there are abundant resources for extraction for transfer to the West. Upon refinement,
there is a backward cosmopolitan journey of finished products which Africa buys at
prices several times as high as the original cost of extraction.
It then stands to reason that Shameen Black (2006:45) is right to deplore modes of
writing from the Third World which celebrate “imperialist visions of world citizenship”.
The uncomfortable antithesis existing between the theory and praxis of cosmopolitanism
of this hue is best illustrated in the Ojaide’s When it no Longer Matters Where you Live,
when he engages in the opening part of the collection with the history of ships and the
meanings they generate for historically subjugated people like Africans. As he argues in
the poem “Ships”, and as I hope to have illustrated, the sight of ships only brings back
memories of the carting away of both human and material resources from Africa and
other places that have come under the colonial subjugation of the West. On the contrary,
ships will in the interpretation of the West be harbingers of civilization to Africa and the
rest of the formerly colonized world. Today, however, the exploitation of African human
resources has assumed more subtle and sophisticated dimensions since the facilitatory
role of the Chinese-invented compass which guided the various western voyages
(Chinweizu 1975: 3.) has been boosted by the convenience of aircraft, and information
technology. Blinded perhaps by the seeming comfort of the attraction, the tendency to
gloss over the coercion that lies behind the cosmopolitanism of Africans in the West
should not come as a surprise. It explains partly why cosmopolitanism is affected towards
valorizing the world in opposition to the home (Black 2006:46); not least because while
exilic victims of refugee status necessarily carry with them insignia memories of home
beyond physical reminders like their goats, the memory of home is expected to count
little to cosmopolitans.
Yet by further probing cosmopolitan claims especially with respect to its beneficiaries (or
victims), we realize how the informing catalyst for border-crossing has its foundation in
the down-turn of conditions at home. This view is reinforced by the antithesis existing
between the abstraction and its actual practice; that is, the paradox that the juxtaposition