21/12/2022
"Esnala Banda"
by Lusaka Poetry Journal
Zambia's most outstanding poetry performance is entitled "Black Continent" (2020). Esnala Banda questions neocolonialism in dialectical verses.
The thesis celebrates Africa's greatness, the antithesis laments neocolonial exploitation and the synthesis involves "the redemption of the Black Continent" (Banda, 2020). Like Aimé Césaire in Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, she asserts that racism, slavery and prejudice disturb civilisation in Africa:
You judge, but you don't know me...
Black continent:
sourcing generations of manpower,
great hoards of men stolen and sold
to build the great cities over and over.
Plunderers and pillagers have come
and gone leaving destruction...
(Banda, 2020)
Esnala Banda recommends redeeming Africa. She confirms that millennial poetry has creative solutions to synthesise neocolonial contradictions. Banda's critique of neocolonialism is comparable to contemporary poems produced by Zambians in the postindependence period.
References
Banda, E. (2020, 31 October). Black Continent [Video]. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/Nalahru/videos/278213870165194
