Ojaide Releases a New Memoir

Dr. Tanure Ojaide, Frank Porter Graham Professor, has released a new memoir that focuses on his recent itineraries in the Global South and North America. In At Home, Away from Home: A Memoir (Cissus World Press, Milwaukee, 2017), Ojaide provides reflections on the plight of the former African colonial subject and now postcolonial citizen caught in the torrents of displacement and emplacement by the forces of global empires. As a member of the global literati and a celebrated professor in North America, who is also a humble local “boy” from the Niger Delta (Nigeria), Ojaide embodies the complications, promises, and contradictions of post-coloniality. So do billions of others from the Global South. In this riveting memoir of fifteen short stories, Ojaide uses the self as a mirror of the postcolonial world. He addresses the agonies and joys of migration and shifting places, as well as the challenges of inter-cultural translations. He lucidly probes the pertinent questions of heritage, belonging, citizenship, and home in the postcolonial space where the caricature of modernity is in full display. He reflects on a world where globalism and globalization have not transcended the epistemic ideology of inequality, control, and power of a miniscule cabal over the world populations. For anyone seeking to know what contemporary Africa is all about and where the continent may be heading, Ojaide’s latest memoir offers a rich fodder for contemplation and understanding. — by Akin Ogundiran 4/5/17