Beyond Backpacking: Solo “Guerrilla” Border Crossing and the Penetration of Geographies of Power in Olabisi Ajala's An African Abroad

The travel legend of Olabisi Ajala in the national and transnational imagination has generated a lot of controversies that thrive on the capacity of rumors to create and sustain legends beyond the material times of their immediate reference. Central to the dispersal of Ajala's legend is the agency of Nigerian popular music that works in a rather antagonistic way to undermine Ajala's scripted perspectives on the travels in his memoir An African Abroad (1963). By paying more attention to the narrative of the memoir, this paper examines the peculiarities of Ajala's border crossing and how they account for the capacity of the narrative to generate a legend and make a compelling read. I identify two types of borders in the memoir: physical borders and borders of power, or what I prefer to call geographies of power. Ajala's success in engaging national presidents and other political leaders in conversation rests substantially on his refusal to cooperate with security and intelligence advice at both physical borders and geographies of power. His subversion of security protocols instantiates suicidal attempts that also constitute the reason the attention of presidents of many nations is drawn to him. This paper concludes that the memoir is important not only in terms of its pioneer documentation of individual postcolonial African backpacking and border crossing; it is significant also by the very sense in which it sets the tone for subsequent forms of African border crossing.