previous attempts at drawing a line between these permutations since they are all
constituents of the one and same grand formation of cosmopolitanism. The assumption of
liberty to collapse the conceptual boundaries that are constituted in exile provides us with
a more congenial basis for grappling with the issue at stake. This is essentially so because
the migration of the postcolonial world, especially to the West, has not been and cannot
be measured or appropriated exclusively in human terms. It is therefore in the design of
the cosmopolitan structure that we can take a holistic view of exile in order to have a
clear articulation and demonstration of the pervasiveness of African deracination.
The question thus becomes to what intent and purpose is such cosmopolitan design,
which privileges a planetary ethos to keep a continent’s resources on perpetual flight?
Once a question of this kind is given centrality in our response, it does not take long to
apprehend the imperialist and capitalist scheme by which the design unfolds as a logical
but unfortunate rapture from the antecedent of colonialism. To cite but two works in the
study, Kofi Anyidoho’s EarthChild emphasizes the impact of colonialism by continually
reminding us of the imperialist and oppressive activities of the “moonchildren” against
“earthchildren”. On its part, Mongane Wally Serote’s History is the Home Address
stresses the disruption of African past by colonialism, showing how South Africa
dramatizes the unique reality of this disruption: “there was pre-colonial time/ there was
slave trade/ there was colonialism/ there was apartheid/ and because these were/ there is
racism” (2004:10).
This further compels us to remind ourselves of the fundamental preoccupation of
postcolonial theory as the confrontation with and interrogation of colonialism together
with its language (Elleke Boehmer 2007:9). By the virtue of the interrogation of
colonialism, there is already a drawn line between the formerly colonized and their
colonizers. The binary that colonial history imposes on the relationship between the
North and the South thus remains one of the challenges that still confront the postcolonial
world especially Africa today. Much as such binary has often found basis for
perpetuation in notions of the “developed” and the “underdeveloped”, the rich and the
poor, the centre and the margin, the self and the other, the included and the excluded, the