Hopes of a harvest festival!: some southern African voices

Although oppression, discrimination and exploitation form the background against which modern Zimbabwean and other southern African poets have written, this same situation has produced different reactions in different poets. Starting with the South African poet Kunene, in whose poems the harvest image is prominent, the author further analyses poetical works by the South African Mafika Gwala, the Zambian P.M. Munatamba, and the Zimbabweans M.B. Zimunya and Chenjerai Hove. Although the liberation struggle is a theme these poets have in common, the tone they display is different: Kunene and the Zimbabweans are more relaxed and less desperate and strident, while the Zambian Manutamba, though writing in an independent country, is more fiery and bitter. Ref.