the artificial borders and walls erected consequent upon colonialism, Serote traverses the
distant pre-colonial African past, linking it with the present, so much so that it becomes
real altogether within the context of pan-African values. It is particularly so with respect
to the interconnections and visceral bonding and banding together in trials and travails,
and triumphs that have characterized Africa, right from the era of slavery.^76 This is why it
can be appropriately limned as another intellectual attempt to explore the ideals of
“African-centeredness”, that is, a consciousness that can facilitate the possibility of an
African scholarship that orbits the totality of African peoples’ experience both on the
continent and in the diaspora (Zizwe Poe 2003: 8).
On this score, one is taken through the horrors of the Atlantic Slave Trade which
essentially eventuated in the major diasporic presence of Africans in the West today (31).
But beyond this, other forms of interruption and expropriation to which the continent and
its peoples had been subjected in the past come up for reflection in form of an emphatic
deployment of parallelism:
Africa was in perpetual combat with life
in the embrace of this fate
in the fate of the sound of the chain
in the sound of the whip
in the fate of the sound of the gun
in the fate of anger and hate
in the fate of the sound of the floodlight
in the fate of the sound of the plastic (31).Yet, it is remarkable to know that Africa had survived all this in the past. This was
because, “even as they ground and pounded my life/ even as they put heat and fire on it/
to my semen/ to my ovary/ i flower, i rise, i emerge/ i flower in the gloomy day like a
mushroom/ i repeat me in bounds and leaps/ i enter/ space and sound and i am here/
handsome like the dance” (32). Nevertheless, the celebration of Africa’s incredible
based framework of Pan-Africanism “despite his personal friendship with African National Congress
founder Sol Plaatje.” 76
Yet, it must be admitted that the history of Pan-Africanism dates back to a much earlier time, the most
credible of which Kwabena Nantambu cites as the unification of lower and upper Egypt in B.C. 3200 “to
form one country under one rule to be able to resist foreign aggression and invasion” from the Greeks, the
Arabs, the Romans, etc. (Giselle Aris, “Pan-Africanism: Competing Interpretations,” Gaines Junction.
2005, 177-184).