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AFRICA, POETRY OF

I. English

II. French

III. Portuguese

IV. Indigenous.See EGYPT, POETRY OF; ETHIOPIA, POETRY OF; HAUSA POETRY; SOMALI POETRY; SWAHILI POETRY; XHOSA POETRY; ZULU POETRY.

I. English. With the end of the colonial period and the advance of literacy and higher education in Africa came a rapid efflorescence of Af. poetry written in Eng. This poetry displays the variety to be expected in so diverse a continent. Like other examples of postcolonial poetics, Af. poetry in Eng. develops out of the fusion of indigenous trads. with the literary inheritances transmitted through the colonial lang. It is responsive to local idioms, values, and hist. and at the same time remakes for Af. experience the forms and styles imported through Eng. from the Brit. Isles, America, and elsewhere. The adoption of the Eng. lang. for Af. purposes, while advantageous to writers who wish to be heard by an international audience, is fraught with political significance. Some Af. critics contend that poetry written in a historically imperialist lang. cannot be fully disassociated from colonialism's oppressive legacy.

Af. poetry written in Eng. is often seen as divided between poetry that is locally rooted and influenced by Af. oral trads. and cosmopolitan poetry, which is indebted primarily to Western literary trads. The work of Af. poets, however, complicates this distinction, since even the most cosmopolitan poets, such as the Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka, also draw on local oral trads., and even the most local, such as the Ugandan poet Okot p'Bitek (1931–82), also make use of Western literary models. In the wake of colonialism and under the influence of globalization, Af. poetry in Eng. is inextricable from Brit., Ir., Am., and other influences, even when in revolt against the West's values and cultural forms. Conversely, in the West, the descendants of enslaved Africans and economic migrants have fundamentally shaped poetry.

The first poem in the sequence "Heavensgate" (1962, rev. 1964) by Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo (1932–67) serves as an example of the enmeshment of Af. and Western poetics in sub-Saharan Africa. The poet invokes the Igbo river goddess, near the village where he grew up: "Before you, mother Idoto / naked I stand." Reaffirming his affinity with native culture, Okigbo grounds his poem in local religion and flora (naked, he leans on the oilbean tree, sacred to Idoto, a totem for her worship). At the same time, his diction (referring to himself as "a prodigal" further in the poem) and rhet. ("Before you, mother Idoto") also recall the Christianity that missionaries imported into Igboland. The lyric is shaped by the Roman Catholicism in which Okigbo was brought up, incl. prayers to the Virgin Mary and the story of the prodigal son. The poem's final lines, which cry out to a native divinity, paradoxically echo Psalm 130 ("Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord") and Psalm 5 ("Give ear to my words, O Lord. ... Hearken unto the voice of my cry").

Although Af. poets are indebted to religious, lyric, and other cultural forms from the West, they seldom lose their awareness of Africa's rich oral trads. A poem such as Okot p'Bitek's Lawino (1966) relies on Acholi songs, proverbs, repetitions, idioms, and oral address, even as it also draws on the model of the Western long poem (Okot has cited H. W. Longfellow's "Hiawatha" as a key influence). An aggrieved village woman inveighs against her husband for forsaking his local culture and being too enamored of Western ways: "Listen, Ocol, you are the son of a Chief, / Leave foolish behavior to little children." In her book-length complaint, Lawino repeatedly brandishes an Acholi proverb that warns against uprooting the pumpkin; in so doing, she emphasizes the importance of preserving the household, as well as the oral trads. that sustain it.

Between the poles marked out by Okigbo's highly literary, allusive, syntactically complex early poetry and Okot's orally based poetics of song, praise, and invective, Af. poetry has discovered a multitude of ways to mediate the oral and scribal, the local and global, the socially urgent protest and the private meditation. Indeed, as an Oxford-trained anthropologist influenced by Longfellow and the Bible, Okot cannot be reduced to simple nativism. And as a poet who absorbs drum rhythms and praise song into his later work, Okigbo — who died fighting for an independent Biafra — should not be seen as a Westernized sellout. Under the influence of intensified global communication, trade, education, and travel, younger poets work in ever-more deeply hybrid and transnational forms. The South Af. Lesego Rampolokeng (b. 1965), e.g., draws on a global array of influences, incl. rap musicians, the Af. Am. Last Poets, Jamaican dub poet Mutabaruka, and Jamaicanborn Brit. reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, to mount a vehement social critique of his country both before and after apartheid.

From the period of Af. decolonization, first formally achieved in anglophone Africa with Ghana's independence in 1957, to today's struggle against both external economic imperialism and the internalized colonialism of dictators and tyrants, oral and other traditional poetry has strongly influenced Af. Eng. poems. The imprint of Af. oral culture is visible in such fundamental elements as the poet's stance as defender of communal values; allusions to the hist., customs, and artifacts of the culture; and the architectonic features adapted from praise song, proverbial tale, epic, invective, and indigenous prayer. Experiments in the transmutation of traditional Af. poetic forms into Eng. vary with the culture represented.

Arising in the aftermath of modernism, much Af. Eng. poetry eschews meter and rhyme in favor of free verse, often ornamented by alliteration and assonance, although rap's influence has spawned intensely rhymed and rhythmic verse. Poems that are meant to speak to, or for, Af. communities avoid extended conceits unless they are buttressed by hard or sardonic reason or concrete imagery.

A. West Africa. West Africa, particularly Nigeria and Ghana, has the oldest and most influential trad. of sophisticated poetry in Eng. This lyric poetry combines audacious leaps of thought and individualized expression with social responsibility; it privileges the metaphysical, religious, and social concepts of its own society, although it also draws on concepts indigenous to Eur. cultural hist. When social protest is overt, it is usually presented with intellectual and artistic complexity rather than simplistic fervor. Exemplary Nigerian poets and their principal works include the country's oldest active poet Gabriel Okara (b. 1921; The Fisherman's Invocation [1978], written against the background of civil war); Christopher Okigbo (Labyrinths [1971], incl. the prophetic sequence "Path of Thunder"); J. P. Clark (b. 1935; Reed in the Tide [1965], incl. autobiographical poems; Casualties [1970], concerning the war between Nigeria and Biafra; A Decade of Tongues [1981]; State of the...