Most of the experiences represented in the works constitute another way of capturing the
ordeals of people who, one way or the other, have become victims of state violence, and
economic oppression; their exile is therefore an attempt to escape the hostile conditions
of home in order to be part of a perceived better life elsewhere in the West. But just as the
“discourse of exile thrives on detail, specificity, and locality (Naficy 4), the same way it
is possible to talk about the specificity of the conditions of home which induce exile. The
conditions of home in Ghana against which Kofi Anyidoho writes in EarthChild , for
instance, is that of a nation hemmed in by dictatorial tendencies with a crushing effect on
the economy, and ultimately forcing many to abandon home and their loved ones together
with the responsibilities of engaging in the “fertility game” (1), a metaphoric articulation
of the negation of economic productivity on the spaces of homeland. Poets like Oguibe,
Ofeimun and Ojaide have written against a similar background of military repression in
Nigeria and the deracination effect that it bred. However, with Jack Mapanje, the
condition, though still that of state repression, was not exactly the same as that of Ghana
and Nigeria in the sense that the perpetration of state repression is carried out by a
civilian despotism which has secured for itself some kind of life rulership. The South
African experience in the chosen texts by Serote rise in memory to invoke the horrors of
state repression in the era of apartheid and contemplate the implications of a new
democratic dispensation in the wake of the collapse of apartheid where the coincidence of
political liberation and economic liberalization (Jean Comaroff 2005:128) has a potential
of still engendering dispersion.
This is why “all displaced people do not experience exile equally or uniformly” (Naficy
4). In spite of this, the thought and experience of exile are concomitant with the
abstraction and practice of diaspora. For, while the thought of home remains for the most
part on the minds of exiles, there is nevertheless the challenge of living through the
present moment of displacement. The challenge applies to exiles in the countries of
arrival where certain understanding of adjustment to new life and survival is basic; but
challenge does not exclude the possibility of attaining certain forms of fulfilment.
Against the backdrop of the circumstances, both internal and external, that predicate the
migration of Africans, like their counterparts in Asia, it thus becomes understandable