Discuss the grived lands of Africa a against the backdrop of Africa precolonial and colonial
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:
Born in 1922 in the Angola town of Kaxikane, Agostinho Neto had his early education at Luanda Secondary school before proceeding to the University of Combra where he obtained his medical degree. His bitter experience with the Portugues colonial policy in Angola hardened his hatred of European colonialism in general. Consequently, his themes center on human rights, personal struggle and self-survival, and a celebration of mother Africa.
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Neto’s political activism manifested itself early at Combria University where, as a member of the Movement for Democratic Youth Unity, he aligned himself with the forces opposed to Portuguese colonial policy. He subsequently joined the popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) -- which he later led -- upon his return to Angola. Through this movement, Neto became Angola’s first democratically – elected president.1
Neto’s verse is often classified as protest poetry, especially because of his strong opposition to racial injustice and colonial aggression and misrule. Several of his protest poems, including “Night” and “The Grieved Lands,” focus their theme on isolation, nostalgia, alienation, the desecration of ancient places, racial discrimination, and a litany of man’s inhumanity to man.
In the above poems, whose titles suggest the somber and dark faces of European colonialism, especially in Africa, there is appears to be a historical documentation of colonial injustice, what Walter Rodney characterizes in his work as Europe’s “underdevelopment” of Africa.1 Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier painfully note:
Much of the poetry from Portuguese Africa is little more than a cry of sheer agony and loss. These territories are still politically and socially in a condition from which most of Africa emerged many years ago. The tiny group of assimilades (about 5,000 in Angola, after over 400 years of coastal occupation) provides the principal target of government repression. Dr. Agostinho Neto, for instance, was imprisoned in Portugal for over two years until his recent escape. Yet if few of these poets can write of anything but their immediate dilemma, their work is testimony enough to their unquenchable spirit of their humanity.2
In “Night”, a work which recalls Wole Soyinka’s poem of the same title but whose theme and structure differ remarkably from each other, Neto discusses the agony of human existence against a backdrop of the Black man’s sordid experience. W.S. Mervin comments on the poem as follows: “In the best of his poems about Africa, he is at pains to reveal his own sitation as he glimpses it in the lives of other Africans.”3
True, this lyric speaks for all Black community. Images of blindness or darkness permeate the poem: the “dark quarters of the world without light nor life,” “I walk in the streets /feeling my way,” “stumbling into the servitude / Dark quarters,” the “world of wretchedness,” “I walk lurching,” the “unlit / unknown streets crowded,” the “night too is dark” Neto’s protest here is muted, with a deep sense of resignation and, like Milton’s protagonist in “On His Blindness,” he can only “stand and wait.”
It is appropriate to cite the entire poem in full for further analysis: