uprooting and rerooting in other lands, especially in the West. This is what Christine
Brooke-Rose (1989:9) refers to as the possibility of “springing forth into a new life,
beyond the boundaries of the familiar”. Put another way, the tribulations of home which
attended the various military regimes in both countries created a thoroughly vertiginous
and treacherous social imaginary and forced many some of the most patriotic to seek
home elsewhere far beyond the boundaries of their lands.
In essence, if as pointed out earlier, an “invention” breeds reaction, then the military
dictatorship that was invented produced reactions of various kinds from the people. For
those that contemplated the option of exile and yielded subsequently, either because of
their anti-establishment stance as activists or dissidents, or as seekers of socio-economic
fulfillment in other lands, it was a confirmation of the veracity of the Foucauldian
postulation of the “winning strategy” of the state. Such monopoly resulted in the
squandering of a lot of resources and opportunities which left the people in poverty and
despair that nudged and encouraged an exit out of the failed space of the state. Ben Okri,
reflecting on the corruption and abuse of power by the military in a spiral of coups and
counter-coups, describes the condition that results as that of an “abiku” child.^17 The
effect of the despair created is further described thus: “Dad was redreaming the world as
he slept...He saw the economic boom in advance, saw its orgiastic squander, the
suffering to follow, the exile to strange land, the depleting of the people’s will for
transformation.” (492)
Measured against Huntington’s paradigm of a revolution, on the one hand, and on the
other, Tullock’s theory of coups, the soldiers failed to meet with the expectations of the
people. The 1980s were particularly significant with respect to this failure. The decade
bore the cumulative failures of the decades preceding it; it was at the same time an
adumbration of the subsequent decade of struggle. This fact makes the study all the more
interesting as both collections are set against the backdrop of the 80s. The effect of exile
it created on the people’s psyche and corporeality will therefore be worth considering.
17
“Abiku”, a mischievous spirit-child who traverses both the land of the living and the spirits through the
transitory agency of death, is a metaphor for political instability in some African writings. The most
celebrated of these works is Ben Okri’s The Famished Road.