To Palm Wine 
Alimotu of the gourd
Lamihun in the fibrous clump
Dawn it is that heralds your approach
When evening comes, the drum crooks taps
Taps, taps in gladness
Mistress of tuppence only, yet
Chased the millionaire into the forest.
You are that which the horse drank
Drank, drank and forgot his horns
You are that which the cock drank
Drank, drank and forgot to urinate
You are that which the guinea fowl drank
Drank, till a cry pierced his throat
And he took to the wilds . . .
Traditional (from the Yoruba)
Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, in introducing the anthology of African poetry, Poems of Black Africa (Hienemann, 1975) writes of the poetic experience in Black Africa and compares it closely with the poetic experience universally. This publication was an important collection of African poetry and one of the contributions of the Heinemann “African Writers Series” to the phenomenal rise of modern African literature in English. It began to take shape in the 1950s and escalated through the 1960s.
This corpus of work weaned itself from Commonwealth Literature to become an international force in its own right and name. It was already well established when Soyinka’s anthology came out, which was, more than anything else, drawing together in one collection much of what had already been published separately. In many ways, the history and development of this writing may be compared to West Indian literature, and the truth of Soyinka’s reference to the poetry experience everywhere can easily be seen.
But these comparisons can very especially be seen in those branches of Commonwealth Literature such as the writings of Africa, the West Indies or India, which grew out of the colonial experience. While all Commonwealth countries have this colonial background, there are important differences between those and others such as the Canadian, Australian or South African.
