Home and Exile: A Trialogue between Three Africans

ABSTRACT: This article is centered around three Africans who wrote on the themes of home and exile: Chinua Achebe, a celebrated Nigerian writer; Lewis Nkosi, an accomplished Black South African writer and journalist; and me, Robin Cohen, a White South African social scientist. Their views on home and exile are discussed in the form of a comparison and implicit conversation (a trialogue). The lives of these three protagonists barely touched, but there are some odd intersections that will serve to sharpen the differences between them. By shedding light on the ambiguities of what home and exile mean to different social actors, the virtuous and somewhat uniform assumptions that are frequently used to describe the exilic condition are questioned.