ABSTRACT

In one of his most satiric comments on the fate of the postcolony, Chinua Achebe (1988) remarks that “we asked the white man to pack and go but did not think he would take with him all the utensils he brought when he came.” This loaded remark speaks to the acculturation of tastes with which post-independence Africa in particular has been cursed since the colonial encounter; and the corollary of displacement (of which migration is a subset) has exposed the continent’s affirmative rhetoric within the same period. The Africans who took over from the colonial masters replicated the colonial logic of subjugation so well that a polarized society was inevitable, with new margins emerging on, and fragilizing, the mortar of independence. Against such a sustained background of betrayed hopes, suppressed anger and sectarian aftermaths—and based on the Coffin Revolution that has been going on in Cameroon since 2016, migration accounts, and literary depictions of the characters from these accounts—this chapter argues that the postcolonial condition of displacement is a strategic consequence of unavailing leadership; one that mistook mimicry for hybridity in its acknowledgement of alien institutions and their ideologies, leading to the stray lifestyle that makes Africans vulnerable to a charity consciousness. The imperative for new perspectives therefore implies not novelty, but redefinitions and the prioritizing of projects within our glocalizing setup.