Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Stop Press/ Tribute To Nadine Gordimer 1923–2014
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Editorial Article: Fiction & Socio-Political Realities in Africa: What Else Can Literature Do?
- The Novel as an Oral Narrative Performance: The Delegitimization of the Postcolonial Nation in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari Ma Njirũũngi
- Abiku in Ben Okri’s Imagination of Nationhood: A Metaphorical Interpretation of Colonial-Postcolonial Politics
- Refracting the Political: Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place
- Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Resolutionaries: 47 Exoteric Fiction, the Common People & Social Change in Post-Colonial Africa – A Critical Review
- In Quest of Social Justice: 58 Politics & Women’s Participation in Irene Isoken Salami’s More Than Dancing
- Breaking the Laws in J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus – Philosophy & the Notion of Justice
- The Rhetoric & Caricature of Social Justice in Post-1960 Africa: A Logical Positivist Reading of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari
- ‘Manhood’ in Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty: Authenticity or Accountability?
- Remembering Kofi Awoonor (13 March 1935–21 September 2013)
- Reviews
Kofi Awoonor: Poem for a Mentor & Friend
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 February 2023
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Stop Press/ Tribute To Nadine Gordimer 1923–2014
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Editorial Article: Fiction & Socio-Political Realities in Africa: What Else Can Literature Do?
- The Novel as an Oral Narrative Performance: The Delegitimization of the Postcolonial Nation in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari Ma Njirũũngi
- Abiku in Ben Okri’s Imagination of Nationhood: A Metaphorical Interpretation of Colonial-Postcolonial Politics
- Refracting the Political: Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place
- Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Resolutionaries: 47 Exoteric Fiction, the Common People & Social Change in Post-Colonial Africa – A Critical Review
- In Quest of Social Justice: 58 Politics & Women’s Participation in Irene Isoken Salami’s More Than Dancing
- Breaking the Laws in J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus – Philosophy & the Notion of Justice
- The Rhetoric & Caricature of Social Justice in Post-1960 Africa: A Logical Positivist Reading of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari
- ‘Manhood’ in Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty: Authenticity or Accountability?
- Remembering Kofi Awoonor (13 March 1935–21 September 2013)
- Reviews
Summary
In the cave of my bedroom, slumbering to sleep
I often listen to poets whose verses force a grin or a weep.
Lesego Rampolokeng and Lemn Sissay stopover
To deplore, in the manner of a knowing griot-warrior,
The Boer’s logic of hate and Anglo racism of late
Meles Negusse tells me about Mammet’s flight
Into the Red Sea, about her escape from the emperor’s morbid gape,
Although playing hide and seek with lovers – who worship her wisdom,
Actually teasing them, biding time
Until wounds wringing in lies, patch up by the salt water’s coral gem.
In the background, I hear the Chinese poet Bei Dao murmur startled
‘When the Cape of Good Hope has already been arrived’
Why the heck take the vessels to wreck in the Cape of Death?
But today disaster has struck, bringing close the twilight
Kofi Awonoor has left this life, in an unscheduled flight
To join the other life that may be gentler and eternal.
I wept, I will not lie
So many memories come by
One of 2007, when on a beautiful summer’s day we congregated in our garden
He started singing songs of freedom; whistling and chanting like a contented nightingale
Still with a raw anguish that somehow balanced the scale
Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the wood,
Words I didn’t fathom then but wish I could.
Summers later yet another beautiful day, sitting in his home in Accra
Hearing my long story of the container-prison – our present day Naqura
I saw his protruding eyes flamed red,
Like roasting grains of red flax seed
And so, vainly though,
I had to withhold the news about the hiding of Mammet,
The mythical muse of the brave, who vanished in the custodial make shift cells of iron and steel
Artfully designed by fatalists with a license to kill,
Alas, how hard it seems to believe in the wood and how easy to deceive and steal.
Were the Nairobi butchers thinking?
If they were thinking, what was the purpose of their doing?
If there was a purpose, what was the logic of the ugliness –
Beyond its deadliness?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Politics and Social JusticeAfrican Literature Today 32, pp. 135 - 136Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014