Two Nigerian Poems

A considerable poetry has sprung up in the English press ofNigeria and elsewhere in West Africa. It often violates academiclaws. but, like so much in African culture, it is alive. Wegive two examples below, with acknowledgements to the NigerianSpokesman, from which they are taken. The first illustratesthe direct and concrete nature of the African mind, the second,his political emotion. Tony Enahoro is a young editor from Beninrecently sentenced to 9 months imprisonment for criminal libel,and the author belongs to a chief's family from the same town.Imoudu is the Nigerian labour leader. Wallace Johnson, the SierraLeone labour leader, was interned in Sherbro Island during thewar.     

Two More Nigerian Poems

In our last number we printed two poems, selected, with no regardto their subject matter, as examples of the attempts that youngAfricans are making to express themselves. Crude though theyare, these poems appeared to us to be something more than merebad imitations of English verse. V/e now reproduce another two–onea romantic, almost Teutonic evocation of the forest, the otherresembling at least the spirit of the Latin songs of wanderingscholars in the Middle Ages. Eweka writes from the same townas Yesufu-Giwa, Sapele, where there seems to be a literary schoolthat might be worth investigating: at least the quality of itsverse, however uneven, ts much higher than any seen from "older"areas like Lagos or the Gold Coast. Is this due to the superiorimagination of the "new" Nigertan peoples, or to the fact thatthey have not yet learned enough to blight them by imitatinginappropriate English models? The answer may be a combinationof these reasons. The first of the present poems, by the way,comes from the Comet of Lagos, the second from the Spokesmanat Onitsha.