Last week we took a brief look at contemporary African poetry as illustrated by a selection from a poet resident in Britain, Nigeria born Ben Okri, who won the Booker Prize 1991 for his novel The Famished Road. The poem selected was an example of that individual writer’s original modernist work, but a work that had echoes of an old African tradition. It provided an opportunity to show a little of what was happening in contemporary work while at the same time give an idea of the kind of traditional oral verse in Africa from which the modern poets often draw strength.
The large and important body of work known as post-colonial literature to which Okri’s work may be attached is of interest here. It grew to a great extent out of the work being produced by writers from the former British Empire, the kinds of styles and preoccupations that were developing among them, the way they were shaping and recreating the art, as well as the ways of analysing and looking critically at this work. It turned out that the term ‘post-colonial’ became a name for the theory and literary criticism that evolved as well as for the literature produced.
While it seems to have been somewhat dominated by fiction, it is of interest here because of the important contribution made to it by the poetry from Africa. Its development had something to do with the increasing communities of writers working in the United Kingdom who originated or descended from former colonies including India, Pakistan, the West Indies and the various countries in the African continent. Their work had a quality different from English literature, was preoccupied, among other things, with issues of identity, and began to shape and influence English literature and literatures in English in various ways to such an extent that it exhibited identifiable characters of its own.
The contemporary African poetry that became a part of this is varied and sometimes unrecognisable, but it grew from a strong corpus produced by African poets of previous generations in the 1960s and 1970s. It also involved writers from colonies and former colonies other than the British; notably the French and Portuguese. This work began to attract world attention for a number of reasons, including the burgeoning political issues of those times. In addition, there were those scholars such as Ulli Beier, Bernth Lindfors and Wole Soyinka, and later, Cosmo Pieterse and poet Jack Mapanje. Important and influential anthologies began to emerge in the 1960s and ’70s, which pulled volumes of these poems together and helped to advance the cause of “modern African poetry.” Most of them were published by the Heinemann African Writers Series. (Ulli Beier, a white European, was accused of inventing non-existent black Nigerian writers and using their fictitious identities to publish work that he had written himself. A collection of plays, The Imprisonment of Obatala by Obatunde Ijimere, a Nigerian Yoruba published in the Heinemann Series was named as one of these.)
Among the early defining anthologies were A Book of African Verse (eds John Reed and Clive Wake, 1964), Modern Poetry from Africa, followed by Poems of Black Africa edited by Wole Soyinka in 1975 and Summer Fires (eds Angus Calder, Jack Mapanje and Cosmo Pieterse, 1983). There were political issues which assisted their march forward. These include the development of nationalism and movements towards independence among several African countries; issues surrounding colonialism and decolonisation; European wars; revolutionary wars in Africa; and prejudice and racism in Europe. There was also the N
