THERE can be no doubt that any record of human history anywhere in the world is one of a human desire to enjoy freedoms and liberties, to want to be counted as equals among men irrespective of race, gender, politics, social affinities, religion and whatever else.
It may be the freedom and liberty to participate in the affairs of a community, the freedom to express feelings that help enrich one’s consciousness of the world around them, the freedom and liberty to communicate unfettered in music or any other forms of art.
In the absence of these universal virtues a struggle to want to be free becomes an inalienable imperative. This is true for people who have lived in captivity by design or otherwise and for others living in their own homeland where these necessities are deemed a luxury.
When human oppression usurps the freedom of individuals people are tormented physically and psychologically.  Africans have had a long history of experience with this kind of situation. The slave trade that depopulated the continent of human cargo is a case in point. In the later years of colonial bondage human labour took another devastating toll on the Africans.
The exploitation of the mineral resources where cheap labour was needed in the shape of the able-bodied men who left their families to work in the mines under deplorable conditions is another example here.
Either the labourerscrossed their country boundaries for workor left rural communitieswithin their countries to go to new towns where mineralextraction was getting under way.In the Southern Africa sub-region, the neighbouring countries of the industrialised South Africa provided an opportunity for such labour.
Zambia’s experience saw many people flock from rural societies to work in the mines that were opening up in the copperbelt. This week our column looks at the Africans in divers circumstances by examining the poetry common in such places at the time. Jose Craveirinha from Mozambique is our first great resource as his poem ‘Mamparra M’gaiza’ indicates:
The cattle is selected
counted, marked
and gets on the train, stupid cattle.
In the pen the females stay behind to breed new cattle.
The train is back from ‘’migoudini’’ and they come rotten with diseases, the old cattle of Africa oh, and they’ve lost their heads, these cattle ‘’m’gaiza’’
Come and see the sold cattle have lost their heads my god my land the sold cattle have lost their heads.
Again the cattle is selected, marked and the train is ready to take away meek cattle
Stupid cattle
mine cattle
cattle of Africa, marked and sold.
This is a simple poem which is loaded with meaning. Its simplicity is a qualification for its selection in our discussion. As is always the case, we intend to help teach would-be poets how to
write poetry. The style used in this poem is encapsulated in singular thoughts which form stanzas. In a word, a stanza carries an idea which is connected to another idea expressing another stanza. The ideas build up towards the total meaning of the poem. The style of the poem is quite economical in the use of punctuation marks.
In fact, only three types of marks are used: the comma, opening and closing inverted commas and a full stop. The inverted marks are used to isolate words borrowed from a local dialect to make them different from the English words. Thus ‘M’gaiza,’ a Mozambique expression for a man just returned from the mines with his pockets full of money but his health is broken is used; another word ‘migoudini’ denotes the word ‘mine.’
The thought that runs through the poem is divided into two: the first is about the initial selection of cattle but down the structure of the poem the second thought is introduced by the word ’again.’ The central metaphor is cattle, the beasts of burden.
By implication, the persona’s or the poet’s people are beasts, stupid beasts that are easily selected and marked (for identification like cattle in a kraal). The poem is silent about the selectors who, of course, can easily be assumed to be the mine owners, the owners of capital. The process of selection is meant to get the best cattle, strong enough to work in the mines. The women are left behind to breed more cattle for the oppressor’s labour. The poet, consciously creates a span of time at the end of which the stupid mine cattle return, burdened perhaps with syphilis and other mine- induced diseases. For whatever gain the miners have had the persona calls them stupid, it is not worth anything.
On its return to the mines the train, as suggested by the word ‘again,’ gets another doze of cattle by the same process of selection in an endless cycle of brutal annihilation of a human race. The constant reference to loss of heads is an expressed symbol of human disintegration and death, the death of a human social fabric, community order and consciousness.
Let us turn to another poem by a South African, Dennis Brutus, whose works we have analysed before in this column. The poem is called ‘Night City’:

Sleep well, my love, sleep well:
the harbour lights gaze over restless docks,
police cars cockroach through the tunnel streets;

From the shanties creaking iron-sheets
violence like a bug-infested rag is tossed
and fear is immanent as sound in the wind-swung bell;

The long day’s anger pants from sand and rocks;
but for this breathing night at least,
my land, my love, sleep well.
Brutus’ imagery is sharp and surgical. The poet’s feelings are expressed in three stanzas clearly marked in an enjambment fashion. The poem is enhanced by figures of speech gaining speed as the poem’s structure unfolds. It is, in a sense, a sensual piece of work, romantic in outlook but it is generally a kind of patriotic romance for one’s country. But if one looks at it from the standpoint of a love relationship between man and woman the message it portends is essentially ironic.
The general mood in the poem is one that denies genuine sleep, what with the restless docks, gazing harbour lights, violence, creaking sheets. fear and cockroaching police cars.This is a country where one learns to live a day at a time, so then as long as one is alive tonight, this breathing night (why not!), my land, my love, sleep and sleep well.
It is a wish for a troubled one’s country that for obvious reasons cries for some relief for itself and the poet’s dearest friend who lives in it. Dennis was born in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, but moved with his coloured parents to South Africa in his childhood.
He was educated at Fort Hare and he University of Witwatersrand. His protest against the apartheid government led him to face arrest and sent to Robben Island. He later left the country and lived in exile. Most of his poetry was written in exile.
Given this backdrop, Brutus knew how it felt to live in an ambivalent situation of hate/love of a country torn apart by the terror of apartheid. You will notice a subdued anger simmering under the brutality of a police state. In the light of oppression, Antonio Jacinto sees his people in almost the same way other poets see them in a tyrannical state. Here the personified ‘Monangamba’:
On that big estate there is no rain
it’s the sweat of my brow that waters the crop:
On that big estate there is coffee ripe
and cherry-redness
is drops of my blood turned sap,
The coffee will be roasted,
ground, and crushed,
will turn black, black with the colour of the
contratado.
Black with the colour of the contratado!
Ask the birds that sing,
the streams in carefree wandering and the high wind from inland:
Who gets up early? Who goes to toil?
Who is it carries on the long road the hammock of bunch of kernels?
Who reaps and for pay gets scorn rotten maize, rotten fish,ragged clothes, fifty angolarest beating for biting back?
Who?
Who makes the millet grow
and the orange groves to flower?
–Who?
Who gives the money for the boss to buy
cars, machinery, women
and Negro heads for the motors?
–Who?
Who makes the white man prosper,
grow big-bellied—get much money?
–who?
And the birds that sing,
the streams in the carefree wandering and the high wind from inland will answer:
–Munangambaeeee….
Ah! Let me at least climb the palm trees
Let me drink wine, palm wine
And fuddled by my drunkennessforget
–Munangambaeeee….
The structure of the poem is also simple. We are introduced to a white man’s estate, a coffee estate where there is no rain because the speaker tells us it is the sweat and blood of the black contratado or black labourer that produces and processes the coffee. In the first part of the poem the poet uses rhetorical questions to get the reader involved into the discussion.
There is already a hint as to who is the key player in the estate’s development; it is of course the labourer himself. When we are made to listen to the wandering waters, the inland high winds and the birds that sing to help enquire who the workers are at the white man’s estate, we already know who the felon is.
But the forest birds and the natural elements of the water and wind only add more information about the details of the suffering labourer: he carries the coffee kernels, he is ill-paid, he gets his pay in kind: rotten fish, rotten maize and ragged clothes.
Despite all this the wh- rhetorical (who?) question continues leading to the climax of the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, psychological torture of the contratado.
Finally, the high winds, the birds and the carefree wandering water shout the name to us of this suffering contratado—and, it is—Munangambeeeee! Twice in a very short space of time the name is shouted at us, it is as though the reader is deaf of hearing and by shouting he needs to hear who the sufferer is. There is a streak of irony in this shout about those who put in much but get nothing at the end of it all.
It is a rewarding metal exercise for the reader to compare this piece of work with Jose Craveirinha from Mozambique whose poem we have already discussed. Craveirinha was a FRELIMO supporter and was imprisoned in 1966.
His poem ‘Mamparra M’gaiza’ speaks of stupid cattle or another contratado selling his labour in the financial capital propelled mines of the colonialists. Mozambique like Angola was a Portuguese colony under the Lisbon administration of the despotic Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.
The colonial experience for the black people under Portugal was similar. In our two poems it is only the places of work that are different, one is about the mines while the other focuses on the estate. In both situations it is the white colonial masters who used black labour to exploit Africa’s resources to build towns and cities back home leaving the black race poorer.
In Craveirinha’s country the contratado may have returned home diseased and dying while in Antonio’s Angola Monangamba, a personified symbol of black dehumanization the workers also lose their heads, drink wine to forget about their suffering: ‘Ah! let me at least climb the palm trees/Let me drink wine, palm wine/And fuddled by my drunkenness forget.’Ah! Monangamba, what a way to forget!Let us end our conversation with Agostino Neto’s poem ‘Kinaxixi’:
I was glad to sit down
on a bench in Kinaxixi
at six o’clock of a hot evening
and just sit there…
Someone would come
maybe to sit beside me
And I would see the black faces of the people going uptown in no hurry expressing absence in the   jumbled Kimbundu they converse in.
I would see the tried footsteps of the servants whose fathers are also are the servants looking for love here, glory there, wanting something more than drunkenness in every alcohol
Neither happiness nor hate
After the sun had set lights would be turned on and I  would wander off thinking that our life after all is simple too simple or anyone who is tired and still has to walk
Neto’s poem is also born of the same colonial experience. Notice in this situation the themes of loss, loneliness, dehumanization and cultural dislocation. In Neto’s Angola it is not only the labourer’s pain but the loss of language expressed by people that have been uprooted from their communities and have lost their wealth and language. In the streets of a new Angola established by colonialists there is a loss of hope.
The poet yearns to talk to someone as he sits on a bench but no -one comes. His lowliness intensifies as night falls and lights are turned on the city. He wanders away and we are not told where he is going to stay the night.
But at least he delights in seeing people just like him in no hurry walking about going, it seems nowhere too. The theme of absence is deepened by the brokenness of their Kimbundu language, the brokenness of a people’s culture. So, the absence is not only about lacking a physical presence of someone but also the cultural roots, so severely amputated. Among the servants of both sons and fathers love is absent. Unlike in Antonio’s poem drunkenness does not seem to be the remedy but love is, although it is hardly accessible.
There is a philosophical appeal in the poem when the poet concludes about the simplicity of life, his and his people’s simplicity. As lights are turned on to benefit the colonial settlers the owners of the land still walk on in the dead of the night.
How can life be made simple in such an ambivalent situation, a life of constant walks no matter how exhausted one can be? Is it not simple and enjoyable for those who can rest for the night or settle down for a cup of tea to while away the night? But such is the paradox of life.
Dear reader, I hope you have learned a great deal from our discussion today. I would urge you to read through the poems and my comments for more enjoyment and learning.
This is a must for readers who want to write to poetry. The more you read the more you learn and the more you become a better writer. The central theme of our discussion is captivity with a special reference to the colonial situation faced by Africans.
The patriots of the time fought for the liberation of African countries from colonial bondage so that future generations could enjoy basic freedoms and liberties which were denied under colonial servitude. African leaders owe it to those who paid the price to fight for these liberties for future generations.
African leaders who deny their people these liberties are an ignominy to compatriots whose vision for Africa was to offer hope, peace, honour and development which were rare commodities in the colonial dispensation that brought shame to the continent.
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