to refute in a postcolonial fashion all forms of colonial insinuations which had hitherto
placed Africa in poor relation to the West. It was indeed an attempt to “write back” in the
same manner of textual articulation with which the West had depicted Africa; after all,
colonialism was executed, employing all forms of textual strategies (Elleke Boehmer
1995:13-15).
An understanding of the extent of colonial impact on Africa and the forms of imperialism
that had gone with it, engaged the art of these poets of the first generation in a sense that
reveals their aversion to the propagation of the Judaeo-Christian civilization. It was a
civilization which, having made a success of its proselytizing in Europe, had become the
basis for encroaching upon Africa with an impassioned rationale that was carried out to
the extent of displacing the gentile, communal societies, as was the case wherever this
form of colonialism had occurred (Fredrick Engels in Stuart Ferguson 2005: 462). It
thus becomes understandable why most of these early writers from Sedar Senghor to
Christopher Okigbo to Agostinho Neto, to mention an arbitrarily representative few,
joined in the nationalist awareness which had commenced much earlier with African
independence struggles to highlight the impact of this colonial incursion and the need to
revive the African heritage hitherto condemned to oblivion by the colonial dispensation.
This essentially was a preoccupation of poets of the first generation in the period shortly
before and after the wave of independence in most African countries in the 1960s (Tanure
Ojaide 1996: 75-76).
One poem which typifies this tendency is Kofi Awoonor’s “The Cathedral”. It is a
lamentation of the desecration and destruction of an otherwise authentic African milieu as
represented by a tree whose “boughs stretched, across a heaven/ [and] brightened by the
last fires of a tribe”. However, with the advent of colonialism, “surveyors and builders”
are sent to cut it down and in its place “A huge senseless cathedral of doom is built”
(Kojo Senanu and Theo Vincent 2003:209). Other poets take other various approaches in
the exercise of asserting and affirming the African personality in their reaction to colonial
views, while at the same time pointing out ways to cultural reclamation. For instance,
Okigbo’s “Heavensgate”, Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, Senghor’s