negritude poetry, Neto’s poetry, among others, are works of this generation projected in
this direction.
Perhaps one other tendency of this generation was the privileging of private or personal
thoughts in their works. Soyinka’s “To my First White Hairs” falls into this category. It is
a creative devotion to the surprise and excitement that accompany the sudden realization
of the passage of time as often signalled by the transformation of dark hair to grey. It also
calls to mind Dennis Brutus’ “The Sibyl” in which one encounters the externalization of
some amatory infatuation with a young lady.^2 The attitude of these poets, it has to be
explained, was actuated mainly by the prevailing socio-political ambience of the time.
Things were still relatively in order and all that was needed was to celebrate Africanity
and indulge in other forms of gratification.
The socio-political climate of their time was also to inflect the kind of training they had
had in the art of poetic composition and literature generally. Whether trained in the newly
established colonial universities on the continent, or the far more established ones in
Europe, Anglophone African poets of this generation had western modernist poets to
emulate as they launched their creativity in a foreign language. Of significant mention is
the influence of modernist poets like Greald Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot and others
whose creative temperament was characterized by metrical finicality, obscurantism and
fragmentation, features that often stand in the way of poetic apprehension and only serve
to build a cult image around poetry (Timothy Materer 1995:1). Besides, it was a period
during which these poets consciously or otherwise were concerned with the self-imposed
responsibility of proving that the Black in Africa could also use English for poetic
creativity as well as any other best known European poet. Indeed, it was a tendency
which had earlier manifested itself in the attitude of African Americans and most
illustrative in the snide and condescending attitude of Alexandra Crummell in his
perception of English as a superior language to African languages (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
1994: 248). This propagation of modernist universalism had its purchase on these African
2
This analysis should not be taken as absolute, as it does not fail to take cognizance of the fact that for
Brutus, romance is another way of articulating his love for his country, a view that is better borne out in “A
Troubadour, I Traverse All my Land”.