home address” serious through the present festive rerun of the African diaspora produced
significantly through the Atlantic Slave Trade. Even if the narrative character reckons
that the return from “Brazil... America... and Islands of the Caribbean” to “Accra the
Ashante” may not be in the right direction, perhaps because they are on “a one way
street” (30), their return provides the virtue from which those contemporary Africans
faced with travel should take a cue. From another angle, here is also an attempt to show
how the management of time past merges into time present. It then goes without saying
that the inter-space dialogue that such return suggests and ingests goes to reinforce the
relevance of the African postcolonial nation state in the scheme of things. As well as the
above, the reflection on the present drift of people from the postcolonial nation state to
the West does not end at the level of the physical. It is also crucially intellectual.
However, the danger that this poses can be far greater in some instances. For the retention
of the relevance and development of the nation-state presupposes that there is an abiding
intellectual and cultural sympathy for any given nation state. Where this is lacking and in
its place there is an unbridled patronage of western imperial ideologies, the consequences
can be dismally annihilating. Consequent upon this the third part of the poem, among
other things, addresses this menace of intellectual drift as a metaphorical form of exile
and migration.
To achieve this, the narrative voice assumes the position of an old, disappointed
uneducated South African but who constitutes the link between the present and the past.
By the same token, he is also a veritable source of the prosecution and success of the
liberation struggle. The voice in its justifiable agitation displays a knowing analysis of the
social malady of “the poverty [that] smells like... sweat/ and blinds and deforms” (41) in
the South African nation many years after the end of the liberation struggle. The
foregoing then forms the basis for arguing that much as globalization impinges on the
integrity and survival of the postcolonial nation state through the perpetuation of resource
dispersal and flight to the North, the resultant human flight that follows in form of
migration to the North cannot be entirely blamed on the concept. In other words, the
violence and exclusion engendered by globalization that is, where the occasion
demands a foregrounding of its shortcomings are necessitated by the complicity of the