exacerbated by other forms of exclusion depending on the country of arrival. It may be
helpful to ponder Klein’s sense of this situation:
In fact, remarkably few of globalization’s fenced-out people turn to violence. Most simply
move: from countryside to city, from country to country. And that’s when they come face to
face with distinctly unvirtual fences, the ones made of chain link and razor wire, reinforced
with concrete and guarded with machine. (197)But such perspective of victimhood, that is, the representation of the postcolonial world
as a victim of the global North, deserves further critical exploration. Once we apply our
minds to this, it begins to dawn on us that what is considered to be the supranational
conspiracy of globalization and as championed by the West and its allies through trade
and the vestiges of colonialism, has been going on for this long because there is a
complicity charge of which the postcolonial nation states are guilty. This is why in the
texts that engage with globalization and exile in this study, I have sought to show how the
coercive movement of Africans to the West cannot be entirely blamed on the imperialist
agenda of globalization. Indeed, the extent to which the African postcolonial nation state
is rendered powerless and obsolescent in the face of globalization must also be seen as a
result of the wilful collaboration of the elite, especially the political elite to betray the
primacy of the economic well-being of their states in order to share in the booties of
imperialism. For instance, in Ofeimun’s London Letter and Other Poems , the movement
of people from the city of Lagos to London is induced not only by the external forces of
globalization, but also, and significantly so, by the neglect of the political elite which was
mainly drawn at this historical time from the military class. The import of this neglect is
vividly captured in “Lagoon” where the persona “let the lagoon speak for my memory/
though offended by water hyacinth/ waste and nightsoil...” (3).
The violence of poverty carried out against the masses during the era of military rule
especially in the 1980s and 90s emanated from the military’s insatiable desire for
embezzlement of public funds. It then explains why the funds from the world financial
bodies, much as their terms were unsympathetic to true development in the postcolonial
nation state, could have ultimately made some difference in the people’s standard of
living. So while the austerity measures resulted in the growth of unemployment as local