Images of Subjugation and Echoes of Resistance in Selected Poems of Agostinho Neto

Abstract

African literature in the colonial era captures mostly the horrible experiences of the colonized in the hands of white imperialists. Colonization in Africa constitutes an era of lasting memories of pains and sorrows in the annals of the history of the continent. It was a period of imperial bastardization of Africa by European countries. The partitioning of the region by Western nations led to the occupation of different parts of Africa by major imperial powers, like Britain, France and Portugal. Accordingly, each of the colonizers has a unique style of administration in their colonies. Unlike Anglophone colonized countries, Francophone and Lusophone regions witnessed more harsh and brutal encounter with the White masters. This is evidently captured in the protest literature of the continent. The immersion of agonizing imagery in Lusophone poetry lends credence to the painful reality of the people's fate under the weight of Portuguese grip on the region. This paper examines instances of the injustices suffered by the people of the region as seen in Agostinho Neto's “Bleeding and Germinating,” “February,” “Contract Workers” and “Prison Nights. It argues that the language of the poems, imbued with words like bleeding, blood, fire, chains and corpses, underpins the incidents that characterize the contemporary reality of the poet's society during colonisation. The research applies postcolonial theory in the exploration of the poems. This is based on its appropriateness to the interpretation of the works in relation to the focus of the study, following Frantz Fanon’s postulations on third world countries and resistance to colonial domination, as stressed in The Wretched of the Earth. The research is focused on evaluating the adverse effects of colonization, its attendant resistance by the colonized, and how the lingering impacts of imperialism has kept the Lusophone region/Africa backward, even after years of decolonization. This way, the study introduces a new insight into the perception of the primary texts, different from existing studies, which were mainly focused on revolutionary aesthetics.