The Transitional Phase of African Poetry

The Transitional Phase

The second phase, which we have chosen to call transitional, is represented by the poetry of writers like Abioseh Nicol, Gabriel Okara, Kwesi Brew, Dennis Brutus, Lenrie Peters and Joseph Kariuki. This is poetry which is written by people we normally refer to as modem and who may be thought of as belonging to the third phase. The characteristics of this poetry are its competent and articulate use of the received European language, its unforced grasp of Africa’s physical, cultural and socio-political environment and often its lyricism. To distinguish this type of poetry we have to refer back to the concept of appropriation we introduced earlier. At the simplest and basic level, the cultural mandate of possessing a people’s piece of the earth involves a mental and emotional homecoming within the physical environment. Poems like Brew’s ‘‘Dry season”, Okara’s “Call of the River Nun”, Nicol’s “The meaning of Africa” and Soyinka’s “Season”, to give a few examples, achieve this level of appropriation. No longer does the school-going African have to find his piece of the earth in the green lands of Europe. What distinguishes this phase of modern African poetry from the next phase which we have called modernist, is the significant absence of experimentation with the European medium of expression. The writers were not unaware of the existence of traditions of poetry-making available in Africa, but the full impact of these traditions is not apparent in their verse making. The African environment is there in the lexical items and the themes, but we have to look to the modernists and their successors for the full harvest to come home.