African Poetry

These poems, composed in Somali and in English, provide a poetic reflection of the recently emerged debate on the theme of Caddaan Studies which means "White Studies". The criticism and counter-criticism contained in the debate dug so deep into life nerve of Somali Studies that over a thousand people participated. The poems, under the title "Inaugurating Caddaan Studies" were composed with a critical observation of the debate.

Un poème entendu à Paris un jour de recueillement collectif au lendemain des attentats de novembre 2015. Un poème retrouvé au hasard des pavés de la ville. Un poème repris en chœur chargé d’une mémoire nouvelle. La trajectoire littéraire d’un poème de l’écrivain sénégalais Birago Diop dans la mémoire immédiate des attentats témoigne d’une façon inédite de panser les douleurs de l’écriture de l’histoire. La parole poétique n’efface jamais rien des traces de sang qui éclaboussent les murs du présent, mais elle sait offrir aux vivants et aux morts la couverture – de survie – de ses mots.

The article analyzes Black Consciousness poetry of 1970s and 1980s South Africa alongside the protest poetry of white South African poet Wopko Jensma. It is argued that while the racial definition of oppression and resistance by Black Consciousness poetry had the important aim of the recovery of the black people’s dignity and the fostering of racial solidarity and unity, it also had the unfortunate consequence of not recognizing white resistance and preventing cross-racial solidarity and empathy. By portraying the racial divide in South Africa as absolute, it implicitly allowed white people no ethical position to speak from. The poetry of Wopko Jensma is analyzed as a unique expression of white solidarity with black South Africans, demonstrated by his mastery of the social and linguistic idiom of a wide variety of people, as well as by his unusual, subversive, self-othering gesture of having himself legally reclassified as Black. By thus rejecting apartheid racial categories, as well as “European” and “African” poetics, he also deconstructed blackness and whiteness as essential identities, expressing an inclusive “human consciousness” and anticipating the ideal of the “rainbow nation” invoked in South Africa after 1990.

The vibrant tradition of West African Arabic poetry is dominated by the genre of madih, that is, poetry in praise of the Prophet Muhammad. This genre of poetry has been mostly ignored in Western scholarship and dismissed as mere ‘pious praise’ lacking any significant intellectual content. In Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection, Dr Oludamini Ogunnaike challenges the misconceptions around West African madih poetry and addresses the scope and depth of this genre; he not only explores its rich lyrical nature and its foundations in the Qur’an, Hadith, pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry, but also its inextricable link to Sufism and Sufi doctrines of cosmology, ontology and epistemology. Drawing on Sufi traditions and practices, the author expounds on the various ways in which West African madih poetry both describes and facilitates the ultimate fulfillment of the human potential, the Perfect Human (al-Insan al-Kamil) or the attainment of the Praiseworthy Station (al-Maqam al-Mahmud) of which the Prophet Muhammad is the highest example.

Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection includes translations of numerous extracts from madih poetry (accompanied by the original Arabic); while the Appendix presents a selection of complete poems—the most popular and influential poems of this tradition. Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection is an opportunity for readers to gain access and appreciation of a unique genre of spiritual Islamic poetry, and, given that it includes the original Arabic, also enables the recitation of the poetry for devotional purposes.

https://its.org.uk/catalogue/poetry-in-praise-of-prophetic-perfection/

The composition and performance of Arabic Sufi poetry is the most characteristic artistic tradition of West African Sufi communities, and yet this tradition has yet to receive the scholarly attention it deserves. In this article, I sketch an outline of a theory of Sufi poetics, and then apply this theory to interpret a performance of a popular Arabic poem of the Senegalese Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse (d. 1975), founder of the most popular branch of the Tijāniyya in West Africa.

Sample course outline and handouts. This undergraduate course ran from January 2018 to May 2018. FYI: this course outline includes a few word choice errors; I occasionally refer to 'novels' in the supplementary documents, which were adapted from a previous course. I no longer possess the source documents, and as I am unlikely to teach this course again, these errors will not be corrected.

Although it is widely argued that the Hebrew Bible contains texts which caricature violence against women, the present article shows that some biblical texts could also offer liberating possibilities to oppressed women in South Africa. The interest of this article lies in bringing Brenda Fassie's song " Nakupenda " (I love you) into conversation with the Song of Songs in order to produce an interaction between the biblical text and an African popular song. In the reading of both songs, the issue of violence against women as well as women's (sexual) independence in the context of patriarchy is highlighted. In conclusion, the author of this article draws liberating lessons for women in South Africa from the actions of the woman protagonist in the Shir ha-Shirim and of the female lover in Brenda Fassie's song " Nakupenda " .

In the poem ‘I’m a man’ by Mzi Mahola the first person speaker recalls what seems to be his traditional initiation ceremony. In this critical analysis the poem’s diction and poetic devices will be discussed in relation to the conveyance of the speaker’s personal experience.

Eye of the Earth comprises of nineteen poems governed by a single thematic interest: the despoliation of earth’s resources by crude human tillage and natural weathering. By symbolic inference, however, Osundare re-enacts social relations consequent to capitalist economy. The re-enactment has three main sections, beginning with a recital which invokes earth’s vast productive powers – “breadbasket/ and compost bed – its natural resources – rocks and rivers/muds and mountains….virgin of a thousand offspring.”

Abstract:
Contemporary poet and scholar Joshua Bennett recently wrote, “If black studies is indeed the rewriting of knowledge itself, an ongoing critique of so-called Western civilization—as Wynter and Robinson and others remind us—then poetry will be absolutely essential. Like the field of black studies more broadly, the teaching of black poetry is not simply additive nor is it a niche concern. Historically poetry is at the center of black social and intellectual life.” Of no literary or intellectual tradition is this more true than that of the Fayḍa Tijāniyya, inaugurated by the Senegalese Sufi Shaykh and scholar, Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse (d. 1975). Described by its initiates as a “flood” of ma‘rifa (divine knowledge) and wilāya (sanctity), the Fayḍa has also produced a veritable outpouring of Sufi literature in Arabic (as well as African and European languages) among its adherents, particularly Arabic poetry in praise of the prophet that both expresses and facilitates access to ma‘rifa in a particularly effective manner. Through close readings of three short treatises and poems of Ibrahim Niasse, this paper attempts to outline Niasse's prophetic poetics of spiritual realization: the closely-linked cosmology, epistemology, and anthropology converging on the Muhammadan Reality (al-ḥaqīqa al-Muḥammadiya) that animates and structures his literary oeuvre and shapes the spiritual, social, and intellectual lives of the members of the Fayḍa Tijāniyya. Building on earlier studies of the Tijānī tradition and Maghrebi/West African Sufism, this article concludes with an examination of the implications of this prophetic poetics for the conception of the “human,” and the intervention literature such as Niasse's has made and can make in contemporary debates surrounding the ethics of knowledge and the re-evaluation of the modern, “Western” category of the “human.”

Chapter Eight: ‘I Am Ignorant of the Good Word in the Clean Book’

      The oppression of the indigenous cultures of African communities through missionary activity during the European colonisation period of the twentieth century is a topic that surfaces in a plethora of modern African literature engaging with the issue of the Western acculturation of the educated African mind. Austin Shelton remarks that demonstrating the alleged superiority of European culture to the African population was one of the primary functions of Christian religious engagement in sub-Saharan Africa, and this issue was arguably one of the most damaging vehicles for deculturalisation of the entire period of European colonial oppression.
        In chapter eight of his poem 'Song of Lawino' (henceforth SoL), Okot p’Bitek’s outspoken protagonist ‘Lawino’ documents her incredulity at the ways of the Christian missionaries and their ‘meaningless’ faith in comparison with the vibrant and expressive ceremonies of her own Acoli people, and also her despair at her estranged husband Ocol’s new-found disdain for the ‘Jok’ Acoli names inherent to the culture of his people in favour of adopting Christian names. p’Bitek’s revolutionary transliteral and notably non-Westernised form combined with distinctly localised natural and cultural imagery applied to Lawino’s address in this chapter provides the essence of Lawino’s character as an exemplary embodiment of the African cultural concept of ‘the individual as the champion and preserver of communal values’ (Elimimian p.154), and the use of language in Lawino’s juxtaposing descriptions of Christian versus local spiritual values and practices highlights Lawino’s condemnatory point of view regarding the negative effects of Western colonisation on her culture and individual members of her community that are destroying her marriage, dividing her community and undermining her culture.

This Paper aims to reveal the trend and issues raised by post-colonialism in contemporary African poetry. Since the era of colonialism is no more, there has been a shift in the focus of African poetry and contemporary poets have concentrated on issues that emanated after independence in Africa. The colonies have started writing back to the Empire. Former colonies have produced renowned poets who opened the wound in the heart of Africa. The poetry of post-colonialism in present Africa is that of despair, disappointment, identity crisis, betrayal of past and present administrations, corruption and lack of development. It is no longer Rodney’s terminology of how Europe underdeveloped Africa but how Africans are under-developing Africa and her heritage.

Wole Soyinka's Beatification of Area Boy : A Lagosian Kaleidoscope And Ngugi wa Thiong'o Trials of Dedan Kimathi are books written in two worlds apart both speak the same tails of civil war, betrayal, oppression and political disappointments. This paper makes an attempt to draw out the social issues as manifested in the lives of the ones who truly benefits nothing from war...the masses.

Public Interest or Strategic Litigation (PIL) - by which term is meant court action that operates to vindicate the welfare or collective well-being of the general public, is fast gaining acceptance and popularity in the Ugandan legal context. Through it, public-spirited individuals as well as Civil Society Organizations and Non-Governmental Organizations have acted; and, continuously, are acting to challenge governmental lawlessness, administrative indiscretion and the exploitation of the poor by the rich. PIL is also being employed to engender the rule of law, promote noble notions of constitutionalism and democratic governance; and also, push back against retrogressive cultures and other bad tendencies like violation of human rights by State organs. More recently, PIL is also being used to promote social justice, precipitate policy and statutory reform as well as shine bright lights upon historical injustices suffered by minorities and other marginalized or disadvantaged sections of society with view to correction. It is also being used to advance or project such causes like environmental justice and public accountability.

In the Ugandan context, the legal framework in place for PIL is quite extensive and permissive.  It ranges from the supreme law of the land which is the Constitution of the Republic of Uganda, 1995 (as amended) to Acts of Parliament and other subsidiary rules and regulations which act to operationalize specific provisions of those Acts of Parliament.

The practice and procedure of PIL can also be gleaned from judicial pronouncements. In addition, the PIL tradition in Uganda has also borrowed heavily from progressive jurisprudence by judges and courts  in Kenya, South Africa, India and; as well, the wider Commonwealth.

However, despite its rising popularity, PIL has suffered some pitfalls which have acted to diminish its value as an effective weapon for social change. These are procedural and systemic. The paper, therefore, considers the state of PIL in Uganda; its history, practice and procedure. It evaluates its success and pitfalls and makes proposals for the future.

This paper adopts the speech acts theory in analyzing selected excerpts from the popular East African play, The Trials of Dedan Kimathi by Ngugi Wa Thiongo and Micere Mugo. Particular attention will be paid to the following aspects of speech acts theory: Direct and Indirect Illocutionary acts, Politeness principle (face threatening and face saving) and perlocutionary acts. Finally, this study will reveal how the analysis of speech acts has projected the central idea of the play.

This is an annotation and translation of the Shukr’l-Waahib al-Mufeeda’l-Mawaahib (Showing Gratitude to the Benefactor for the Divine Overflowing Given to Those He Favors) by one of Black Africa’s leading mystics, Shaykh Abd’l-Qaadir ibn Mustafa. I first came upon this metaphysically luxuriant poem in the month of Ramadan in the year 1406 A.H. (May 1986) while residing in the home of one of the author’s great grandchildren in Maiurno, Sennar, Sudan, my teacher Shaykh Muhammad Bello ibn Shaykh Abd’r-Raaziq ibn Shaykh Uthman ibn Shaykh Abd’l-Qaadir ibn Mustafa. He showed it to me one night after the tawaareeh prayers and requested that I read it. He said that his paternal uncle, Shaykh Abd’r-Rahman al-Ya`bana ibn Uthman told him that this poem was a summarization of all the exoteric and esoteric sciences which were bequeathed to the Fudiawa in general, and to his immediate family in particular as it reached its pinnacle with his great grandfather, the historian, the Amir, and mystic, Shaykh Abd’l-Qaadir ibn Mustafa. This divine overflowing (fayd ilaahiy), as the author called it, was bequeathed to him from his erudite and saintly mother Sayyidat Khadijatu bint Shehu Uthman ibn Fuduye`, and her brother, his maternal uncle the saintly Shaykh Muhammad Sanbu ibn Shehu Uthman ibn Fuduye`. It overflowed from these siblings from their spiritually magnetized mother, the mystical, pious and learned wife of the Shehu, Iyya Gharka A`ishatu Ghabindu bint Shaykh Muhammad Sa`d ibn Abdullahi ibn Muhammad ibn Sa`d ibn Muhammad Ladan ibn Idris ibn Maasiran, who received it from her husband, the Shaykh of all the Shaykhs Shehu Uthman ibn Fuduye`.
The Shukr'l-Waahib is a tantalizing glimpse of all the essential mediated and unmediated sciences bequeathed to humanity within the epistemology of Islam. The poem not only gives a depiction of the depth of erudition of African Islamic traditions but it also gives us an indication of the extent of the crime which was committed against the purveyors of these intellectual and esoteric traditions as a result of the trans Atlantic slave trade and European colonialism in Africa.

The Shukr’l-Waahib by the Shaykh Abd'l-Qaadir ibn Mustafa, is evidence that there was a conscious preservation and transmission of a canon of knowledge and metaphysics which constituted a collective and communicative memory that encompassed the broadest realm of Islamic epistemology and mysticism. This intergenerational historical consciousness consisted of three integral factors without which it could not and cannot persists: [1] knowledge (`ilm); [2] saintliness (wilaayat); and [3] sovereignty (khilaafa). Each of these factors supported one another in a symbiotic liaison which gave birth to a rearward and forward looking spiritual and secular government which saw itself as the herald and final link to the appearance of the Seal of the Muhammadan Saints (al-Mahdi) and the heavenly descent of the Seal of the Universal Saints (Jesus the son Mary).Shaykh Dan Tafa condensed all of these sciences into sixty seven verses. He divided the poem into seven sections: an introduction followed by six chapters:
Chapter One: Mentioning What I Recieved From the Shari`a Sciences
Chapter Two: Mentioning What I Recieved From the Elemental Sciences by Means of Textual Transmission and Other Than That
Chapter Three: Mentioning What I Recieved From the Sciences of Spiritual Realities
Chapter Four: Mentioning What I Recieved in the Sciences of the Awliyya Which Are the Sciences of Secrets According to the Path of the Sufis
Chapter Five: Mentioning What I Recieved in the Sciences of Secrets As Well. However, Outside of the Path of the Sufis

Chapter Six: Mentioning What I Recieved in the Sciences of Secretsthat I Have Recieved from the Sciences if the Greatest Unveiling Which No One Exept Us Have Craved for and Which None Will Disclose Except the Muhammadan Seal, who is the Mahdi, upon him be peace.
 
The Shukr’l-Waahib was composed as a form of praise and gratitude to Allah for this blessing, since continuity and persistence in all its domains are dependent upon giving thanks and praise. The author indicated this in a couplet which I believe is the secret (sirr) of the poem where he said: “So, all praises are due to Allah who by means of His praise * Has completed and perfected in us the righteousness of His divine support.” What this reveals is that the foundation of the three treasures: knowledge; saintliness and sovereignty that were given to the entire Fudiawa which would guarantee their persistence, revolves around being in a constant state of praise (al-hamd) and gratitude (as-shukr).
Allah ta`ala assisted me to compose a commentary upon this illuminating poem which I called `Ilaawat'l-Muttaalib fee Shukr'l-Waahib al-Mufeeda'l-Mawaahib (The Increase of the Aspirant in Gratitude of the Benefactor for the Divine Overflowing Given to Those He Favors)

al-hamdulillahi wa shukrulillah wa shukrulillah wa'l-hamdulillahi

Shaykh Muhammad Shareef bin Farid al-Qaadiri
Zawiyya Shehu Uthman ibn Fuduye`
Yirimadio, Bamako, the Republic of Mali

This excellent poem composed by Shaykh Abdullahi ibn Fuduye` was one of the earliest of his poetic works, composed in the year 1201 A.H. (1785 C.E.) when he was twenty-two years old. He named the text Manan’l-Manaan Li Man Arada Shu`b ‘l-Imaan (The Benefits of the Benefactor for the One Who Desires the Branches of Faith). It was a versification of the renowned an-Niqaaya of the reformer of the 9th century A.H. Imam Jalaal’d-Deen Abd’r-Rahman ibn Abu Bakr as-Suyuti (d. 911 A.H.) in which he delineated the fourteen essential sciences of Islam. Later, as-Suyuti composed a commentary on the an-Niqaaya called Itmaam ‘d-Diraaya. Shaykh Abdullahi composed his versification of the an-Niqaaya its commentary after having studied the two texts exhaustively along with his teacher the master linguist and ascetic Shaykh Ahmad ibn Abu Bakr ibn Ghari. He read the an-Niqaaya with him and received license to transmit the text along with licenses in the other texts he studied with him, such as the at-Talkhees, its commentaries, the Alfiyat’l-Ma`ani, its commentaries and the al-Jawhar’l-Mahnuun, its commentaries and other books of rhetoric. On completion of the an-Niqaaya and its commentary Itmaan’d-Diraaya, Shaykh Abdullahi demonstrated his mastery of the sciences transmitted therein by composing this excellent poetic abridgement of these texts in one hundred and seven poetic verses.

Cette contribution n'a aucune prétention à vouloir renouveler l'étude de la poésie en langue malgache. Elle n'a d'autre ambition que de proposer, très sommairement, quelques pistes pour une approche littéraire des débuts de la poésie écrite à Madagascar.

This succinct but brilliant poem by Shaykh Abdullahi ibn Fuduye`, may Allah be merciful to him and provide us with his baraka; regarding the particles of inflection (huruuf’l-`iraab) was first published according to my knowledge by Shaykh Abdullahi al-Ilorin al-Qaadiri of the southern region of Nigeria; which I used as the basis of this translation. The poem comprises thirty-eight stanzas and briefly covers the basic functions of the particles related to nouns and verbs and give simple examples for each. Shaykh Abdullahi did not cite all of the particles in order to keep the text as concise as possible. I am presently working on a commentary upon this text, explaining the meanings of the technical terms, as well as providing the inflections of the examples the Shaykh offered. It must be understood that Shaykh Abdullahi ibn Fuduye` was an absolute scholar of independent judgment (mujtahid mutlaaq) in the linguistic sciences, and did not adhere to either the Kufan or Basran schools of grammar; but as Shaykh Ibn `Ajiba said of Shaykh Ibn Ajurum: “He inclined to the truth wherever he discovered it.”

This article engages with the works of Sudanese American poet Safia Elhillo, a rising star in Arab, African, and diasporic literary circles. It explores the chronotopic use of metre, repetition, keywords, and mise-en-abyme in Elhillo’s works to think through the ontological stakes of postcolonial verse. It consequently proposes fractals as a non-binary way of conceptualizing hybridity, linking these to a polychronic logic, where the poems’ form and content foreground temporality as a recursive, self-repetitive contemporaneity. Further, through a sustained focus on how Elhillo creates a network of intertextual links between her poems, the article shows how recursive structures that highlight time-space dialectics cast scale as the main link between the various building blocks of the poems. By linking these chronotopic fractals to patterns of orature that draw on both Arabic and African traditions, the article gives an aesthetic reading of the betweenness of Elhillo’s American Sudanese positionality.

Link to full paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/RRZSCN4CGPZ5SFVYKXVY/full?target=10.1080/17449855.2021.1888150

Mathias Eugen Mnyampala (1917-1969) was a Tanzanian writer, lawyer and poet who wrote in Kiswahili. His mother tongue is Cigogo. He learned to read and to write in Kiswahili at the age of fifteen in a local Roman Catholic Bible school. Since independence of Tanganyika in 1961, he put his poetic art at the service of the development of Kiswahili, the language of the new nation. The issue of the Tanzanian nation building is reflected in this particular destiny of a young pastor from Ugogo in the center of Tanzania becoming a master of Kiswahili poetry recognized by his peers as well as a national artist. Our main question concerns the formal metric structure and linguistic description of Mathias E. Mnyampala's poems. How to define them? What relationships do they have with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries classical corpus of the Kiswahili poetry? Why is this particular type of poetry - considered formally and linguistically - which is being promoted at the national level and getting official recognition by successive political authorities in Tanzania? To achieve the political interpretation of formal and linguistic analysis of poetic texts, we first had to equip ourselves with tools that were missing regarding formal metric description. I attempted to analyze all the existing theories in metrics to arrive at a formal and reductionist synthesis. I then analyzed Mathias E. Mnyampala's poetic corpus on this basis. Metric forms and the language of the poems demonstrate ex materia creative processes linked to the metrics of the classical corpus that tell us something about the nation building in which they are called. The ex materia creation, neither classical nor modern, is a third way of poetic composition that my formal approach can describe. I will analyze that parallel to the nationalization of the meters of classical Kiswahili poetry, it comes to the africanization of the national culture.

n his article "Myth and History in the Poetry of Osundare" Christopher Anyokwu examines the interrelation of myth and history from an African perspective. Anyokwu analyzes the poetry of one of Africa's most prolific and decorated contemporary poets, Niyi Osundare. Osundare is a third-generation Nigerian poet whose work is based on Yoruba oral tradition and informed by Marxist ideology. Osundare's poetry demonstrates the so-called "return-to-roots" neo-traditionalist ethos in modern African writing. Osundare's attitude to myth, ritual, and other African animist categories is intriguingly complex, ambivalent, and giving rise to charges of ideological irresolution and culturo-epistemic bifurcation. As a champion of poetry of social statement and revolutionary change, Osundare places history on a high pedestal in the overall message of his art. Anyokwu analyses the different points of interaction and divergence between myth and history in Osundare's poetry arguing its conjunctural significance in the growing world of African letters.

Le kiamu est un dialecte du kiswahili du Nord qui a fourni l'une des fondations linguistiques, avec les dialectes de Mombasa, au développement de la littérature classique d'expression swahilie entre le XVIIIème et le XIXème siècle. A ce titre, le kiamu fait l'objet de descriptions linguistiques nombreuses depuis le XIXème siècle. Le présent ouvrage, tente de dresser un état des lieux en 2005 sur la base de l'analyse phonologique et morphologique d'un corpus linguistique et poétique. Des énoncés de la vie courante sont analysés ainsi que les 131 premières strophes d'un poème de genre utenzi du poète de Lamu, le Cheikh Mahmud Ahmed Abdull ibn Kadir. Il entreprendra la récitation d'une de ses compositions dont notre enregistrement est une des bases du présent travail présenté à l'origine comme mémoire de fin d'études de master de recherche. Ce livre constitue également une première approche de la métrique classique de la poésie d'expression swahilie. En particulier du genre utenzi dont des éléments de description sont initiés.

This is a review of The Beauty I have Seen (a trilogy) by Tanure Ojaide. This anthology is divided into three parts and it is about the compelling journey of the poet. The anthology won the 2011 Cadbury Prize for Poetry awarded by Association of Nigerian Authors and was nominated for the 2012 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. The 154-page book has various names associated with his visit to different countries and most especially the ills associated with his homeland, his Urhobo nationality also reflects in the anthology. Despite the fact that the poet is resident in the United States, he remains an author about the state of Nigeria. This study will show that Tanure Ojaide is one of the prolific poets in the Third-generation epistemology of Nigerian poets in English expression.

Every literature bears the imprints of the social context from which it has derived.  Even extreme Formalist/Structuralist readers, who insist that a poem should be, not mean; that poetry has no referents outside itself; that the value of a poem ends in its intellectual enjoyment rather than in any social applicability it could possess, concede in very significant ways that a work of art does not create itself, and that the keys to certain aspects of its profundities lie in its historical origins.  Rhythms of Crisis does not deny the social complexities out of which it has emerged.  Its very blurb states:

In spite of its several subject matters, its varying degrees of complexity or simplicity, its possible layers of meaning, Dennis Brutus’s poetry is held together by an underlying structure of thesis and antithesis; of two parts frequently in a relationship of opposition.  This feature of the poetry derives from Brutus’s vision of South Africa (his primary creative context) as comprising two related but frequently opposing parts: Apartheid on the one hand, and the oppressed on the other.  The present attempt is to illustrate that feature from the perspective of the poet’s ‘songs,’ which are often emollient vehicles for unpleasant messages.

This article seeks to explore the ways in which Zimunya constructs Zimbabwean rural and urban landscapes and cultural identities at a time when the city is making inroads
into the rural terrain and the rural hinterland is encroaching into the city. I argue that even though Zimunya seems to blame the white man’s culture for ‘contaminating’ the rural landscape and cultural identities and seeks to purify his home space, the tale unfolding in the poetic narratives suggests that his society also changes with time. It might not be possible for his society to behave and relate to each other in accordance with pre-capitalist values as existing social and economic conditions have changed. Contrary to existing formalist criticism of Zimunya’s poetry such as those posited by Zhuwarara, R. (1985, Introduction. In M. Zimunya (Ed.), Country dawns and city lights. Harare: Longman) who views the rural African society as both overshadowed and threatened by city life, a place which symbolises a civilisation whose capacity to brutalise seems infinite, I argue that both the rural and urban African people have the capacity to ‘resist’ the metropole culture creating a new identity or a system of relations and representations which is not fixed, but dynamic and continually recomposes and redefines itself.
Keywords: cultural identities; landscape; hybridity; indigenes; metropole

This article contends that African poetry cannot be contemplated without recourse to pain and that it has become a recurrent motif in African poetry. The pain motif in African poetry is brought about by the worsening socio-political situation of African society. Though the poets of the three generations that make up African poetry reflect both their private and public pain in their poetry, the level of pain contained in the poetry of the poets of the third generation has never been perceived in the poetry of previous generation of African poets. Unlike the poetry of preceding eras, those of the third generation embody a poetic motif that seeks to depict hearts steeped in deep pain and that are totally broken. Using poems selected from Hyginus Ekwuazi’s three collections, Love Apart, Dawn into Moonlight: All Around Me Dawning and The Monkey’s Eye, the persona’s experiences and the people’s ordeals are revealed. The paper concludes that the kind of pain which characterises the poetry of the poets of the third generation is overwhelming and reflects a people who have known so much pain and suffering.
Keywords: motif, pain, poetry, generation(s), Africa, society, Hyginus
Ekwuazi

Mamba Issue 6 is a big sizzling compilation as the journal continues to attract the attention of countries and continents by featuring works of new haijins from Zimbabwe, Tunisia, Morocco, and far-off Palestine. It features three haibans coming from Ghana and Lesotho exploring the essence of arcs and circles in the architectural design of African tribes’ huts, and the life of the
African child tending to his father’s stable. The issue as well features the three winning pieces from the Lagos Haiku Workshop organised by the Convener of Parliament of Poets; Michael Babajide in conjunction with Africa Haiku Network which took place on June 6, 2018, at Arch Deacon Adelaja Senior Boys’ Secondary School Bariga, Lagos
state, Nigeria. The visiting haijin and workshop instructor was Emmanuel Jessie Kalusian, co-founder of Africa Haiku Network.
The maiden contest equally received a wide live coverage done by Channels TV Lagos. Also, gracing the Mamba for the first time are two sumie paintings from Vyacheslav Sinkevich, one of Russia’s leading contemporary painters. Readers will as well find the review of Moon on Water; the debut haiku collection by Brendon Kent written by Adjei Agyei-Baah a prism with rare colors worth adoring. And to further create soothing stoppages for readers to relax and continue their reading through, the issue is interspersed with some of the fine haigas and photo haiku selected from Africa Haiku Network just ended Rainfall Haiku Series. Lastly, this issue coincidentally contains five new haiku sent to our journal by the late Angelee Deodhar, one of the giants and geniuses of Indian haiku before her death. We hope this compilation will once again delight you in your homes, workplaces and anywhere you may find yourself. Our keen and diligent readers, we cheerfully look forward to having your warm thoughts if there are any to share to keep our young journal continuously appealing and strong.