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Analysis of the Poem 'Africa' by Maya Angelou

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Poetry Analysis – ‘Africa’ by Maya Angelou
In her poem, ‘Africa’, Maya Angelou describes the plundering of Africa’s resources and spirit by European imperialists and their slave trade. She is the poem’s narrator, and at times the narration seems almost omniscient. She progresses from describing the continent’s majesty in the first stanza, to cataloguing the assaults visited upon Africa by the Europeans. In her final stanza, she declares that despite her trials, Africa will rise again and be restored to her glory.
In Maya Angelou’s personification in “Africa,” the continent acquires real emotional appeal, and the reader’s empathy is aroused. The first stanza enacts the personification. Africa is “sugar cane sweet” with deserts for hair, golden feet, mountains for breasts, and two Niles for her tears. The reverential and meditative tone with which she speaks of Africa is conveyed through her elegant diction ‘thus she has lain’, and the reader cannot help but to venerate the continent’s beauty. Africa is a woman – eternal and eternally beautiful. Stanza one is quite regular, consisting of eight lines, each with four syllables. The abcbdeae rhyme scheme is relatively predictable, and it evokes the endlessness that Angelou is trying to sketch.
The second stanza details the Western world’s desecration of Africa’s people and her spirituality. The distressing tone of the stanza is conveyed by Angelou’s descriptions of the brutal ‘brigands’ coming through frost and icicles with their religion and guns while taking the “young daughters” and “strong sons” to satisfy their insatiable hunger for slave labour. Africa’s colonization also meant the imposition of the colonialists’ Christian religion, and this too was a traumatic event, as Africa’s own philosophies were dismissed as primitive and unfounded. The disruption wrought in stanza two manifests itself in the

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