takes precedent over exile in Mapanje, which is why the longing for return cannot be
denied.
The kernel of critical exploration in Chapter Four has been the interrogation of the
liberalization of border-crossing of various kinds as a positive development and response
to the unprecedented and accelerated compression of time and space in the age of
globalization. To engage this assumption, the study of Ofeimun’s London Letter and
Other Poems and Ojaide’s When it no Longer Matters Where you Live has been
positioned as direct responses to some of the claims of globalization. In more specific
terms, the chapter has been concerned with how such response of border-crossing from
Africa to the West highlights the socio-economic tussle between the global cities of the
North and the non-global cities of the South. Needless to say, at the base of the
instigation, which stresses the dystopian condition of African cities as a reason for human
flight to the West, is the subtly disguised motive of neo-liberal capitalism. For once the
migrants from African cities arrive in the global cities of the North, they more often than
not discover to their chagrin that the utopian texture which the cities of the North appear
to radiate to gain attraction from the South is nothing other than a grand design in make-
believe. The situation is worsened by the realization that the pursuit of capital that has
taken flight from Africa to the West can hardly be a success, much less for the
availability of engagement than for the exclusionary practices of host nations which
consistently drive a wedge between labour and capital acquisition especially if such is
intended to be taken back to countries of origin. Common to both texts, however, is the
impossibility of discounting the degree of complicity of the internal dynamics of state
misrule as highly contributory to the exilic option that citizens take in the end.
While for instance London Letter and Other Poems illustrates the contradiction of
expectation and disappointment in the case of migrants who have moved from Lagos to
London, When it no Longer Matters where you Live speaks to the limits of cosmopolitan
euphoria in the movement from the Niger Delta Cities of Nigeria to American cities.
Both texts thus appropriate the memory of colonial and imperial travel to chart and
illuminate the current movement of Africans to the West, and concluding in varying, yet