This study examines the interplay between translation, resistance and national consciousness by exposing the role of translation in capturing and exposing the Nigerian postcolony's past struggles for cultural recognition and current yearning for self-purification in view of such contemporaneous social realities as cultural, economic and political inequalities. African responses and resistance to these stereotypes, however, derived for the most part from an anti-imperialist nationalist ideology, which ultimately gave rise to the emergence of postcolonial translation practices. Postcolonial translation has become a double-edged sword in that it facilitates nation-building by providing creative writers with the linguistic and cultural wherewithal with which to express the national agenda, while simultaneously undermining the national configuration by allowing sub-regional cultural imaginations to thrive at the expense of national consciousness. Translation has therefore facilitated a conflicting experience of nationhood in the contemporary Nigerian nation-space that is deeply rooted in a historical legacy of religious and cultural alterity.