Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment If read somewhat expansively and “sympathetically,” what these lines
amount to is the suggestion that apartheid, with its destructive hatred
of Black people and its legacy of supremacist arrogance, has not met
its match because there have not beenmenlike Shaka, or stated some-
what differently, because of the loss of the collective manhood of the
race. But read with critical rigor, the lines imply a baffling, even trivial-
izing neo-N ́egritudist symbolization of the will to resistance, the will to
emancipation of a whole continent by male sexual or generative prowess.
Ogun Abibiman, in its totality, transcends such astonishing flaws in its
racial discourse. Skillfully weaving history, myth and powerful vignettes
of the cynical pragmatism of modern-day “Great Powers” diplomacy
with bitter but gritty exposure of the compromises and betrayals of neo-
colonial African regimes, the poem constitutes a remarkable attempt at
reinventing heroic poetry for a continent in the grip of profound self-
doubts and in the wake of a stolidly unheroic, postmodern age with little
appetite for thegrands r ́ecitsof traditional heroic poetry.
That the central section ofMandela’s Earthlends its title to the entire
collection is no surprise because, of the four sections making up the
volume, it is the only one organized around a central figure – Nelson
Mandela – and a consuming desire to meet and subvert the extreme racial
provocation of apartheid on a scale of imagination, intellect and will
equal to the racial mindset of the ideologues and theorists of apartheid
and their Western backers. In this respect, it is remarkable that the five
poems in this section can be said to take off where the inflated diction
and rhetoric ofOgun Abibimaninevitably succumb to the laws of gravity –
as far as using the figure of one promethean hero to stand for the will
and destiny of a continent is concerned.
Thetoneof address in the poems of the “Mandela’s Earth” cycle is no
less reverential in their run of celebrative apostrophes to the courage,
integrity and will of Nelson Mandela than the tone which consummates
the idealization of Ogun and Shaka inOgun Abibiman. But tone – and
mood and diction – in the “Mandela’s Earth” cycle of poems is deeply
inflected by a corrosive, deflationary wit that is totally absent inOgun
Abibiman. And this wit pits the moral and spiritual stature of Nelson
Mandela, imprisoned for more than a quarter of a century, against the
absurd, paranoiac logic of his apartheid captors:
Your patience grows inhuman, Mandela.
Do you grow food? Do you make friends
Of mice and lizards? Measure the growth of grass
For time’s unhurried pace?