should be seen as a tool, that is, a resistance strategy within the domain of the
postcolonial to challenge all forms of western imperialist agenda that may confront the
postcolonial world.
On the whole, the foregoing argument verges on the issues surrounding the engagement
of this research. Chapter One, for instance, has been preoccupied with the
conceptualization of exile within the domain of postcolonial discourse. By so doing, it
has not only endeavored to undertake an exploration between exile and postcolonial
theory, but has also equally engaged with the thin line existing between exile and other
similarly configured concepts within the broad-based discourse of migration such as
diaspora, migrancy, transnationalism, transnation, globalization, cosmopolitanism, among
others. Importantly, the chapter has shown how in a sense these concepts do not only
relate but also display a disposition towards mobility and interchangeability, that is, once
we do not subject their individual drifts to finical rigidity. It is this flexibility of
conception that has enhanced the discussion of exile in the selected texts.
It thus explains why in Chapter Two the study has examined the dialectic of home and
exile using Oguibe’s A Gathering Fear and Anyidoho’s EarthChild. The task in the
chapter has essentially been that of demonstrating how military dictatorship had served as
a vector for the deracination of people from the West African countries of Nigeria and
Ghana, and by implication, many other parts of African that came under the bubonic
plague of military jackboots. Yet beyond this obvious background against which the
chapter sets out, I have also shown that by taking liberty with colonial memory, the high-
handedness of the military class could be read as an unfortunate rapture from and
consolidation of the same rule of force by which colonialism was perpetrated on Africa.
Thereafter, the pains of exile are explored beginning with A Gathering Fear in which the
divisive condition of the Nigerian nation state as home shortly before and after the Civil
War accrued to deny the author as well as many others that were victims of the war,
especially from the East, a true sense of home. The aggravation of all this in the wake of
the war by military dictatorship then leaves many with the option of fleeing the land to
the West. The tragedy of escaping from home in search of a space of peace and survival