Selective Oriented Gradient Filter

Like Okigbo, the Ghanaian Kofi Awoonor sees the destruction committed by colonialism as both physical and psychological. The short but effective poem ‘The Cathedral’ deals with physical destruction which has material and spiritual implications:

On this dirty patch a tree once stood

shedding incense on the infant corn:

its boughs stretched across a heaven brightened by the last fires of a tribe.

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They sent surveyors and builders who cut that tree planting in its place

A huge senseless cathedral of doom.

The tree that is cut down is more than an ordinary tree: it is the tree of life, giving sustenance by ‘shedding incense on the infant corn’, and having a protective influence by ‘stretching across a heaven’ that shelters the ‘tribe’. The last line of the poem in which the word ‘senseless’ appears superfluous informs us of what has supplanted this symbolic tree - an artefact organised by the ‘builders’ in place of the natural symbol of life and protection, an artificial creation which spells doom for the Africans.

At times such destruction of nature in Africa by the white man has an economic rather than a religious motive behind it. In Part I of J. P. Clark’s ‘Ivbie’ we are told of

‘strangers’ ‘from far-fabled country’ who invaded ‘our virgin jungle’ and ravaged ‘our occult groves’. These strangers, Part II informs us, were searching for ‘gums and oils’

which were finally carried ‘in barrels off to foreign mills’. The result of this operation was that the African soil became ‘quarried out of recognition I As never would erosion/another millenium’.

But returning to Kofi Awoonor, we find that the psychological and spiritual harm done to Africa is much more disturbing. For the ‘psychological destruction of the African and his mode of being’ was part of the white man’s design. He imposed ‘his own customs, religion and values on the black man’ and ‘native tradition and way of life were interrupted by proselytizers’. ‘The Weaver Bird’ (p. 37) is a central poem in this connection. The bird-imagery we noted in Okigbo’s poetry is present here also, but the birdagent is different in both cases. Here it is the weaver bird. Awoonor ‘uses imagery of the weaver bird and its notorious colonizing habits, which often kill the chosen tree, to unfold a vision of the whole colonial period in Ghana’. One factor which gives this poem the tragic intensity with which it is imbued is the contrast between the friendliness of the Africans and the callous ingratitude of the white man whom the weaver bird symbolises:

The weaver bird built in our house.

And laid its eggs on our only tree.

We did not want to send it away.

………

And the weaver returned in the guise of the owner.

Preaching salvation to us that owned the house.

This theme of tenant turned landlord is also the basis of the poetic reaction in South Africa. The ‘weaver bird’ has not settled down to supervise its newly acquired domain, for that would have presented it as humane, which it is not. It rather embarked upon fouling ‘trees, totems, and shrines so that the contemporary African has to build anew’:

We look for new homes every day, For new altars we strive to re-build

The old shrines defiled by the weaver’s excrement.

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Gerald Moore, while commenting on the word ‘excrement’, said that the poem distils

‘its arrested bitterness into the single word “excrement”‘. This word expresses the poet’s picture of the weaver bird and what it symbolises, and not his emotion of anger of bitterness. ‘Excrement’, being that of the weaver bird, is used to show how insensitive to human values the bird is - it deposits faeces on shrines; and to show how oppressive the colonial attitudes to the indigenous African religion were, for the bird exercises no control over the distribution of its own dirt. The word therefore sums up, not the poet’s bitterness, but the contempt with which he holds the weaver bird and all it represents.

In Awoonor’s poetry the gods with their shrines are victims not only of oppression by the whites, but also neglect by their own ‘children’ who happen to be converted into the new religion. Gerald Moore was conscious of this fact when he said that Awoonor’s ‘poetry abounds in laments for the neglected shrines and forgotten gods, ignored by a society now intent upon individual status and materialism’. That the

‘shrines’ and the ‘gods’ were neglected, ignored and forgotten is a correct observation;

but that the cause of this was the society’s quest for ‘individual status and materialism’

is far from the truth. The true cause according to Awoonor was the foreigners who by preaching other kinds of shrines and gods distracted some members of the society from discharging their duties to their own gods. Even in the same poem, ‘The Years Behind’

(p. 59), lines 8-11 of which Moore quoted to illustrate the fact of neglect, Awoonor hints at the cause of this neglect: ‘My life’s song falls low among alien peoples.’ That is to say that his entire life - song, culture, religion - was looked down upon by these

‘alien peoples’ who condemned his culture and set up a foreign one for his adoption.

This desertion is very dramatically presented in another of Awoonor’s poems,

‘Easter Dawn’. In this poem we learn that

the gods are crying, my father’s gods are crying for a burial - for a final ritual -

but they that should build the fallen shrines have joined the dawn marchers

singing their way towards Gethsemane...

This is not all, for, a few lines later, we see the tragedy clinched by the priest of the gods deserting them himself:

the gods cried, shedding clayey tears on the calico

the drink offering had dried up in the harmattan the cola-nut is shrivelled

the yam feast has been eaten by mice and the fetish priest is dressing for the Easter service.

And at this point the desertion is complete; but the deserters are not pursuing individual status or material wealth - they are drawn into another religion, Christianity. This is natural, for every act of conversion is counterpoised by another of aversion. And as Taban Lo Liyong would put it, they are withdrawn from one type of superstition and

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planted into another (if superstition means ‘credulity regarding the supernatural’). In one of his Haiku-like poems Liyong says:

I’d have loved god more

had Christian missionaries confirmed my superstitions its hard to believe

after being undeceived

The absence of punctuation is the poet’s making; and so is the use of the lower case g for the Christians’ ‘God’. The argument of this short poem is of religious and historical significance. It is believed by many that Christianity has not been effective in African societies because the early missionaries did not base their religion on the Africans’

religious consciousness which they (Africans) developed even before their contact with the Europeans. The rather belated realisation of this ‘sin’ of omission has recently led to frantic, sometimes haphazard, efforts at using indigenous African musical instruments during the Christian service (especially the Mass). But the substance of the service remains unchanged. And many people are waiting, rather cynically, for the time when the indigenous wooden and clay vessels will also replace the imported golden chalice and ciborium on the altars.

The African is a victim of historical determinism. He has lost something of his religious inheritance and, according to another poem by Awoonor, he is threatened with loss of identity. The imagery this time is no less terrifying. The scene now shifts to the smithy in ‘The Anvil and the Hammer’ (p. 29). The African now becomes the crude iron in the hands of the smith, goldsmith not blacksmith, since his colour must be other than black. Thus the African is ‘caught between the anvil and the. hammer/In the forging house of a new life’. In this ‘forging’ there is a lot of confusion: ‘The trappings of the past, tender and tenuous’ are ‘laced with the flimsy glories’ of the present symbolised by ‘paved/ streets’; and in an attempt to resist the new formation, the Africans endeavour to remain pure and original when they sing, but find themselves spontaneously using ‘snatches/from their [whites’] tunes’.

The smith’s job is therefore wrong from the beginning. Indeed the word ‘forging’

in the poem becomes pleasantly ambiguous, for ‘forgery’, ‘counterfeiting’, ‘falsifying’

are all equally implied. For complete transformation would mean dehumanisation of the African. But in the circumstances change, that is modification, is inevitable; and the poet himself concedes this. That is why he pleads for a kind of admixture, which is no synthesis, for synthesis is impossible:

Sew the old days for us, our fathers,

That we can wear them under our new garment, After we have washed ourselves in

The Whirlpool of the many rivers’ estuary.

It is significant that the two kinds of garment are to be made from different materials - the old and the new. Thus the African retains his old self but adds on to it something borrowed from the imported culture. Furthermore, it is remarkable that the ‘garment’

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made up of the ‘old days’ is to be worn close to the skin, for that is nearest to his heart, and it is, as it were, protected by the borrowed garment.

The protagonist of this poem has therefore achieved a measure of success in his bid for ‘cultural salvation’ in the face of ‘cultural turmoil’. He has not yielded to a total change of himself as the enemies of his culture aimed at in their ‘forging house’; but he has not come out unscathed from it either. For it was through fire he went, and washing

‘ourselves in/The Whirlpool of the many rivers’ estuary’ can only be a euphemism for the pangs of purification experienced in the ‘whirlpool’.(Egudu, 1978)