Some scholars of African literature consider the epic Os Lustadas (The Lusiads, 1572) of Luis Vaz de Camoes to be one of the first African poems, although it is written in Portuguese. Os Lustadas, which Camoes claims was modeled on Vergil’s Aeneid, features the giant Adamastor, who combines aspects of Polyphemus and Prometheus. This classically based epic has served as the inspiration for several South African poets, including Roy Campbell in his poem ‘‘Rounding the Cape,’’ which was published in Adamastor (1930). Campbell’s reworking of the epic Os Lustadas contains a large number of classical deities, as do other adaptations of this epic. In Campbell’s poem, Adamastor, who desires Thetis, Peleus’ wife, is cast in the role of the black ‘‘other’’ who suffers at the hands of a white populace ignorant of the atrocities it has perpetrated. This slippage in the characterization of Adamastor by Campbell parallels the practice of African dramatists who politicize their dramas by refiguring classical myth.
Numerous other writers in Africa reveal classicist leanings through their use of Greek and Roman references. Some of the poems by the Senegalese statesman Leopold Senghor in his anthologies, including Chants d’ombre (Songs of shadow) (1945) and Elegies majeures (Major elegies, 1979), are pervaded by Greco-Latin poetry and Greek philosophical thought. The Zimbabwean poet Musaemura Bonas Zimunya makes use of classical allusions in Thought Tracks (1982a), Kingfisher, Jikinya and Other Poems (1982b), and Country Dawns and City Lights (1985); in the first and third collections, his use of certain phrases and a variety of meters resembles the Latin poets, particularly Catullus (Maritz 1996). Other poets have adapted the heroes, themes, and subjects of classical authors. Wole Soyinka uses the archetype of Ulysses in an eponymous poem in A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972), while in ‘‘Idanre,’’ published in Idanre and Other Poems (1967), the god Ogun embarks on an archetypal journal into the abyss reminiscent of a descent into Hades. In South Africa, many writers have written works based upon classical sources, including Etienne Leroux, who in Hilaria (1959) uses a mythological parallel of Cybele and Attis’ revival and the Eleusinian Mysteries; Karel Schoeman, for whom Vergil’s Aeneid serves as a guide for the chief character Versluis in ’n Ander land (Another land, 1984); and N. P. van Wyk Louw, whose operatic libretto Asterion (1957) contains elements from Greek tragedy and myth.
Modern African novelists sometimes use characters and episodes from Greek mythology and literature. This is not all that surprising, since in the first part of the twentieth century there was no tradition of novel writing on the subcontinent. This is the case with the Nigerian novelist Daniel Olorunfemi Fagunwa. In Fagunwa’s Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale (The forest of a thousand daemons: a hunter’s saga, 1938), the hunter Akara-Ogun is an Odysseus figure, while in Ireke-onibudo: Pelu Opolopo Alayeo (The sugarcane of the guardian, 1949), characters such as Oluigbo, Ireke, and Itanforiti are modeled respectively upon Polyphemus, Jason, and Chiron. The novelist Ibrahim Issa of Niger in his Grandes eaux noires (Big dark waters, 1959) draws upon Homeric images to explore the historical possibility that Roman soldiers destroyed the kingdom of a local ruler along the Niger River after the Second Punic War in 182 bc. Ayi Kwei Armah, a Ghanaian novelist, incorporates echoes of Juvenalian satire and Platonic morality, including the allegory of the cave, in his work entitled The Beautyful Ones Are Not yet Born (1968). In the novel Le dernier des Cargonautes (The last of the Cargonauts, 1984), Sylvain Bemba uses the tale of the Argonauts as the basis of his account of the life of Emmanuel Mung’Undu, who is modeled upon the figure of Jason. In this work Mung’Undu endures a life of exile and adventure through the deeds of his despotic father, an African Pelias, before finally dying through the agency of a Medea-like woman.
The classical tradition among modern writers in Africa is also evident on a superficial level in the titles of their works. Numerous poets in Cape Verdes and on the mainland use titles for their collections of poetry and individual poems based upon classical elements. The title of an anthology such as Jardim das Hesperides (Garden of the Hesperides, 1928) by the Cape Verdean poet Jose Lopes, who also wrote poems in Latin, bears witness to this influence. So does van Wyk Louw’s Tristia (1962), named after Ovid’s work, which contains poems with Latin titles such as ‘‘Ars Poetica,’’ entitled in imitation of Horace’s poem of the same name. Titles of individual poems that show this influence include ‘‘Creation of Caryatid’’ by Wole Soyinka (1967) and ‘‘Daphne en Apollo’’ and ‘‘Echo en Narcissus’’ by the South African D. J. Opperman (1945). Many other collections of poetry, individual poems, prose works, and the titles of these works contain classical allusions, names, and words and phrases in Latin and Greek.
World History
