To talk about Kofi Awoonor is to try to re-member a poet, an essayist, a novelist, a political scientist, a diplomat, and a lot more. In the introduction to his monumental study of African culture and literature, The Breast of the Earth (1975), Awoonor describes himself as ‘a cultural nationalist, teacher, artist and above all, an African’ (xi). All these were hats he wore proudly over a lifetime of vigorous dialogic engagements with post-colonial Africa’s tortured history, or what, elsewhere in his works, he refers to as the African predicament. Awoonor saw no contradiction in embracing these multiple labels; rather, he saw each as part of a larger chain of complementary roles that actively helped in his cause to be an eloquent analyser of the ills of the African society. More importantly, his active commitment to these multiple roles were, for him, part of the process of finding cures for those ills so as to make ‘the world better for others’ (‘Notes from Prison’, The African Predicament. 2006: 410). Throughout a career that spanned more than half a century, he never strayed from that commitment to the disadvantaged, and no wonder, at the very end, in his posthumously published collection Herding the Lost Lambs (2013), he could summarize his life’s mission in the lines below:

In this paper, my primary aim is to bring Awoonor’s prose fiction work into the conversation about his legacy of dealing with post-colonial Africa’s history, and the continuing relevance of this aspect of his oeuvre to us in twenty-first century Africa. Specifically, I propose to critically analyse how his two major works of prose fiction, This Earth, My Brother … (1971) and Comes the Voyager at Last (1992), tackle the traumatic aftermath of the historical dismemberment occasioned by the African Encounter with the West. The paper will analyse how the two works complement each other by engaging the psychologies of continental African and African Diasporan victims of the colonial Encounter.