Poetry of Soyinka & p'Bitek

African poetry begins with African themes, rhythms, rituals, and ideas, growing out of the culture of the continent and of different regions within that continent. The history of Africa has also been a history of colonialism, and the European powers that controlled large expanses of territory during the colonial era also left behind cultural influences which would become part of the artistic expression of African poets and other African artists. Artistic expression in any given age always develops from works, styles, and themes produced in earlier eras. The further back into history we go, the more difficult it may be to ascertain the source of a given culture and the art it produces. Contemporary African poetry, though, has roots both in ancient African expression and more recent European expression. This can be seen in the poetry of Wole Soyinka of Nigeria and Okot p'Bitek, and a key theme is the survivability of the human being in the face of forces greater than him or herself. Such a view can be linked to the way these tribes and nations survived the era of colonialism and so outlasted the European powers greater than themselves. It can be linked to the way the people have survived various nationalistic movements and civil wars which, however destructive, never completely wiped out the earning of the people for freedom and self-determination. It can be linked cosmically to the plight of man in a world buffeted about by the gods. It is a vast theme t

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political power, "crowned in green crepes and amber beads." This is a reference to the sun rising in the East, and the next stanza explains what happens when it does: Raising eyelids on the sluggish earth Dispersing sulphur fumes above the lake Of awakening. . . (37). The daytime imagery also involves death and decay in the form of "burning mangoes" and the "sluggish earth." Night and day are intertwined: Your flutes at evening, your soul-awakening Dances fill the night with growth; I hear The sun's sad chorus to your starlit songs (37). The imagery in this poem suggests that the human being is imprisoned by forces greater than himself, and the ultimate imprisonment is found in the fact that we are all imprisoned by death, the death which surrounds us. This sense of death and destruction also evokes images of the civil war, for night and day, dead and living, the people of this area and the people of that--all are depicted as being at war, and this is a civil war because all the oppositions are in fact merely different manifestations of the same underlying reality. In "Purgatory," all these opposites are faced with the reality of their circumstance. Some "have walked to the edge of the valley/ Of the shadow" (39) and are now

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