Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies

This essay seeks to examine transnational migration by looking primarily at 20 th- century writers historicizing the concept of the ‘post-colonial’ and pointing to its development as captured in their writing. In the paper, transnational migration is viewed as the movement of persons across national boundaries where the migrants live their lives across borders, participating simultaneously in social relations that embed them in more than one nation-state, and in which there is a process by which such immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement. Going by this definition, all major African writers (such as Ayi Kwei Armah, Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, and the like), with the possible exception of Ayi Kwei Armah, are transmigrants. This is because their migration took place—is taking place—within fluid social spaces and identity-forming contexts, which are constantly reworked through their simultaneous connectedness to more than one society. In this case, the term that better expresses this situation is ‘post-colonial’. Although there is a growing community of African writers and artists living in the West, it is uncertain how they might influence the events, politics, and cultural discussions within their original homeland. The conclusion is that it is not clear how the transmigration of African intellectuals could help shape the identity and tenor of the post-colonial African literary experience, which has been historically and culturally shaped by the impact of the African colonial experience. In this sense, then, recent migration by the African literati (specifically novelists) to the West is only the latest version of the pull that Europe and the United States of America exert on African post-colonial identity. This is not likely to slow down in the foreseeable future.