betterment. This way Africans bragging about their cosmopolitanism will no longer leave
us with intellectual and productivity gaps in the continent as their pride will no longer be
in advancing the development of the West with their exile contributions, but will be more
interested in remaining at home. Even if they must “go away,” it will essentially be for
the advancement of the economic, social, cultural and technological status of the
continent. This then is the morality that should serve as the groundwork upon which the
postcolonial world should launch itself into the new millennium.
On the basis of the above proposition, we may choose at this point to respond to Appiah’s
indictment of “exaggeration” against postcolonial intellectuals. First, we must accept the
fact that the poets whose works have come under study in this research are qualified to
belong to that class of intellectuals whose interrogation of colonialism via the abstraction
and practice of migrancy in the name cosmopolitanism of whatever hue, has done so to
the extent of disagreeing, in varying degrees, with the dimensions of contemporary
African migration to the West. At face value, the deracination caused by factors both
internal and exponential in the various African countries, have done more to refract from
the development of the continent than they have advanced its vision. What is more, there
is a leveling of both intellectuals who exude the air of free cosmopolitans and non-
intellectuals who more often than not are perceived as the real exiles since the
circumstances of their dislocation from their home countries are easily designated as
coercive. Thus where home has become undesirable because of its many dystopian
indices, it has nonetheless remained indispensable. This is why the dialectic of home and
exile in the works under study compels a coordinated platform for the preservation of the
integrity and survival of home, which translates into the nation state and ultimately the
African continent. The discussion thus returns us to the question of nationalism. However
it must be remarked that nationalism, being a relatively recent concept, more so in the
postcolonial context, should not be seen as an end in itself; not least because its colonial
antecedent compels us to admit the artificiality of its imposition, which continually
accounts for why subnationalist solidarity and agitations are on the increase even in the
21 st century. Nevertheless, these subnational modes of articulation have always relied on
the broader template of the nation for expression. It then accounts for why the nation