ABSTRACT
The concern for exploring the nature of the city is an age-long effort. This endeavour was pioneered by the likes of the sociologists such as Max Weber and George Simmel. Even the first school of American sociology, the Chicago School, was partly defined by its concern for the city (Ritzer 1996). The metaphorization and tropological reconstruction of the city in African fiction always throws into sharp relief the saliency and vicissitudes of life in the continent marked and marred by a bewildering amalgam of social vices. However, the critical reception of the African-city fiction has tended to focus on texts written by writers at ‘home’: Cyprian Ekwensi's People of the City (1976), Jagua Nana (1979) and Jagua Nana's Daughter (1986); Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters (1970); Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People (1966); Meja Mwangi's Going Down River Road (1976), etc. Little critical attention has been paid to the works of African novelists in the diaspora concerning their narration of the African cities. This paper seeks to make a shift in the focus by explaining how some African shortfiction writers in Europe narrate one of their motherland's cities. This effort promises to serve as a backdrop for isolating the neocolonial decadence and modernist predicaments in Africa, and it calls to mind Frisby's claim that ‘the city is where modernity is concentrated or intensified’ (1992, p. 10). It has been in the cities, above all other settings, that most of modern predicaments of Africa and Africans are centred. The paper will investigate its subject in the round, involving the inevitable trilogy of social, economic and political structure of African cities, but also bringing in the vital cultural and architectural aspects. Negotiating the trouble with the African city from exilic writings promises to serve as a form of reimagining the world which will eventually widen our understanding of the binary opposition between home and away and recreates connectivities between home and away cultures.
