Postcolonial Poetry

The International Voices

As the British Empire spread to all corners of the world, so did the English language and literature. The empire faded after World War II, but what had become the international tongue and medium for creative writing survived and even prospered. English and its literature had long been enriched by speech and writing from Africa, the West Indies, Canada, India, Australia, and New Zealand. The dismantling of the Commonwealth neither subordinated nor silenced the distinctive voices that had arisen and that continue to arise. Traditionally, this body of fiction, drama, and poetry has been referred to as “Commonwealth literature” to distinguish it from English and American literature. It is often still called Commonwealth literature for want of a better name, but as the old British Commonwealth recedes into history, so does a once-significant but now largely meaningless political term. These days, names such as “postcolonial literature,” “world literature written in English,” or “international literature in English” are more common. Some critics envision a time when all literature in English, including that of England and the United States, will blend into a single body, a time when no literary works will receive preference because of their national origins, and all literature will be judged entirely on merit.

The circumstances in which poetry grew out of the one-time Commonwealth affected all aspects of the poetry’s development. Such effects were felt in the poetry of both the “settler” countries—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa—and that of the colonized areas—great parts of Africa, India, and the West Indies. The distinction between “settler” and “colonized” is simple: The settlers came to stay, taking over the land from those they considered primitive peoples—the First Australians, First Nations in Canada, Maoris in New Zealand, and Black South Africans—and these peoples were variously ignored, enslaved, or exterminated. The descendants of the dispossessed Indigenous peoples have added their poetic voices to those of the settlers, who had, through the years, created their own exclusionary literature. The colonizers, on the other hand, went forth from England to rule and exploit, not to settle. Some settled, but once the empire dissolved, their descendants left, unlike those in the settler countries. During the heyday of colonialism, the British set up schools for select groups of individuals they colonized; although those they educated in such places as Kenya, Nigeria, or India were intended to help rule their fellows, some became writers instead, thus giving Commonwealth poetry a third voice.

The writers in all three voices had available the centuries-old British literary tradition from which to draw forms, standards, and inspiration. Always, though, this fully developed text—a part of the colonial baggage—set up a creative tension that both benefited and hindered the poets.

Settler poets

How were the settlers in Australia, South Africa, Canada, and New Zealand to express in poetry the peculiarities of a new land and the life there? Could English poetry alone serve as a model? The emu had replaced the skylark; the flamboyant blossoms of the frangipani had dimmed the daffodil and primrose. Colonial outposts like Cape Town or Sydney bore little resemblance to London. Makeshift towns or isolated homesteads on the bleak veld of South Africa or in the vast outback of Australia contrasted starkly with the villages, meadows, copses, and moors of England. As the settlers communicated less with their former home, even their language changed: New words came into use to describe unfamiliar things, accepted grammar fell by the wayside, and indigenous expressions crept in. Neither could the heterogeneous and structured English society survive intact among those in the isolated pockets of the Empire; no matter how hard the settlers tried to preserve their traditions, they faced lives in altered societies where rules and conduct adjusted to circumstance.

Despite their circumstances, the poetic impulse loomed strong among the early settlers. Perhaps the writing of poetry served as a comfort, a way to overcome loneliness and isolation, and a way to grasp the radical changes the settlers experienced. For example, even though Australia’s convict pioneers were largely illiterate, they were the colony’s first poets. Soon after their 1788 arrival, they altered familiar English and Irish ballads to express the despair and misery that marked their lives. Like the literate free settlers who followed them to Australia and those who went to Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand, they drew from the established text, imitating it and adding a new dimension. In 1819, an Australian judge named Barron Field (1786-1846) published two poems in a booklet, First Fruits of Australian Poetry (1819), in which he claimed to be the colony’s first poet: “I first adventure; follow me who list/ And be Australia’s second harmonist.” Traditional in form, these two poems—“The Kangaroo” and “Botany Bay Flowers”—are typical of much early settler poetry. While Field finds the unfamiliar flora and fauna intriguing, he neither captures it wholly in his imitation of English verse nor refrains from recording his amusement over such oddities.

On the other hand, an anonymous Canadian settler expresses greater appreciation for his new land in “The Lairds of Esquesing,” which appeared in 1826. This poem celebrates “Canada’s wild woody shore” and “The Oak and the Hemlock and Pine” as the means of a better life for those who “are still coming o’er;/ In hopes of a good situation.” However, pride and delight in the potential exploitation of natural resources, not in their beauty, lies at the center of the poem. These examples—like the early poetry from New Zealand and South Africa—express not a national identity but rather a colonial mentality. Such was the case with the abundant verse that continued to be written well into the twentieth century. Some were brazenly nationalistic in their celebration of the heroic pioneers, those hardy individuals who conquered the land; although the pioneers have long been admired for destroying the forests or eroding the veld and killing the Indigenous peoples, later generations have questioned whether these acts deserve epic status. Some records of pioneer exploits, usually too mundane for true heroic stature, have found posterity as folk verse, such as the work of Australia’s Banjo Paterson (1864-1941). Much of the poetry was far removed in spirit from the place where it originated, a pale imitation of distant literary fashions. For example, while there was no dearth of localized nature poetry, too often, the poets saw the New World, the antipodes, or Africa through a Romantic sensibility they inherited from earlier English nature poetry. A true voice had not yet emerged, and for the most part, this poetry has been forgotten, deservedly so.

The established text continued both to bless and to debilitate, for that which came from England was considered the real literature and that written in the colonies a shadow of the original. Those who had never seen a daffodil or a skylark were strictly schooled in poetry that celebrated such phenomena and were led to believe that the literature of their own country was second-rate. After all, it was not until the 1950s that the national literature entered into the school curriculum of the settler countries, which, after World War II, were at last breaking their ties with England. Further, as the political and economic influence of the United States spread during the postwar period, so did its literature, which had long before rebelled against the British tradition. The maturing of poetry in these countries, then, came about during the twentieth century and, in particular, after 1945.

Roy Campbell

One exception is Roy Campbell (1901-1957), South Africa’s major English language poet. Born in Durban, South Africa, of British descent and schooled in English literature, Campbell broke away from his heritage. Revolted by South African racial attitudes, he became one of the country’s first literary exiles and spent most of his life abroad, mainly in France, Spain, and Portugal. At times, he satirized South African settler society, as in the biting wit of a poem like “The Wayzgoose” (1928), whose opening stanza contains the lines: “Where having torn the land with shot and shell/ Our sturdy pioneers as farmers dwell,/ And twixt the hours of strenuous sleep, relax/ To shear the fleeces or to fleece the Blacks.” Campbell experienced a divided relationship with his native land, calling it “hated and adored” in his poem “Rounding the Cape.” This dichotomy continues to haunt South African writers and consequently dominates much of the country’s literature. Campbell, a major lyric poet and one of the first Commonwealth writers to attain an overseas reputation, also wrote about his homeland with fervor and captured its essence in poems like “The Zebras” (1930) and “Zulu Girl" (1926).

Judith Wright

Another poet of international standing is the Australian writer Judith Wright (1915-2000), who discovered her homeland as a metaphorical entity from which she could draw meaning and, through extending the metaphor, express that meaning to others. For Wright, nature serves as a bridge to universal understanding, and the landscape she explores to attain this knowledge is purely Australian; she approaches nature with a sensibility untainted by the inherited text of English literature. Her first book of poems, The Moving Image, appeared in 1946. One of her major themes is the relationship between humankind and nature, which led her to become a public figure fighting to protect the environment: “a landscape that the town creeps over;/ a landscape safe with bitumen and banks,” she laments in one of her poems, “Country Town” (1946). Some critics have observed that Wright’s later poetry suffered from her political involvement with environmental issues. However this work might be judged, Wright helped to show the generation of poets who followed how they could be Australian without being provincial, how they could express an Australian sensibility without cringing, and how they could examine the landscape honestly.

Wright is also the first poet of Anglo-Saxon origin to treat Australian individuals in an understanding way. One of the best of these poems is “Bora Ring” (1946), in which she mourns the loss of the ancient rites of those who inhabited the country for forty thousand years before the White man came: “The song is gone; the dance/ is secret with the dancers in the earth,/ the ritual useless, and the tribal story/ lost in an alien tale.”

A. D. Hope

A. D. Hope (1907-2000), the third poet from a settler country who gained an international reputation, was Australian as well. However, he made no effort to explore the metaphysical dimension of his native land as a basis for poetry; instead, he followed the dictates of eighteenth-century neoclassicism. Damning free verse, modernism, and lyricism, Hope wrote in a highly structured, witty, cosmopolitan way. For him, the inherited text was not to be discarded but to be used and improved upon. He rarely mentioned Australia, for he felt more at home in Greece than he did in a place where, as he wrote in his poem “Australia” (1943), “second-hand Europeans pullulate/ Timidly on the edge of alien shores.”

Les A. Murray

The Australian poet Les A. Murray (1938-2019) gained recognition around the world, receiving numerous international awards and regularly publishing overseas. In 2000, a collection of his poems called Learning Human: Selected Poems appeared in New York. His poetry, noted for its verbal intensity and lyrical qualities, is undergirded by conservative political and religious views. A dichotomy marks his work. On one hand, it celebrates the strength and character of ordinary people and assumes an anti-intellectual pose. On the other hand, it is extremely erudite in its references and allusions. His twenty-first-century works and poetry collections include Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2011), Waiting for the Past (2015), and Collected Poems (2018).

Al Purdy and Margaret Atwood

Canada and New Zealand have strong poetic traditions, and both have many poets widely admired in their own countries but who have not yet achieved the stature of Campbell, Wright, Hope, or Murray. Contemporary Canadian poets have moved far from the anonymous nineteenth-century versifier who exulted in the pioneers’ despoilment of the land. One of Canada’s best-known poets, Al Purdy (1918-2000), for example, sees the necessity of reinventing a poetic tradition divorced from the colonial past, a tradition that takes into account Canada’s geographical vastness, a primary theme in his own work. While Margaret Atwood (b. 1939) has established a worldwide reputation as Canada’s leading fiction writer, her considerable achievement as a poet is little recognized outside Canada.

Three New Zealanders

New Zealand, too, has produced a wide array of poets, the best-known being James K. Baxter (1926-1972). An old-fashioned poet by some standards, Baxter gained his popularity and lasting fame through a rare ability to meld language and location, for he was truly a national voice that spoke apart from the established British text. The far more sophisticated work of another New Zealander, Allen Curnow (1911-2001), is also highly regarded for both its rich language and its handling of the metaphysical aspects of the remote country; for instance, in “House and Land” (1941), he speaks of the “great gloom” that “Stands in a land of settlers/ With never a soul at home.” A New Zealand poet who has received attention overseas is Bill Manhire (b. 1946). His poetry is simple and direct yet sophisticated and dense in its suggestiveness. It takes varied forms, covers a wide variety of subjects, and draws its material both from his native country and from places abroad.

Indigenous poets in settler countries

Silent, or silenced, for the two hundred or so years since White individuals invaded their lands, the Indigenous people of the settler countries—Australia, South Africa, Canada, and New Zealand—have added their voices to Commonwealth poetry. They are the victims of a secondary colonialism, for they have long been subjected and, in the past, often murdered by the settlers who saw them as one more pest on the landscape. Also secondary to the Indigenes is the English language and literature, which was forced onto them for survival on the fringes of the White world. Beset by a borrowed written text and oral literature that has eroded during two centuries of assimilation, the Indigenous writers face peculiar problems as they set out to create a tradition that is not a thirdhand version of the British text. They need to determine whether they should write in the conqueror’s language or their own languages, which sometimes have been corrupted or lost. They must decide whether to use standard English or the creolized language that many Indigenes speak as a result of poor education and segregation. Other challenges include how to incorporate the remnants of their oral traditions and how to reach the largest audience.

The question of audience often seems the most important, for much of the poetry protests the second-class citizenship to which the Indigenes have been relegated. At first, the main audience for such writing was White liberals, so English became the mandatory language. In the 1970s, though, the poetry began to play a more direct role in the lives of those it talked about, as the land-rights campaigns and the consciousness movement gained momentum, inspired in part by the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Because English stood as the common language among the Indigenes, most of the writing was of necessity done in the borrowed language.

Kath Walker

One of the first such voices to be heard was that of Kath Walker (1920-1993), a First Australian later known by her tribal name, Oodgeroo Noonuccal. In 1964, she published the volume of poetry We Are Going, and in “Aboriginal Charter of Rights,” she asked, “Must we native Old Australians/ In our own land rank as aliens?” Widely admired by Black Australians as well as by their oppressed fellows in other settler countries, Oodgeroo’s poetry helped awaken these long-silent people. White readers also discovered her work, which made them realize that something new was afoot. The poems in We Are Going now seem tame and have in later years been called too conciliatory by some First Australian activists, who have taken a harsher stance toward the White world in their poetry. Later, First Australian poets such as Lionel Fogarty (b. 1958), Archie Weller (b. 1957), and Kevin Gilbert (1933-1993) take a stronger approach in taking up the cause. In their work and that of some emerging poets, the protest rings loud and the anger erupts. Often, though, a comic strain runs through the poems and makes them even more immediate. Also, these poets tend to mix Indigenous words and slang terms with standard English, which is an effective technique.

South African poets

The South African poet and novelist Dennis Brutus (1924-2009) was another early and widely acclaimed writer of protest poetry. In particular, his poems from prison, Letters to Martha (1968), describe vividly the abuse he and other political prisoners suffered. In “This Sun on this Rubble,” he writes: “Under jackboots our bones and spirits crunch/ forced into sweat-tear-sodden slush/ —now glow-lipped by this sudden touch.” Other Black South African poets include Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali (b. 1940), who published Sounds of a Cowhide Drum in 1971, and Mongane Wally Serote (b. 1944), who, in “Ofay-Watcher Looks Back” (1978), observes that “jails are becoming necessary homes for people.” Although it is too soon to make judgments or to name major poets, the post-apartheid era in South Africa has unleashed a vast amount of poetry by those formerly oppressed by the political system. For one thing, publishing opportunities and financial support have become more available. This work addresses the triumph over apartheid as well as its lingering effects, taking up the challenges, problems, and disappointments facing the majority native population after a century of submission.

Maori poets

New Zealand poets Rosemary Kohu (b. 1947), Robert DeRoo (b. 1950), and Hone Tuwhare (1922-2008) express in their work what it is like to be a Maori among the Pakehas—the Maori word for the Anglo-Saxon settlers. In “Taken,” for example, Kohu recalls how, as a child, she was placed in the Bethlehem Native School, which methodically stripped away her heritage so she might become a “Pakeha-thinking Maori.” Between stanzas of the poem appears the refrain, “’To get on in this world you must be Pakeha.’” In “Aotearoa/New Zealand/Godzone?,” DeRoo speaks to the land, calling it “Aotearoa,” its name before the colonial “New Zealand” and the affectionate “Godzone” were affixed. He sees history as “conquest,” in which “we claw each other for rights” to the land, then concludes that as an inhabitant of Aotearoa, he can claim no single piece of the land but must embrace it all, telling Aotearoa that “my mind’s birth-knot ties me irrevocably to you.” Another Maori, Tuwhare is one of New Zealand’s most popular poets. Neither didactic nor angry, his work is full of warmth and wit. Still, he speaks strongly for his community and its marginal place in New Zealand society.

Canadian indigenous poetry

The work of the early Canadian activist poet Duke Redbird (b. 1939) condemns White society for its insensitive treatment of the Indigenous peoples. “I Am the Redman,” one of his best-known poems, became a rallying cry in the 1970s for the long-silent First Nations. Another native poet, Rita Joe (1932-2007), articulates her people’s plight in a more conciliatory fashion—reminiscent of Oodgeroo in some ways—saying, for example, in one of her untitled poems published in Poems of Rita Joe (1978), “Pray/ meet me halfway—/ I am today’s Indian.” Other poets in this group include Chief Dan George (1899-1981), Daniel David Moses (1952-2020), and George Kenny (b. 1951).

Combining traditions

It would be misleading, though, to leave the impression that indigenous poetry constitutes nothing more than protest. As the years have passed, some rights have been gained and certainly consciousness has been raised, and many Indigenous poets have moved toward familiar topics of poetry: love, home, nature, and spiritual quest. They have also combined with English language forms their oral heritage, which has been retrieved through great effort. These writers are thus in the process of establishing a poetic tradition that echoes the borrowed literature and, at the same time, imbues it with their own ancient text.

One of the writers who has combined the two texts most impressively is the Australian poet Mudrooroo Narogin (1939-2019), who published as Colin Johnson before taking a tribal name. His poetry volume Dalwurra (1988) records the travels of the Black Bittern, a totemic bird from mythology. Like the poet himself, this bird sets out on a spiritual quest, visiting Singapore, India, the United Kingdom, and other parts of Asia before returning to his native Australia. In the introduction to Dalwurra, Mudrooroo describes the work as a way of showing how ancient song cycles can serve as the framework for poems in English, adding that by using such traditional materials, the poet is to some degree disciplined by them.

The highly original poetry of Mudrooroo, of such Maori writers as Keri Hulme (1947-2021)known abroad for her novel The Bone People (1983) rather than poetryand of emergent South African and Canadian poets promises that this new voice in Commonwealth poetry will prevail.

Colonial and postcolonial poets

The most important poet of the colonial and postcolonial poets of India, Africa, and the West Indies, Derek Walcott (1930-2017), is of African descent but was born and grew up in the West Indies when his remote Caribbean island still formed part of the British Empire. In “A Far Cry from Africa” (1962), he speaks of “the English tongue I love,” but then asks a question common to many postcolonial poets who are not Anglo-Saxon but whose heritage and language is largely English: “Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?” While the West Indies have produced a number of poets, Walcott overshadows the others and, to a great degree, represents international poetry in English at its very best. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. Walcott has incorporated his native Caribbean into a metaphor of universal proportions. Although some of his work takes up other locales and subjects, his best poetry returns to the land of his birth, with all its seductive beauty and internal decay.

Like Walcott, many of the postcolonial writers spent their first years as colonials, then at maturity, found themselves in young nations set free from the imperial fetters of the past. Were they at that point to continue writing in English, thus building a national literary tradition based on the language and text of the departed conquerors? Should they not turn their backs on the English tongue they loved and write in the native languages of, say, Kenya, Nigeria, or India? By writing in English were they not pandering to the Western world rather than speaking to their own people, thereby creating what some have called “tourist literature”? While these questions have been debated by critics and writers in the half-century since the era of independence, an English language literature has continued to develop in Africa, India, and the West Indies. “Develop” carries significance: What has emerged in all the genres is not a postcolonial facsimile but a sturdy hybrid, which grows out of what West Indian novelist Wilson Harris (1921-2018) calls “the universal imagination,” be its source African, ancient Greek or Roman, British, European, or American; its mythology Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, or Christian; its forms expressionistic, romantic, neoclassic, or indigenous.

Sarojini Naidu

The first major poet from India, Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949), long preceded independence. Born into an Anglicized Indian family at the height of the British Raj and educated in England, Naidu published her first book of poems in English, The Golden Threshold, in London in 1905 and received immediate recognition at home and abroad. She published three more books of poems that still hold charm—and immense promise—with their curious blend of Romantic and Victorian forms with Indian imagery and subject matter. Her poetry reveals a passionate love for India along with an Eastern preoccupation with death and immortality, as in “Imperial Delhi,” which celebrates the ancient city of so many past glories: “But thou dost still immutably remain/ Unbroken symbol of proud histories,/ Unageing priestess of old mysteries/ Before whose shrine the spells of Death are vain.” Naidu gave up her poetic career in “the English tongue” she loved to join Mahatma Gandhi’s freedom movement and became one of Gandhi’s closest associates throughout India’s struggle for independence, which was finally gained in 1947. Had she been born later, her story might have been different.

Kamala Das

In postcolonial India, one of the major poets is also a woman, Kamala Das (1934-2009). Her work, infinitely more modern in form, sophisticated in tone, and confessional in nature, still brings to mind Naidu’s poetry as it blends Indian imagery, Western forms, and the universal concerns of love, passion, alienation, spirituality, and death. Although Das wrote in both the Indian language Malayalam and English, she describes language in her poem “An Introduction” as nothing more than a tool for expression, a way of communicating what is said in the other language of nature and experience, which she calls “the deaf blind speech/ Of trees in storm or of monsoon clouds or of rain or the/ Incoherent mutterings of the blazing/ Funeral pyre.” While the imagery is purely Indian, the idea it expresses reaches far beyond its source. Das validates her use of English by divorcing language from superficial nationalism and seeing it as just one form of human expression, which she calls in the same poem “the speech of mind that is/ Here.”

Nissim Ezekiel

Another important Indian poet in English, Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004), is considered a pioneer figure who introduced European expressionistic forms into Indian poetry but, at the same time, diffused what he borrowed to express a purely Indian sensibility. His often-experimental work encompasses a wide range: Some of it is highly personal in its revelation of the inner experience, as in “Two Images,” and some in its frank treatment of sexuality, as in “Nudes”—two of his best-known poems. In “Poster Poems,” he creates collages of the subcontinent’s variegated human landscape. Some Indian critics, however, have found Ezekiel’s work—and that of Das as well—too Western in orientation, objecting, for instance, to the use of Christian imagery; these poets and others writing in English should, the critics say, rely more heavily on Indian mythology, history, and literature, even if their language is non-Indian.

An African approach

To a great extent, contemporary African poets have been more faithful than their sometimes all-too-literary Indian counterparts at integrating the African languages and heritage into English poetry. Many African poets write first in an African language and then render their work into English, often retaining many of the African words. Some write in pidgin to reproduce the flavor that English has acquired in Africa. Others attempt to evoke, through verbal effects, traditional drum or flute poetry, or the chanted verses that are a part of tribal ceremonies. A single poem may refer to Christian mythology alongside allusions to African religion, or may contain lines from Ezra Pound or echo the rhythms of Gerard Manley Hopkins while focusing on a purely African subject. The Western hero Odysseus might be mentioned in the same breath as Chaka, the legendary African warrior.

The colonial African poets concentrated on subject matter, often protest, and let technique take care of itself, usually adhering to the forms and diction set by the British text. In contrast, postcolonial writers exercised admirable craft in their work. From a technical standpoint, they do not write in a vacuum but show a keen awareness of modern trends in English language poetry. Many were educated abroad, in England, Europe, or the United States, but they honor their heritage in their works. The Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah (b. 1945) expresses this intent forcefully in his 1981 address “Do Fences Have Sides?”: “The writer in Africa and the Third World countries is looked upon as the contributor to and/or creator/shaper of the nation’s enlightened opinion…he is, to a great number of people, the light whose beams guide the ark to safety.”

Wole Soyinka

Certainly, the approach to literature espoused by the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka (b. 1934) exemplifies Farah’s statement. Soyinka, who received the Nobel Prize in 1986, is better known for his poetic drama than for his separate poems, even though he has excelled in the latter form, as well as in fiction and the essay. Soyinka’s work is sometimes described as creatively eclectica single play or poem may bring together such disparate elements as African purification ceremonies, the rhythms of Shakespearean verse, folk narrative of the Yoruba people (Soyinka’s tribal identity), and the dramatic techniques of Bertolt Brecht. His work brilliantly represents the subtle interaction that takes place when a writer borrows from and responds to a wide variety of texts. While nationalist critics and theorists in Africa and elsewhere may denounce such interdependence and call it artistic neocolonialism, the artists apparently—and fortunately—realize that they do not create within set boundaries. His twenty-first-century works include King Baabu (2001), Climate of Fear (2005), and Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known (2002). Soyinka also wrote essays, like "Beyond Aesthetics: Use, Abuse, and Dissonance in African Art Traditions" (2019), and works of nonfiction, such as Climate of Fear (2005). In 2024, Nigeria's National Arts Theatre was renamed to honor Soyinka.

Christopher Okigbo

Another such poet is Christopher Okigbo (1932-1967), who was born in Nigeria and was killed in the Biafran War. Lyrical, cryptic, intense, and frequently obscure, his highly personal work blends the sounds of African music and the performance of ancient rituals with Western artistic and literary elements. Okigbo is usually considered the most modern of the African poets, and the fusion of sound and symbol makes his work extremely difficult—at times incomprehensible—on an intellectual level, but it is always resonant and exciting.

Okot p’Bitek

Okot p’Bitek (1931-1982) was born in Uganda but spent the last decade of his life in Kenya after his criticism of the Ugandan government made him persona non grata in his homeland. Trained as an anthropologist, p’Bitek received international attention when his four “Songs” were published, the first in 1961, the last in 1971. The overriding theme of the “Songs”—actually dramatic monologues in which various Africans speak—is the conflict between Western influence and African ways. For example, in the Song of Lawino (1966), the speaker laments her husband’s desertion of her, complaining that the “manhood” of all the young African men “was finished/ In the class-rooms,/ Their testicles/ Were smashed/ With large books!” Witty, at times satirical toward both African and Western ways, the “Songs” record in addition to the lament of the African woman the observations and sometimes the desperation of a Europeanized African man, a prisoner, and a prostitute. The poems serve to supplement anthropologist p’Bitek’s scholarly writing on African culture.

Along with their counterparts in India and the West Indies, the Africans join the settler poets and emergent Indigenous writers to lend contemporary poetry in English voices that are unmistakably international.

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