Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health - Chapter Nineteen Section One- The Poet As Liberator by Dave Jaffe

    The Poet as Liberator - David Diop


    The Dark Continent. The poorest place on earth. A treasure trove of riches. Where all of the first human beings came from. The continent of Africa has been called all these thing and more.
     The short-lived poet David Diop was born int the west African country of Senegal. He saw his birth place and the continent of Africa as  poor exploited lands. Yet he also thought that things would get better for Africans who were black.
     
      "Africa, tell me Africa," Diop wrote
      "Is this you, this back that is bent
      "This back that breaks under the weight of humiliation."


       In the late 1950's when Diop, who was a victim of tubercolosis, wrote these words, sub-Saharan Africa, or Africa below the Saharan desert, did fit his description. White people ruled most of southern Africa. Most black people who made up most of the peoples in this area, didn't live past the age of 40. And most of Africa had been hammered by a succession of blows.
       First came the slave trade which lasted from the 16th century to the 19th century. In this terrible chapter of black African life, white people oversaw a massive kidnapping of black people. Black people ended up in the Americas working as slaves for white rulers.
     "33 million black people died in the slave trade," the African-American activist Malcolm X. once said in effect. The conservative British historian Hugh Thomas put the number of deaths in the slave trade at 13 million.  Whatever the correct number, the white-run slave trade took the best, the brightest and many others from Africa. It devastated the continent of Africa below the Sahara.
       After this massive blow came a second onslaught.At the Congress of Berlin held in the 1880's, European powers like Germany, Great Britain, France and Belgium carved out new empires in Africa. Again this was a terrible blow to Africa. The white colonization of Africa didn't unfold without a struggle.
     Africans fought their invaders. Yet in the end, the white's superior weapons and technological skills prevailed. Still, by the mid-1940's, after the end of the Second World war, black Africans started their new struggle for freedom.
     David Diop spent most of his life in France, a country that had colonized Senegal and other parts of west Africa. Diop was the son of a Sengalese father and a mother born in Cameroon that was another west African and French colony. Diop died in 1960 at the age of 33 in a plane crash along with other people including his wife.
     By this time open warfare had erupted between black rebels and their white rulers. Many black people died in this struggle. Between 1954 and the 1990's, at least 5 million black Africans died in freedom struggles in Kenya, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Guinea-Bissau and South Africa. The true figure could be even higher. White people died too as did black allies of the white rulers. Yet the vast majority of people who died in these struggles were black rebels.
     This was a third blow inflicted on Africa, mostly by white people. Yet Diop never lost hope in the future of his native continent. (End of Section One. To Be Continued.)