Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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In my last column I presented a few African Anglophone writers - Africans who use English as the channel through which to convey their thoughts. Most if not all of them wrote prose: novels, short stories and plays.

In this column I shall present African writers who used Romance languages, particularly French and Portuguese. Most of those produced poems, works of resistance, love, humanity and freedom. It is a well-known fact that poetry can be an effective means to generating emotions, especially patriotic impulses. We know for instance how the French resistance movement against the Nazis used poetry as a weapon. They even published a magazine, Silence de la mer, in which Aragon wrote his famous love poems to Elsa.

What remains interesting, however, is that most of the writers of the liberation movements of the colonies whose people spoke French or Portuguese chose to express themselves in verse rather than prose. Leopold Sedar Senghor, who became president of Senegal after independence, for example, was a poet. He published four volumes of verse, founded the Negritude movement and was the force behind the successful institution Presance Africaine, headquartered in Paris. It is worth mentioning here that Senghor was the first African president to resign, handing his place over to younger candidates.

On the French side there are indeed many names that have become famous, whether as poets or as philosophers. The name of Alionne Diop is famous, as that of a great thinker and the mind behind two very important congresses of Black Intellectuals held first in Paris and then in Rome. He is well- known for his sociological research about Africans.

Then there is Ousman Sembene, poet, playwright and film director. Sembene, whom I had the pleasure of meeting when he was awarded the Lotus Prize, died recently. One of his famous poems is called "Fingers":

Fingers capable of sculpting statues

Held high on

Fingers that affect us

Shaking us

Fingers of artists

Rough and dry fingers

Which throw seeds

The fingers of the peasants

Which are now holding the trigger

But it is perhaps in the former Portuguese colonies that we have the best example of poetry used as a weapon of resistance and self assertion. I have chosen two leaders, Agostino Neto, president of the Popular Liberation Movement of Angola, who was awarded the Lotus Prize in 1970, and Marcellino Dos Santos, also a Lotus Prize recipient.

Neto was a medical doctor who led the liberation movement of his people. He studied medicine in Portugal in 1947 and in 1952 he was arrested for taking part in anti- colonialism demonstration.

After finishing his studies he returned to Angola, where he led the liberation movement. One of his best known poems is "The Hoisting of the Flag", which he wrote on his return to Angola. Translated into English by Nihad Salem, it was published in Lotus magazine:

When I returned to my native land

The Casurina trees had vanished from the town

You too

Liceu my friend

Consoling voice of the lively rhythms of my love

In the night of infallible Saturdays

I arrived at the very moment of national cataclysm

I arrived for the surrection of the grain

The dynamic symphony of growth and joy in men

Blood and suffering

Were an impetuous torrent dividing the city

When I returned to my native land

The day was chosen

The hour had come

Even the laughter of children had disappeared

When I returned to my native land

The men were more on the alert

Something gigantic was on the move in the land

Students studied more

The sun shone brighter

A young serenity lived within old men

It was more than hope, it was certainty

It was more than goodness, it was love...