IGWEBUIKE: African Journal of Arts and Humanities

The phenomenon of migration is not new in Africa. The migration of African citizens to different climes has been influenced by the dynamics of social, economic, political and ecological conditions and processes. These experiences as re-presented in the oeuvres of Chika Unigwe – On Black Sister’s Street and Better Never than Late present indicators that reflect the complex realities of the causes of migration and responses of migrants to the effects of migration in transnational boundaries. This paper evaluates migration experiences to identify what type of hybrid and connected spaces these migration experiences are producing, what segregated and integrated social worlds they are fostering, and how they are reconfiguring the African continent an around transnational borders. The paper identifies ambivalent psychological conflicts in ideologies such as gender relations, varying gradations of exploitations, dissonance arising from transcultural conflicts and the long for home in exile as experiences of migrants in the novels. The reproach perspective in the analysis of the characters in the texts point to the conclusion that migration rather plagues Africa and remains a significant phenomenon perpetrated against Africanism by Africans who should advocate fixing the African depreciating polity through psychological re-definition rather than migrating.

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