African Poetry

Introduction

African literature, including poetry, finds its roots in a long tradition of oral literature in over three thousand native languages. With European colonial intrusions between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries, much literature from the continent was expressed in English, French, Portuguese, and other languages, particularly Arabic in North Africa. Postcolonial literatures and poetry continue in a variety of languages and a combination of traditions.

Oral traditions

Traditionally, oral poetry was produced by specialized, trained poets who were connected to kings, chiefs, spiritual figures, or secret societies. In addition, certain groups, such as hunters, farmers, cattle herders, and warriors, had designated poets. Oral poets were often descended from family lineages. A large body of oral poems from Africa has been recorded, translated, and published. Traditional oral poets recited in indigenous languages, such as Hausa, Yoruba, Ewe, Kongo, Igbo, Mandika, Fulani, Wolof, Zulu, Tswana, Gikuyu, and Swahili. Performance artistry—memorization, improvisation, and gesture—and audience response are part of the oral presentation, which has social and cultural significance. The oral poet who recites well-known pieces can introduce self-inspired innovations.

Used to honor and criticize, the most widely discussed form of oral poetry is the praise poem, generally associated with royal courts but also applicable to other social strata. Praise poetry is designated by such names as oriki (Yoruba), maboko (Tswana), izibongo (Zulu), and ijala, poetry of professional Yoruba hunters. Among the Akan, women are known for their proficiency in the funeral dirge. Usually, the praise poem of the court poet rendered historical lineage and stressed positive characteristics, but a poem of this nature could also remind the celebrated figure of responsibilities to the community. A “freelance” oral poet can offer praise and possibly criticism of individuals of lesser status. There are a number of names for oral poets: griot (Mandinka), kwadwumfo (Asante), imbongi (southern Africa), azmaris (Ethiopia), and umusizi (central Africa). The umusizi of Rwanda recited at ceremonial occasions such as births, initiations, and funerals. The spiritual role of certain oral poets is exemplified by the Yoruba babalawo, whose verse is distinctly musical. Yoruba Ifa divination, associated with the Ifa oracle, is expressed in verses. Among the forms of oral poetry, which can be accompanied by drums and stringed instruments, are elegies, lyrics, political pieces, and children’s songs. In addition, such African epics as Sundjata (Gambia) and The Epic of Liyongo (Kenya) display oral influences. Though the authorship of older oral poetry is often unknown, certain individuals have been recognized, such as the eighteenth-century Somali poet Ugaas Raage.

Early written poetry

The earliest written poetry can be represented by Egyptian hieroglyphs such as the obelisk inscriptions of Queen Hatshepsut, Eighteenth Dynasty. Other early written poetry by writers of African descent is in such languages as Arabic, Latin, Portuguese, Swahili, Amharic, and Hausa. Antar (sixth century) and Rukn al-Din Baibars (c. 1268-?) wrote in Arabic, suggesting the Islamic influence; Juan Latino (c. 1518-c. 1594) in Latin; and Domingos Caldas Barbosa (c. 1738-1800) in Portuguese. The Kenyan woman Mwana Kupona binti Msham (d. 1865), who wrote in Swahili, composed “Poem of Mwana Kupona” (1858), addressed to her daughter. Ethiopian Blatta Gäbrä Egzi’abeḥĪr (c. 1860-?), educated in Eritrea, is reputedly the first to have written Amharic poetry.

Colonial period

Paralleling the legacy of oral verse, modern African written poetry developed through a series of generations, each coming to prominence in successive eras encompassing the colonial, liberation, and independence periods. As a result of the political and cultural impact of European colonialism during the first half of the twentieth century, the path to poetic recognition involved writing in the dominant colonial languages, which influenced poetic style and form: English (anglophone), French (francophone), and Portuguese (lusophone). Some of the principal poets born between 1900 and 1930 were the Madagascan (francophone) Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo; the Senegalese (francophone) Annette M’Baye d’Erneville; Ghanaians (anglophone) Gladys May Casely-Hayford, Michael Dei Anang, R. E. G. Armattoe, and Kwesi Brew; Nigerians (anglophone) Dennis Chukude Osadebay and Gabriel Okara; the Kenyan (anglophone) Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye; and South Africans (anglophone and indigenous language) H. I. E. Dhlomo, Benedict Wallet Vilakazi (who published poems in Zulu), and Dennis Brutus. Highly recognized, Rabéarivelo employed Madagascan song forms and techniques of the French Symbolists. In 1953, Okara’s poem “The Call of the River Nun” earned for him the Nigerian Festival of Arts award. Banned under apartheid, Brutus’s Sirens, Knuckles, Boots appeared in 1963. The lusophone poets of this period include Jorge Barbosa of Cape Verde, Antonio Agostinho Neto and Antonio Jacinto of Angola, Alda do Espírito Santo of São Tomé, and Noémia de Sousa of Mozambique, the first African woman poet to be internationally recognized. North Africa also produced a number of poets, such as imprisoned and tortured Algerian Anna Gréki (1931-1966), who published in Arabic and French.

Negritude

One of the most important developments was the negritude movement, at its height from the 1930s through the 1960s and influenced by America’s Harlem Renaissance. The movement had Caribbean and African cadres. Decidedly francophone, negritude, a valorization of African racial identity and anticolonialism, was represented by such poets as Aimé Césaire of Martinique, Léon Damas of French Guiana, Jacques Roumain of Haiti, Édouard Maunick of Mauritius, Tchicaya U Tam’si of Congo, Birago Diop and Léopold Senghor of Senegal, and David Diop, born in France of Cameroonian and Senegalese parentage. Born in 1906, Sénghor, to become president of Senegal in 1960, emerged as one of the leading African poets writing in French. His advocacy of negritude is evident in his 1945 poem “Femme noire” (“Black Woman”): “And your beauty strikes me to the heart, like the flash of an eagle.”

Liberation period

In the 1950s and 1960s, the period in which African countries gained liberation, there emerged a dynamic group of poets publishing in English, many of whom were born in the 1930s; some of them directly criticized negritude as romantic. This group included Ghanaian Kofi Awoonor; Ugandans Okot p’Bitek and Taban Lo Liyong; Nigerians Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo (influenced by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound), Wole Soyinka (a vocal critic of negritude), and John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo, who founded the poetry magazine The Horn; Malawian David Rubadiri; and Gambian Lenrie Peters. Okigbo’s first collection, Heavensgate (1962), contributed to his legendary reputation as a committed liberation poet, and indeed he was killed in the Biafran War. P’Bitek’s Song of Lawino (1966), translated into English from Acholi, was one of the most influential poems challenging Western cultural values. Awoonor authored many volumes of poetry, including Night of My Blood (1971). Among the South African writers were Mazisi Kunene (who wrote in both Zulu and English), Cosmo Pieterse, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Arthur Nortje, and Amelia Blossom Pegram. Titles such as Kgositsile’s Spirits Unchained (1969) and Pegram’s Our Sun Will Rise: Poems for South Africa (1989) exemplify the protest voice.

Many poets were published in such magazines as Présence Africaine, Transition, and Black Orpheus. Certain poets have also been accomplished in other literary genres. Novelists Chinua Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Ben Okri, and dramatists Femi Osofisan and Nobel laureate Soyinka, author of Idanre, and Other Poems (1967), have published poetry of note. By the 1960s and 1970s, critical works and edited collections of African poetry began to appear, produced by such advocates as Janheinz Jahn, Gerald Moore, Ulli Beier, Donald Herdeck, Soyinka, and Langston Hughes. Among later editors of African poetry are Awoonor, Isidore Okpewho, Jack Mapanje, Frank and Stella Chipasula, Musaemura Zimunya, and Adewale Maja-Pearce.

Post-independence poetry

With independence, African poets accelerated their poetic production. By the 1980s, numerous anthologies, representing various regions and scores of poets, had been published. Many of the poets born after World War II were especially concerned with political and social issues relating to their newly independent governments. Critical of the state, certain poets were imprisoned or forced into exile. Among those imprisoned for political reasons were Soyinka, Awoonor, Brutus, and, from the then “younger” generation, the highly acknowledged Mapanje of Malawi, who published, among other works, Of Chameleons and Gods (1981). South African poets such as Mongane Wally Serote and Frank Chipasula of Malawi chose exile. Serote’s Third World Express (1992) is an extended poem with a global scope. Representing North Africa, Abdellatif Laâbi of Morocco published numerous collections in French. Political commitment to the “nation” and beyond is a distinguishing feature of post-independence poets.

A good number of postindependence poets have come from anglophone countries. Their poetic production has been furthered by the establishment of writers’ organizations in such countries as Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya. Among the most prolific and highly recognized poets are Niyi Osundare, Tanure Ojaide, Chimalum Nwankwo, Lemuel Johnson, Catherine Acholonu, and Ifi Amadiume of Nigeria; Atukwei Okai, Kofi Anyidoho, Kojo Laing, and Kobena Eyi Acquah of Ghana; Mapanje, Steve Chimombo, Lupenga Mphande, and Frank Chipasula of Malawi; Syl Cheney-Coker of Sierra Leone; Serote of South Africa; Tijan Sallah of Gambia; Jared Angira of Kenya; and Zimunya and Chenjerai Hove of Zimbabwe. Holding advanced degrees, many of these poets have written critically, have been editors, and have taught at academic institutions in the United States, Europe, or Africa. For a variety of personal and political reasons, a good number of the post-independence-generation poets reside in the West.

Anyidoho addresses the African diaspora in AncestralLogic and CaribbeanBlues (1993), and Ojaide, a well-published literary critic, was the recipient of the Alliance Africa Okigbo Prize for Poetry. Ojaide’s The Fate of Vultures, and Other Poems (1990) contains the award-winning title poem “The Fate of Vultures,” a striking critique of political materialism. Amadiume’s Passion Waves (1986) was followed by her critical work Male Daughters, Female Husbands (1987). Commonwealth Poetry Prize recipient Osundare was recognized for such works as The Eye of the Earth (1986), concerned with the environment. The end of the twentieth century generated still-to-be-recognized poets such as Solomon Omo-Osagie II of Nigeria and Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., of Ghana.

Most importantly, the 1980s and 1990s were marked by the recognition of female poets who address gender and patriarchy, themes generally overlooked by their male counterparts. Representative of this group are Pegram, Lindiwe Mabuza, and Zindzi Mandela of South Africa; Amina Saïd of Tunisia; Ama Ata Aidoo, Naana Banyiwa Horne, and Abena Busia of Ghana; Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, Rashidah Ismaili, Amadiume, and Catherine Acholonu of Nigeria; Kristina Rungano of Zimbabwe; Stella Chipasula of Malawi; and Micere Githae Mugo of Kenya. Micere Mugo’s “Wife of the Husband,” from Daughter of My People, Sing (1976), questions traditional marriage symbolized by “His snores,” and Busia’s Testimonies of Exile (1990) voices African feminism, expressed in the poem “Liberation”: “For we are not tortured/ anymore.” Concerned with state injustices, Mabuza’s “Death to the Gold Mine!” (1991) recalls the shooting of mine workers by South African police through such images as “the calcified bones in the ridges.” The younger guard of women poets includes Iman Mirsal of Egypt and Mabel Tobrise of Nigeria.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, though more women poets were finding their way into publication, they still suffered from the sexist attitudes that had long been basic in African culture. While women might be idealized as earth-mothers, they were still not considered the intellectual equals of men. As a result, the works of most women poets received little attention from critics and were not widely known in Africa, much less globally. One of the first attempts to remedy this problem was made by Irene Assiba d’Almeida and her colleague and translator, Janis A. Mayes, whose anthology A Rain of Words: A Bilingual Anthology of Women’s Poetry in Francophone Africa (2009) was the first book of its kind. By making the works of women poets widely available, d’Almeida and Mayes took an important step toward the revision of the literary canon, which still excluded most female poets.

Forms and themes

The form of oral poems is not limited to set patterns of lines or rhythms. A good number of them are literally songs containing poetic elements such as rhyme, assonance, and alliteration. However, when transcribed and printed in European languages, oral poetry resembles free verse. Repetition is a common device of the praise poem, whose rhythm can reflect the tonal qualities of certain African languages. Written poetry of the colonial era borrows from oral poetry and European style; there is a modernist quality to the body of twentieth-century African poetry—most notably the absence of rhyme. The Hausa oral poem “Ali, Lion of the World!” uses repetition effectively, as does modernist Cheney-Coker in “The Hunger of the Suffering Man” (1980).

A functional art, African poetry in its oral and written forms has addressed a variety of themes, including worldview, mysticism, values, religion, nature, negritude, personal relationships, anticolonialism, pan-Africanism, neocolonialism, urbanism, migration, exile, the African diaspora, and patriarchy, as well as such universals as valor, birth, death, betrayal, and love. Religious poetry is exemplified by Islamic influences in such languages as Arabic, Hausa, and Swahili and in Ifa oral verses. A primary motif is the spiritual world, often reflected in a praise or evocation of ancestors.

Imagery in African poetry frequently evokes the natural environment, as in Brutus’s “Robben Island Sequence,” in which the poet alludes to “the blood on the light sand by the sea,” ironically blending imprisonment and seascape. Neto implies the hardships of colonization in “The African Train” through the image of “the rigorous African hill,” and another lusophone writer, Sousa, suggests pan-Africanism in “Let My People Go,” with references to “Negro spirituals,” Paul Robeson, and Marian Anderson. Negritude is observable in U Tam’si’s “Brush Fire” (1957): “my race/ it flows here and there a river.”

Furthermore, the sometimes problematic experience of Westernization is echoed in Macgoye’s “Mathenge” (1984), which juxtaposes cultural memory and Western modernity: “the neon light, the photo flash.” Similarly, Zimunya contrasts the urban and rural in “Kisimiso,” which describes a son “boastful of his experiences in the city of knives and crooks.” African poets have also mined their experiences outside the continent, suggested in Anyidoho’s “The Taino in 1992” (1993), which remembers “a hurricane of Arawak sounds” in the Caribbean.

Gender themes appear in a line from a Zulu woman’s oral self-praise poem, “I am she who cuts across the game reserve,” and in the straightforward poem “Abortion,” by an Egyptian poet born in the 1960s, Iman Mirsal, who evokes the image “lots of foetuses.” Acholonu’s “Water Woman” blends orality with natural imagery evoking a “daughter of the river.”

Although most of the poetry in European languages uses standard grammar, Nigerian Ezenwa-Ohaeto composed “I Wan Bi President” (1988) in pidgin; earlier poets Casely-Hayford and Nigerian Frank Aig-Imoukhuede also wrote in Africanized English. For the most part, African poets writing after the independence era have remolded free-verse forms and have borrowed or incorporated elements of oral poetry, using folklore, songs, rhythms, words, or concepts from indigenous languages. Osundare uses animal imagery in Waiting Laughters (1989):

Ah! Aramonda [wonder of wonders]

The mouth has swallowed something

Too hard for the mill of the stomach

Furthermore, certain poets, who valorize African languages, compose initially in indigenous languages, such as Kenyan Gitahi Gititi (Gikuyu) and Eritrean (Tigrinya) Reesom Haile.

Modern African poets have strived for a poetic voice that recognizes orality and evocative metaphors, demonstrating how the imposed colonial languages along with African mother tongues can be honed to express relevant social and cultural images. Because written poetry may also be performed, African poets have worked for a balance between abstract and accessible metaphors in order to continue the functional and communal art of their poetic forebears.

Twenty-first-century African poets Omotara James, Rasaq Malik, and Alexis Teyie are featured in the 2018 anthology New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (Tano). James, a first-generation American born to parents of Nigerian and Trinidadian descent, contributed her poem, "A Wall" to the anthology, and in 2024, she published her first collection of poems, Song of My Softening. Nigerian Malik's contribution to the anthology is "In Another World." His work earned him two Pushcart Prize nominations. Teyie's work "There It Goes" is featured in the 2018 anthology. She is the co-founder and editor of the Enkare Review. Another important twenty-first-century poet, Sudanese-American Safia Elhillo, is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and the Brunel University African Poetry Prize, and in 2018, Forbes listed her in their creative category "30 Under 30." Among her many works are numerous poetry collections, including Home Is Not A Country (2021), Girls That Never Die: Poems (2022), and Bright Red Fruit (2024).

Prominent trends in African poetry of the first quarter of the twenty-first century include the reception of a number of new authors, an increase in female poets, and a diversification of genres.

Bibliography

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