In West Africa they call him a griot. Swahili civilization is replete with poets, leaders of thought spanning centuries. A book edited by Abdilatif Abdalla and published by Mkuki na Nyota, Kale ya Washairi wa Pemba (The Past of Pemba Poets), lists quite a few, including Fumo Liyongo wa Baury in the twelfth century, and Suudbin Said Al-Maamiriy in the nineteenth century. These poet-intellectuals largely saw themselves as the voices of the people and seekers of justice.
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This seemed to be in direct conflict with the pride Ghanaians had in their own culture and precolonial history. I recall a song—my father’s favorite—by the great Nigerian musician and activist Fela Kuti called “Colonial Mentality.” Colonial mentality, as defined by Kuti, is the idea that people who have been colonized, marginalized, and enslaved feel themselves inferior to their colonizers based on the very fact of their colonization. He be say you be colonial man, Kuti sings in his beautifully rough voice, his Nigerian pidgin clear and defiant. You don be slave man before / Them don release you now / But you never release yourself.
Chapter 2: ‘His Poems Are Seditious in Nature’: The Man Who Connected Them All
“Over the years, I have heard my uncles and aunts talk about the poetry my dad used to write. It had assumed a kind of legendary status in our family, but reading these documents was the first time I had actually seen it. I was surprised at how much it read, to me, like what it is — the writing of someone barely out of their teens. An intelligent person, with a great command of English, for sure. But words that could bring down a state? I still can’t get my head around it. I suppose that is the thing with repressive regimes. Any dissent must be totally stamped out. Even the words of someone as young as my dad. They say that you manifest what you fear, and the government did just that with my dad. He wasn't actively planning a revolution before his banning but he would do so afterwards.
Language has always been a battlefield of ideas. It is a war zone in the struggle between enslavement and empowerment, between the dominated and the dominating, the colonized and the colonizing. The history of a language, Tom Paulin has written, is often a story of possession and dispossession, territorial struggle, and the establishment or imposition of a culture. Language has been as much the tool of conquest and resistance as the sword. Indeed some of the fiercest battles have been fought and continue to be fought in this zone.
The poems remind us of the obvious: that Abdilatif Abdalla is primarily a poet and not a politician; and that his real voice, the enduring voice, the voice that will survive him, is the one infused with the spirit of the words, rhythms, and imagery of his poetry, reminding us of the Keatsian words “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” At its best and most powerful, the aesthetic is also the ethical.
An excellent student of South African literary and intellectual history, Mphahelele was aware of the words of R.V. Selope Thema in an issue of the Chamber of Mines weekly newspaper for workers, Umteteli wa Bantu (Mouthpiece of the People), in March 1929:
The duty of Bantu writers and journalists, as that of writers and journalists of other races, is to call the attention of the leaders to the things that are detrimental to the interest and welfare of our people. A writer who does not criticize and correct the mistakes of his people does not fulfill the purpose for which God endowed him with the power of the pen. A writer is a prophet, and his duty is not only to prophesy but also to rebuke, when necessary, the people for wrongdoing; to criticize, when occasion demands it, the conduct and methods of the leaders of his race, and point out the way of salvation.