1. Achebe – II

2. Monday Quiz 1. What’s the title of Ikem’s lecture? 2. Of the peasants, the workers and/or the students, who would Ikem trust to run the government? 3. What happens to Mad Medico? 4. How does Chris know that Ikem was murdered in cold-blood, instead of shot by a police officer during an act of self-defense? 5. Who is Emmanuel? 6. Why is Beatrice suddenly kind to Agatha? 7. Who are the three green bottles? 8. How does Chris escape the policeman who stops him at the check point?

3. Gabriel Okara Gabriel Okara – (1921 - ) Nigeria. His work deals with both colonial past and neocolonial present. The following poems contrast Western and African cultures, focusing on the differences and underplaying the complementarity that is possible between cultures and necessary to create harmony in the world. He decries the mockery and rejection of his culture by the West and he describes how, in the neocolonial era, the African elite is alienated from African culture and develops self-hatred.

4. Piano and Drums When at break of day at a riverside I hear jungle drums telegraphing the mystic rhythm, urgent, raw like bleeding flesh, speaking of primal youth and the beginning. I see the panther ready to pounce, the leopard snarling about to leap and the hunters crouch with spears poised;

5. Piano and Drums And my blood ripples, turns torrent, topples the years and at once I’m in my mother’s lap a suckling; at once I’m walking simple paths with no innovations, rugged, fashioned with the naked warmth of hurrying feet and groping hearts in green leaves and wild flowers pulsing.

6. Piano and Drums Then I hear a wailing piano solo speaking of complex ways in tear-furrowed concerto; of far-away lands and new horizons with coaxing diminuendo, counterpoint, crescendo. But lost in the labyrinth of its complexities, it ends in the middle of a phrase at a daggerpoint.

7. Piano and Drums And I, lost in the morning mist of an age at a riverside keep wandering in the mystic rhythm of jungle drums and the concerto.

8. You Laughed and Laughed and Laughed In your ears my song is motor car misfiring stopping with a choking cough; and you laughed and laughed and laughed. In your eyes my ante- natal walk was inhuman, passing your omnivorous understanding and you laughed and laughed and laughed. You laughed at my song, you laughed at my walk. Then I danced my magic dance to the rhythm of talking – drums pleading, but you shut your eyes and laughed and laughed and laughed.

9. You Laughed and Laughed and Laughed And then I opened my mystic inside wide like the sky, instead you entered your car and laughed and laughed and laughed. You laughed at my dance, you laughed at my inside. You laughed and laughed and laughed. But your laughter was ice-block laughter and it froze your inside, froze your voice, froze your ears, froze your eyes and froze your tongue.

10. You Laughed and Laughed and Laughed And now it’s my turn to laugh; but my laugher is not ice-block laugher. For I know not cars, know not ice-blocks. My laughter is the fire of the eye of the sky, the fire of the earth, the fire of the air, the fire of the seas and the rivers fishes animals trees, and it thawed your inside, thawed your voice, thawed your ears, thawed your eyes and thawed your tongue.

11. You Laughed and Laughed and Laughed So a meek wonder held your shadow and you whispered; “Why so?” And I answered: “Because my fathers and I are owned by the living warmth of the earth through our naked feet.”

12. Agostinho Neto – (1922-1979) Angola. A militant worker for Angolan independence, he served several terms of imprisonment under the Portuguese colonial regime. As president of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, he lead his country to independence and became its first president in 1975. His poetry is about the plight of the peasants and workers in Angola. They are in a state of deprivation, cut off from the joys of life and relegated to a world of servitude by the bearers of “Western Civilization.”

13. Night I live in the dark quarters of the world without light, nor life. Anxious to live, I walk in the streets feeling my way leaning into my shapeless dreams, stumbling into servitude. -- Dark quarters -- Dark quarters worlds of wretchedness worlds of wretchedness where the will is watered down and men are confused with things. I walk, lurching, through the unlit unknown streets crowded with mystery and terror, I, arm in arm with ghosts, And the night too is dark.

14. Kinaxixi (a working class residential area in Angola) I was glad to sit down On a bench in Kinaxixi at six o’clock of a hot evening and just sit there... Someone would come maybe to sit beside me And I would see the black faces of the people going uptown in no hurry expressing absence in the jumbled Kimbundu they conversed in.

15. Kinaxixi (a working class residential area in Angola) I would see the tired footsteps of the servants whose fathers are also servants looking for love here, glory there, wanting something more than drunkenness in every Alcohol Neither happiness nor hate After the sun had set lights would be turned on and I would wander off thinking that our life after all is simple too simple for anyone who is tired and still has to walk.

16. Western Civilizations Sheets of tin nailed to posts driven in the ground make up the house. Some rags complete the intimate landscape. The sun slanting through cracks welcomes the owner After twelve hours of slave labor breaking rock shifting rock breaking rock shifting rock fair weather wet weather breaking rock shifting rock Old age comes early a mat on dark nights is enough when he dies gratefully of hunger.