implied in the said social imaginary. The alibi for the overthrow of the anti-colonialist
Nkrumah was couched in appropriate but pretentious language in order to appeal to the
people and gain their confidence. But more importantly, it presented the military
intervention as a revolution. The impression which was ingrained in the social psyche
assayed to open up an expectation in the direction of redeeming the nation’s image and
fate from the destructive order against which they were staked. However, the situation,
which turned out to be nothing but the institution and perpetuation of military
dictatorship and praetorianism left the nation’s social psyche shattered through and
through. The observation is more apt if one considers the fact that between 1966 and
1981 not only was military rule entrenched but it also developed a pathology for scuttling
democratic processes. Moreover, the frequency of intervention is evinced in the four
military regimes witnessed within the time frame (Pellow and Chazan 47). So the fit of
pique and disappointment into which the people were thrown accounts for the musing of
Elegy for the Revolution. It is indeed an attempt on the part of the poet to objectify the
anguish and sense of loss to which the people capitulate in view of the military
interventions. The medium of this objectification is the appropriation of the Ewe dirge
tradition. The said tradition is regarded essentially as belonging to the designation of
music or song in the Anlo-Ewe oral tradition (Kofi Awoonor 1974: 3). But the
appropriation cannot be regarded as mere “simplistic transference of values from Ewe
[artistic] practices” (Oyeniyi Okunoye 2005: 91). It necessarily undergoes a modification
in the hand of the poet, who transforms it not only into an objectification of a people’s
sense of immediate tragedy and trauma, but also makes it a fundamental project in the
subsequent construction of the many phases of the condition of a postcolonial state. The
poet’s salute to the people in the face of the breach of faith on the part of the military
class comes up clearly in the dedication:
To the memory of
The revolution that went astray
and for
Those who refused to dieThe sequence that one identifies in the subsequent publications understandably looks
back to this point in Ghana’s history as underpinned by a people’s collective elegy and