Coming to Terms with New Ageist Contamination: Cosmopolitanism in Ben Okri'sThe Famished Road

African Literature and the Future

“…Mathew Green, in his study of A Way of Being Free and Mental Fight (Romanticism 2008), argues for an imaginative engagement with the economic base of history; while Mabiala Kenzo, also reading The Famished Road, opines that there should be a borrowing of 'insights from resources that are both endogenous and exogenous to Africa and their own tribal contexts' (2004:1) such that the travails occasioned by religious bigotry would be forestalled. From a literary perspective, Douglas McCabe (2005) and Esther de Bruijn (2007), in the context of The Famished Road, are in counter-dialogue of whether Africa's bankruptcy should be resolved with new ageism or cosmopolitanism. In fact, speculations about an ideal Africa in this century have become divergent and are increasingly becoming problematic themselves, exemplified by McCabe and Bruijin's stand-off, because there are no perfect solutions.…”