Art, Ideology and Social Commitment in African Poetry

In this study the author argues that African
poetry is a response to the socio-cultural and political realities of
the African condition shaped, as it were, by the specificities of
African pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial experience. The author’s
contention is that the study of African poetry must situate, as its
take-off point, the mediation of the aesthetic imagination and creative
individuality of African poets in relation to the acute and objectively
existing material forces that undergird the destiny of African nations
and peoples.

The author posits that the organic ontology of
African poetry is a persistent aesthetic confrontation with (and rework
of) the modes of social production and the reproduction of values in the
context of the material foundations of the continent’s colonial and
postcolonial moments as African communities get increasingly sucked into
the globalist, late postmodern capitalist epoch.