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African Traditional Poetry Poetry is meant to be recited or sung orally. The written forms and attendant theories that have been formulated about poetry represent developments in the medium in response to the growth and the complexity of human societies and the problem of communication. Recent studies of the traditional literature of many societies have revealed that African communities have always had their own ideas of the nature and function of poetry. Among the Somali the poet is revered and poetry has been long recognised as a serious and functional form of art. The Swahili Utenzi shows clearly that poetry is known and appreciated as a special form of art practised by the gifted. Among the Yoruba the Ewi describes this art form, while Awoonor has shown in Guardians of the Sacred Word that poetry is a well-known art in traditional Ghanaian society. Traditional poems are a serious art form dealing with the range of human experiences: they conjure up whole worlds, are rich in ...

The Contemporary Phase There is no absolute distinction between this third phase that we have just been considering and the fourth phase which we have called contemporary poetry writing. But at the same time, it is clear from such a poem as Kofi Anyidoho’s “Hero and thief’ that some of the new poetry is, indeed, attaining the appropriation of Africa’s spiritual heritage. For in them “custom” has, indeed, become “the spreading laurel tree”. We do not claim that this is the only way in which the younger contemporary poets are writing or should write. In fact, some of Anyidoho’s poetry remains impenetrable as a result of the intensity of the traditional idiom. But what we see happening in people like Muckhtarr or Niyi Osundare or Funso Ayejina is that the intensity of their understanding of the traditional aesthetic has made their exploration and their grasp of the contemporary situation firmer and their poetry more expressive and more resonant. It is because of this close link bet...

The Modernist Phase We have already said that the achievement of modem African poetry in the presence of indigenous traditions of poetry-making has not been linear. Thus the kind of experimentation under the influence of metropolitan writers like Eliot and Pound that we observe in the poetry of Okigbo can be compared to the experimentation already evident in the pioneering work of Senghor. The elaborate verse line that Senghor had borrowed from people like Claudel had enabled him to incorporate into his poetry the rhythms of the music of the Khalam. By the modernist phase, therefore, we are referring to the awareness, under the impact of early twentieth-century metropolitan practices, that poetry need not come in the conventional nineteenth-century garb of regular metre and rhyme. This awareness led to the experimentation with oral material, such as the translation from Ewe dirges which abound in Kofi Awoonor’s poetry in the 1960s. A similar sense of liberation and experimentati...

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,...

The pioneering phase We have called the first phase that of the pioneers. But since the phrase “pioneer poets” has often been used of writers of English expression like Osadebay, Casely-Hayford and Dei-Anag, we should point out that our “pioneer phase” also includes Negritude poets of French expression. The poetry of this phase is that of writers in “exile” keenly aware of being colonials, whose identity was under siege. It is a poetry of protest against exploitation and racial discrimination, of agitation for political independence, of nostalgic evocation of Africa’s past and visions of her future. However, although these were themes common to poets of both English and French expression, the obvious differences between the Francophone poets and the Anglophone writers of the 1930s and 1940s have been generally noted. Because of the intensity with which they felt their physical exile from Africa, coupled with their exposure to the experimental contemporary modes of writing in F...