Of protest poetry, fraternity of the confused and decoloniality race
THIS past week I had an opportunity to sojourn among griots somewhere in Harare at some poetry event — I conveniently use the term “griots” instead of poets to situate this argument in a context which in my view should be Afrocentric if not decolonial.
This is inspired by my firm conviction that poetry and other forms of discursive media from the Global-South must be largely redemptive and challenging the status-quo of coloniality. Why call them griots? This is because griots are peculiar to Africa and West Africa to be precise, where they are referred to as the “jeli”. The role of griots historically substantiates the prudent function of the ancient African mechanical archival memory and narrative construction. The office of the griot was multifaceted since in some instances it had transfigured or specialised roles of chronicling genealogies, history, fables and mythology.
Due to the weighty articulation demands of this career, in some instances griots became certified spokespeople, eulogists, diplomats, teachers, interpreters, masters of ceremonies and were key instrumental in providing relevant thought-power in matters of state-craft. Basically, griots were bearers of aristocratic duties and socio-economic think tanks. In our Zimbabwean case, a griot was an equivalent of a “nyanduri/imbongi”.
This proves that the art of thought construction through poetry and other discursive outlets is nothing new to Africa and that the relevance of poetry homogeneously cuts across every society in the continent. This further reflects that poetry has been part of our time immemorial intellectual heritage in Africa regardless our modern importation of Eurocentric poetry writing styles. From Negritude to African renaissance, poetry critical has been a conveyor belt of social principles, interpellation of politics and economics of the African people and their interface with other peoples of the world.
As such, the modern griots must be able to situate their intellectual tilting towards the historical triumphs and down-turns of our being at the same time the futuristic aspirations of what we stand for in this battle against the global asymmetrical hierarchies of sharing power, knowledge and being. Thabo Mbeki is one griot who has made a profound reclamation of what our poetry ought to disseminate in Africa’s quest to challenge borrowed thinking and imaginations of being, thus his declaration, I am an African:
“I owe my being to the Khoi and the San whose desolate souls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape — they who fell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen, they who were the first to lose their lives in the struggle to defend our freedom and independence and they who, as a people, perished in the result.
“Today, as a country, we keep an inaudible and audible silence about these ancestors of the generations that live, fearful to admit the horror of a former deed, seeking to obliterate from our memories a cruel occurrence which, in its remembering, should teach us not and never to be inhuman again.
“I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land. Whatever their own actions, they remain still part of me.”
This except from Thabo Mbeki’s address on the occasion of the introduction of the Constitution of South Africa in 1998 reflects his unflinching declaration of belonging to the continent. On the other hand, the spoken word has been manipulated to deconstruct the classical function of the institution of the Global-South griot. Now the same office serves as a conduit of neocolonial protest and denigrating the African government and selective criticising of state ineptitude in Africa. This façade of protest lacks historical conceptualisation of the real sources of Africa’s so-called “failure”. Now the preoccupation of the protestant griot is venting borrowed anger concealed as sincere discontent for the need for change. Besides, this is mere neo-liberal protest framed on the Rene Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum/ I think and therefore I am” disposition. The sad irony is that this value system is de-linked from the agenda that African men and women of letters should be propagating , “I think from where I am” principle.
Now reverting to the poetry session which informed the writing of this piece, the protest poets I met at this particular event also claimed to be evangelical poets and there I was sensing that the real griots are no more. We now have poetic utterances of convenience which are devoid of Thabo Mbeki’s loyalty and unquestionable allegiance to Africa and the values that the continent stands for.
This crisis calls us to rethink the idea of protest poetry from a decolonial context. In my view I think a true African protest griot must be out-rightly anti-establishment in terms of challenging all colonially set parameters of social order including religion. It is impossible to be both a protest poet at the same time claim to be evangelical. This is because part of the issues which these protest poets claim to challenge are end-products of what started as evangelism to the Africans and later became a project of looting, murder, rape, slavery and finally colonisation. Therefore, one cannot claim to be a true protest griot if they are not able to challenge Africa’s bondage to foreign religions at the expense of her abundant spiritual heritage. This means that before one is quick to claim to be a protest griot by virtue of criticising state failure they must be able to have an antiestablishment rationale which is historically guided.
Protest griots must be able to deconstruct the magnanimous residues of coloniality including the lost essence of African spirituality before they talk of “failures” of the state and regime change.
It only takes one to belong to the fraternity of the confused to clamour for regime change and use the poetic office to demonise a republic whose existence is founded on the spiritual endorsements of Africa’s fight against imperialism. True protest griots are those who challenge the imposition of ideas that are not African in Africa. True protest griots are those who remind us of the GlobalSouth’s burden of history and what really made us to be where we are. This unique style of true protest writing is found in the work of Cynthia Marangwanda, the author of the ground breaking decolonial publication ‘ Shards’, she writes: The ancestors are weeping, Their tears have dried the land, Their sorrow drowns the nation in a confusion we fail to comprehend. They watch from the skies Holding their broken hearts as their children stumble and fall blindly in broad daylight. They listen sadly as their descendants blame politics and economics for a problem that is umbilical. How can a land move forward when its roots no longer grow in soil but in concrete? Our forefathers have died a thousand Deaths at the hands of our rejection. They can’t identify us anymore.We are now foreign. We look and act more like the oppressor that they helped us overthrow and it’s confusing. They are searching for their offspring but all they find are copies and imitations of the invader’s children. They have become the laughing stock of the heavens. How can the children you gave birth to curse your name and call you a demon? How can a child accuse his mother of witchcraft? It’s something unheard of, a great taboo This is why the whole land is going insane, The spirits of the land are restless Until their anger is appeased Our schizophrenia will continue Until we break down completely. The poem by Marangwanda explicitly gives a real retrospect of Africa’s knowledge crisis and how our quest to be a free people continues to be at the ransom of coloniality. For this reason, we are a generation that has focused too much on the material than we have navigated our path back to the higher realms of African spirituality, renaissance and consciousness.
We need to graduate from being victims of imperial reason and be the source Africa’s victory in the battle for decolonising knowledge, being and power through panAfricanism.