods and
against the background of oppressive civilian rule in Malawi, Chapter Three
demonstrates among other things, the initial exilic consciousness of Mapanje. It will
further show how the first period of exile set the antecedent for the present sense of exile
that one encounters in The Last of the Sweet Bananas. On the other hand, this chapter will
explore the consistency of the poet’s opinion of the myth of social and infrastructural
sophistication of the western world herein appropriately represented by Britain in a time
interval of about twenty-five years. It will examine the sarcastic tone of his poetry on this
issue with a view to pointing out the vulnerability of British socio-structural flanks to the
same vagaries found in any other part of the Third World. In the final analysis, the
chapter will locate the exilic condition within the context of struggle for survival against
the native forces of exclusion. Crucial to the intended explication in this chapter is the
need to frame it by a critical response to the claims of western modernity with respect to
journey in particular, and the resultant transnationalism that one encounters in The Last of
the Sweet Bananas.
Chapter Four is preoccupied with Odia Ofeimun’s London Letter and Other Poems and
Ojaide’s When it no Longer Matters Where you Live as direct responses to the concept of
globalization. More specifically, the chapter is illuminated by the understanding that the
politics of space in general and the cityscape in particular is central to the practice of
globalization. Therefore, the chapter engages with the dynamics of city politics between
the North and the South and how these dynamics have ingested migration and exile of
people from African post-colonies in the era of globalization to the North, especially
Europe and America. Reckoning that the dystopian conditions of postcolonial nation-