The Imagery of Death in African Poetry

Abstract

Opening Paragraph This paper rests on the belief that traditional oral poetry from many parts of Africa exhibits a number of common themes in the imagery with which it handles the fact of death. Further, it argues that these themes are often to be found in the work of contemporary African poets, writing in English or in French. Their treatment in such work may be the sort of sophisticated examination of inherited beliefs that we find in a writer like Euripides, but there can be no doubting the strength of this movement, among younger writers, to come to grips with Africa's traditional systems of thought and make them part of a living intellectual and emotional heritage. The old missionary-inspired dichotomy between ‘modern’ and ‘backward’, as that between ‘Christian’ and ‘heathen’, is gradually breaking down and giving place to the reunified culture that is painfully emerging. As this new cultural unity establishes itself, Africans will no longer be required to amputate a large part of themselves, and almost the whole of their ancestry, in order to qualify for civilization. Hence the importance of the role which African poets are playing in this whole process of restatement and reassessment. In their work the concern for bringing these things to the surface of the mind, for integrating them consciously with the personality, is more explicit and more personal that it can be with the novelist or the dramatist.

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