Murders by Leopold Sédar Senghor

They are lying there along the captured roads, along the roads of disaster  Slender poplars, statues of the sombre gods wrapped in long gold...

Letter to a Poet by Leopold Sédar Senghor

to Aimé Césaire To the Brother I love and the friend, my blunt, fraternal greeting!  The black gulls, the far-travelling canoe-masters have ...

African Communion by Tom Simpson

They came concealed in ceremonial robes: HIC EST ENIM CORPUS MEUM.  White robes, beautifully bright robes: Behold, your new God! But this ne...

A Look in the Past by Jared Angira

Once I was a lizard  cheeky and harmless  and built clouds  that the heat  never could melt I learnt of the transanimation  into a monitor d...

Hitch-Hike by Jared Angira

The Memory stands like a cracked bronze statue in a museum talking, smiling when we are tired with life we struggle to frustrate  old pressu...

II On the Edge by Okogbule Wonodi

I wait on the shore for the turning tide  and for seabirds, mouthful,  with shrimps caught on wet marshes. Around me the sands burn,  films ...

The Fulani Creation Story (Traditional Story from the Fulani)

At the beginning there was a huge drop of milk. Then Doondari came and he created the stone: Then the stone created iron, And iron created f...

Poem: Ogun, from Idanre by Wole Soyinka

  Now I will chant a salute to my Ogun O Belligerent One, you are not cruel. The Ejemu, foremost chief of Iwonran Town, He who smartly accou...

The Beginning (From Idanre) By Wole Soyinka

Low beneath rockshields, home of the Iron One The sun had built a fire within  Earth's heartstone. Flames in fever fits  Ran in rock fis...

Benin Woman by Odia Ofeimun

Under the smouldering sun of  this angry afternoon  you sum up the ancient city  in a quaint, moonlit stare, indifference. Rooted to the ear...

The Prophecy by Richard Ntiru

Who shall console the veiled woman  who buries her head in her wet hands,  who weeps at the folly of weeping  tears that won't dissolve ...

To the Living by Richard Ntiru

Only those Who have survived The final anaesthetization; Those who have enacted the final epilogue; Only those Have the prescient perception...

Cycle by Mazisi Kunene

Part I So many are asleep under the ground,  When we dance at the festival  Embracing the earth with our feet. Maybe the place on which we s...

The Bond by Mazisi Kunene

Gumede son of Bdaba, here I am. I have come to present This grinding stone of Masilela, my mother. It is heavy, as though she weighted it wi...

Breath by Birago Diop

Listen more to things  Than to words that are said. The water's voice sings  And the flame cries  And the wind that brings  The woods to...

PORTRAIT OF AN OLD PAIR OF SHOES Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali

Tanned as a hide of a hefty heifer,  carved by the craftsman's scalpel,  and shined to a shimmering blackness a s of liquid tar piping ...

TWO CHIMNEY SWEEPERS Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali,

I saw two chimney sweeps scraping the soot  inside a stack. They came out  and wiped their faces and one said to the other 'I'm whit...

THE MINER Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali

At the strike of the noon  bell he pops out of the shaft  like a pea shot from the muzzle of a bazooka. He plods on iron spiked boots  to st...

THE SONG OF SUNRISE by Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali

The sword of daybreak  snips the shroud  of the night from the sky,  and the morning  peeps through the blankets  like a baby rising  from i...

THE FACE OF HUNGER Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali,

I counted ribs on his concertina chest bones protruding as if chiselled  by a sculptor's hand of famine. He looked with glazed pupils  s...