EMERITUS

The non contemporary Africa poetry enthused a lot of Afro-western cultural clashes. It enthralled the topic of rejection or acceptance of culture, either nature-imposed, self-inclinatively acquired, or superiorly coerced by the Whites. The earliest period of the non contemporary African poets characterised the innocent mixed feelings and reactions among Africans, most especially the elite, of two different traditions. The then poets had the taste of the two cultures, having been colonised by the Whites, and perhaps schooled in foreign higher institutions. 

Their experiences of colonisations in Africa which took place in the 20th century and their literary idealism summoned their inclination towards the predominance of the two opposing cultures. While some wrote to reverb the aesthetics and prowess of African culture, some denigrated it. It was a period of historical rewriting of what African people were and are. Prior to the time, all Africans wrote about their continent was a panegyric, an encomium to the continent of the Black and its beauty. 

A good embodiment of an emotional literary work is Leopold Sedar Senghor’s Black Woman in 1945. Senghor became the first African to praise the beauty of Africa in personification of a woman. He highlighted that the beauty of an African is his/her skin, not in need of any sort of shelter. 

Furthermore, Nigeria’s Isaac Praiz’s Serene Africa is an expression of the uniqueness of Africa. He illustrated the black continent as the land flowing with milk and honey. His illustration is a typology of the biblical truth of the land God promised Abraham’s descendants, which is a metaphor of paradise. In reality, the promised land did or does not flow with milk and honey. Without mincing words, Praiz successfully opined that Africa, his mother continent, is a synonym of paradise. 

To add a verisimilitude, a Malawian poet, Morton Msowoya, contributed to the aesthetical displays of Africa culture in verses in his poem, Mama Africa. It is your natural beauty// With no make up// That lured Westerners — Stanza 1, lines 1-3. The few listed poets and a good list of other eminent poets appreciate the dark continent. However, as their profound and detailed exhibitions of African culture and continent seemed the best to them, a host of others were having mixed feelings, while some switched cultural allegiance to the Western.  

A case study of Jared Angira’s Expelled foregrounds the rejection of foreign dominance in Africa, particularly Kenya, his country. He lamented the negative impacts on the foreigners in his home land. We had traded in the market competitively perfect// till you came in the boat// and polished goodwill approval from high order// all pepper differentials, denied flag-bearers. The outcry of the poetic persona in Expelled shows that the Africans were comfortable with all that they had before the adventure of the Europeans in their (African) territory. Hence, he orders the Europeans to leave his territories before they sodomize it. Without any form of gainsaying, this shows a total rejection of all the Westerners represented in an African society.  

Notwithstanding, while Jared, a politics-inclined and foremost poet in Kenya, and a lot of others show their rejection of every influence of the Europeans in the dark continent, a myriad of others, just like Kofi Awoonor were “Caught between the anvil and the hammer.” While the Africa tradition is the pang that delivered him, he, however, wanted to sing a new song. He expresses that the jargon of a new dialectic comes with the charisma of the perpetual search on the outlaw’s hill. The persona in the poem wants to have the dynamism of the two cultures.  

Gabriel Okara’s Piano and Drum is a typical exegesis of the dominance of the foreign culture in the African domain. Okara, being an African, should have let ‘Drum’ precede ‘Piano’ in the poem title. However, he elevated the piano, a metaphor of the foreign culture more than the drum, a typology of African culture. Nonetheless, it goes with one of the lines about the Western culture in the poem, ‘coaxing diminuendo’. He highlighted the awesomeness of the two cultures. Ipso facto, he was lost in the choice of choosing the mystic rhythm of jungle drums (African culture) and the concerto (Western culture). 

Above all, the non contemporary African poets have made their statements concerning the issue about the aged-long cultural clashes in the dark continent. And it has persisted to this present society. It seems little is literarily contributed among the present crop of poets in Africa. There needs to be a renaissance period about the subject matter. But if needs be, the thematic preoccupations should revolve around African beauty, the superiority of African culture, the goodness in the land of Africa, among others. Doing so will not only promote African cultures but also will eradicate the jaundice view of the Whites against Africans.