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• Violence Hits Central Johannesburg after Execution of Moloise

  International outrage and violent demonstrations in the centre of Johannesburg followed the execution yesterday in Pretoria of Benjamin Moloise, a black South African poet. The execution - carried out in spite of pleas from around the world for clemency - prompted an angry response from Commonwealth heads of government, meeting in Nassau. Efforts are under way there to draw up a joint policy aimed to end apartheid in South Africa. [Article continues to describe Margaret Thatcher's involvement, and the meeting of the Commonwealth leaders/how they plan to work to end apartheid.]
• The Times Diary: Poetic Justice

  [Full text]: "The prosaic difficulties of a troubled world have complicated work on an international reference book on poets who write in English. With a preface by the Poet Laureate, C. Day Lewis, Contemporary Poets of the English Language is the first book on the subject for more than 10 years and the only one to include non-white poets from Asia and Africa: it will be published in October by The St. James Press of Chicago and London. Its American editor-in-chief, Mrs. Rosalie Murphy, says she ran into many problems. In Nigeria, the questionnaire sent to Wole Soyinka was not passed on to him in prison, where he has been for two years; while the entry on Christopher Okigbo had to be dropped after Mrs. Murphy had confirmed a report that he had been killed in the civil war. Then there were many black South African poets who have escaped from or otherwise left the country and still move from place to place: Bloke Modisane, believed to have left South Africa on foot in 1950, was traced to London. Minor racial complications occurred in this country, too. Most poets from Wales put down "Welsh" as their nationality, although some admitted to "Anglo-Welsh." Most Scots preferred "British," while some northern Irish put "British-Irish." In America, nearly all Negroes called themselves "Black," although LeRoi Jones added exotically "African-American-Ancient Egyptian."
• The Times Diary: Envoy steps into gap

  "The Malagasy Republic's ambassador in London, Mr. Jules Razafimbahiny, 46, is being called back to help fill the gap caused by the death of the Malagasy Foreign Minister, Dr. Albert Sylla, in an air crash in Madagascar last month. Mr. Razafimbahiny is to become Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, the senior position going to the Minister of Agriculture, Mr. Jacques Rabemananjara, who is also a poet of note and was imprisoned by the French in France following the insurrection of 1947...
• The Literature of the Civil War

  [Excerpt]: "More than a year before the outbreak of the Nigerian Civil War, the late Christopher Okigbo wrote these lines... At the very beginning of this period, Chinua Achebe had written an unlamenting epitaph on the First Republic in his bitterly satiric novel A Man of the People, published a few days after the first coup and accurately foreseeing a period of military rule, riding upon the people's weary disillusionmnt with the politicians..."
• The arrest of Ken Saro-Wiwa

  [Excerpt]: "At three o'clock on the afternoon of June 21, the President of the Nigerian Association of Writers, Ken Saro-Wiwa, was arrested in Port Harcourt, and has been held incommunicado ever since. He had long been expecting such a move against him. He had also long had doubts about the value of literature as a vocation in a social and political situation as critical as Nigeria's. For the past two years, he had devoted himself to promoting the interests of the Ogoni people, the ethnic group to which he belongs... Born in 1941, he attended Umuahia Government College, the school from which many eminent Nigerian writers--Chinua Achebe, Elechi Amadi, Christopher Okigbo among others-- graduated...."
• South African poet faces the death penalty

  Breyten Breytenbach, the anti-apartheid poet, was sent for trial in the Supreme Court today on charges carrying the death penalty. Mr Breytenbach, aged 36, is accused under the Terrorism and Anti-Communism Acts of helping to set up an illegal organization to promote armed struggle in South Africa intended to overthrow the white government... Mr Breytenbach is said to have been involved not only during his latest visit, but during a well-publicized visit in 1973, when he brought his wife. They are not allowed to live together under South African's racial laws.
• Roy Campbell honoured

  Mr. Francois Viljoen, the South African Ambassador in Lisbon, has laid a wreath on the grave of Roy Campbell, the poet who was killed in a motor accident in Lisbon 10 years ago today. Roy Campbell, one of South Africa's outstanding poets, spent the latter years of his life in Portugal. He fought on the Nationalist side in the Spanish Civil War.
• Red island roads

  ...You would think that the Malagasy themselves would exist in a waking dream, with lemurs playing about their heads in a distant version of the Peaceable Kingdom. Yet there are no abstract nouns in the central Malagasy language and their greatest poet, Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, killed himself in 1937 because he could not reconcile his nationalism with the French language and culture in which he was obliged to work...
• Pretoria judge delays hanging

  A three week stay of execution was granted last night to Benjamin Moloise, who was due to be hanged shortly after dawn today for the murder of a black security policeman... Moloise, a poet and upholsterer, aged 30, was convincted in November 1983 of the murder of Warrant Officer Phillip Selope, who was shot in an ambush in a township outside Pretoria a year earlier. The African National Congress has said it ordered the "execution" of the policeman for his part in the arrest of three ANC guerrillas who were later hanged in Pretoria, but that Moloise had no part in it.
• Poetry of the New Lands

  Turning to South Africa, Sir Hubert said Rudyard Kipling was in a sense a poet of South Africa, the Poet of "General Joubert" and the "Bridge Guard in the Karroo." and "Columns" and "Piet." He had consulted Mr. Kipling as to what South African Poetry there was beside his own. Mr. Kiplig replied, "It's a case of there's Pringle, and there's Pringle, and there's a lot of good verse, light and half-light, but scattered, and there are the poems in the Taal, part translations and parodies, part original." Pringle was the son of a Scotch Border farmer, roughly contemporary with Keats. He acquired a good literary position in Edingurgh and made the friendship of Scott. But literature did not pay, and in 1819 he went out to South African with a Scotch party. He spent some time with them in the bush and then attempted a new iterary career in Cape Town, but quarrelled with the governor, and returning to England threw himsef into the cause of the abolition of slavery. Just when success was reached he died at the early age of 46 in 1834.
• Poetry Gala

  Julian Jebb recounts the evening of poetry recitals that occurred in celebration of William Plomer's 60th birthday. He served as the President of the Poetry Society, and his introduction ended "with a tribute to two South African poets who had committed suicide."
• Obituary

  Mr Charles Eglington, the South African writer and poet, and editor of the Anglo American Corporation's prestige magazine Optima, was found hanged at his home in Johannesburg on Thursday. He was 52. A noted critic, Charles Eglington was also considered one of South Africa's best poets.
• Obituaries

  "Chinua Achebe, who has died at age 82, was the Nigerian journalist, essayist and poet, considered by many to be the father of African literature."
• N. P. Vanwyk Louw

  Nicholaas Petrus VanWyk Louw, one of South Africa's best known Afrikaans poets, died on Wednesday night. He was 64. Apart from his own work he was known for his studies on Afrikaans of such contemporary poets as T. S. Eliot. In 1943 Louw was awarded the Hertzog prize for Literature by the South African Academy of Arts and Sciences. Holland's University of Utrecht awrded him an honorary degree of a doctor in literature in 1948. Louw was the founder in 1930 of STANDPUNTE, the South African literary review. Louw was for many years lecturer in education at the University of Cape Town and later was appointed to the Chair of Afrikaans and Nederlands at the University of the Witwatersrand.
• Mr Roy Campbell's Death

  Mr. Roy Campbell, the South African poet, who had lived for some years in Portugal, was killed, and his wife was injured, when a car in which they were returning from a fortnight's holiday in Spain crashed into a tree near Setubal on Monday night. Mrs. Campbell was taken to hospital.
• Mr Okot p'bitek: Poet and commentator on African culture

  [Excerpt, Obituary] "Mr Okot p'Bitek, Uganda's best known poet and a trenchant commentator upon contemporary culture in Africa, died on July 19. He was born in 1931 at Gulu in Acholiland Uganda, the son of a teacher...As a result his first major English language work, Song of Lawino (1966) blended modern satirical ironies into a verse form approximating to traditional Acholi poetry, a technique achieved by the author translating his own work into English from its vernacular. The related Song of Ocol, followed in 1970, with Song of Prisoner and Song of Malaya jointly winning the 1972 Kenyatta Prize for Literature. Okot's commitment to Acholi poetry and music is partly explained in the Horn of My Love (1974), a miscellany of poems in two languages with accompanying commentary..."
• Mr F. C. Slater

  Mr. Francis Carey Slater, the South African poet, died on Tuesday at the age of 84, our Cape Town Correspondent reports. He was born in the Cape and educated privately at Lovedale. He joined the staff of the Standard Bank in 1899 and retired from the management of its Grahamstown branch in 1930. His poetry began to appear in 1905 and a selected edition with biographical introduction by Sir Robert Ensor was published by the Oxford University Press in 1947. Some of the poems in the book were obviously derivative, but others had force and originality from their blend of romantic, stoic, and satiric strains. He was deeply moved by the great themes of nature, character, and race in his native country. His Collected Poems was published last year. In 1925 he made an anthology, The Centenary Book of South African Verse, and his verse had appeared in The Times Literary Supplement.
• Heinemann Educational Ltd

  [Excerpt]: "The collected poems of one of the most talented writers in Africa, who was killed in battle during the Nigerian Civil War."
• Full Analysis of the War Awaited

  [Excerpt]: "How far are the Nigerians writing about their own crisis and civil war? It is now over two years since the war ended, yet the published material by Nigerians themselves is still very sparse. This is understandable on severa grounds: first, although many were prepared during the war to join the propaganda effort on both sides, in the post-war mood of reconciliation there has been a natural desire to bury the past... But I cannot conclude without nothing the impact of the war on creative writing. Nigeria's writers, not initially very obviously politically committed, became caught up in the turbulence of events. For example, the poet Christopher Okigbo joined the Biafran army and was killed: the dramatist Wole Soyinka, who had earlier been deeply affected by the political crisis, was detained in a federal jail for much of the war..."
• Far Removed

  [Excerpt]: "On September 18, 1967, two months after appointing himself major in the Biafran army, Christopher Okigbo--a thirty-seven-year-old patriot, classicist, and poet--was riddled by bullets during a battle to contain the federal Nigerian army in the university town of Nsukka, where he had once worked as the college librarian. Fifty-three Brigade, to which he had attached himself in a dramatic act of solidarity, was in full retreat, with the exception of Okigbo himself, who had decided to hold his ground in an ill-protected bunker. When the enemy arrived, he tried to lob a grenade at a tank. His body was never found. His memory, though, haunts African writing... As Obi Nwakanma's well-researchd biography proves, however, impetuous action was a recurring aspect of his personality. With the exception of his poetry, Okigbo could never settle to anything for very long..."
• Eng. Lit. Expands

  [Excerpt]: "...In Africa, what is past or passing or to come makes up the contemporary community: and the modern African writer often reacts violently against it. Wole Soyinka in his plays belabours it like a latterday Yeats dethroning Irish nineteenth-century political rhetoric; George Awoonor-Williams in his poems hopes for a continuation of its wisdom in a materialistic rootless society; the late Christopher Okigbo measured the loss, the complete cancelling out. In Chinua Achebe's profound novels comes the most skilful handling of the theme: the bridging of time between village and city, all illuminated with a variety of tone, a subtlety of speech, which is only now being recognized, and which needed the critical understanding of John Pepper Clark, the Nigerian dramatist, to make the social nuances of its characters clear to the non-African reader..."
• Death Of A Moslem Poet: Last "Minstrel" Of North Africa

  DEATH OF A MOSLEM POET LAST "MINSTREL" OF NORTH AFRICA FROM OUR ALGIERS CORRESPONDENT Just after noon on January 12, almost at the beginning of Ramadan the famous Moslem poet Sheik Benguedda El Hadj Belarbi, died at Mazuna. He was over 80, and had been il for a long time. For may years he lived at Ain-Morane, where he was the central figure in a group of native chiefs, the descendants of those who had fought in the border battles btween Bu-Maaza, the Sultan of the Dahra and the Warsenis, and Saint-Arnaud and Pelissier. He was the living history of those stirring times. Later on he came to Mazuna and became the proprietor of a Moorish cafe, which was opened by M.Jules Cambon, then Governor-General of Algeria, and was for many years a place of pilgrimage for poets from all over North Africa. His chief delight was in long improvisations, for which he relied on his remarkable retentive memory. In his library were to be found nearly all the works of the North African Moslem poets especialy those of Morocco and Western Algeria, and he would readily recite long narrative poems of over 1,200 lines, such as the famous Moslem poems of the seventeenth century. He died poor, having spent nearly all his money in paying scribes to record the traditional Moslem poetry. Wirh him has passed probably the last of those who have long borne the banner of Moslem ministrelsy in North Africa.
• Black poet will hang on Friday after Botha rules out retrial

  President Botha of South Africa turned down a petition yesterday for a retrial of a black man sentenced to death in June 1983 for the murder of a security policeman, also black, seven months earlier. The convicted man, Benjamin Moloise, aged 30, a poet and upholsterer by trade, who has been in "Death Row" in Pretoria Central Prison since his conviction, will be hanged on Friday. No further appeal is possible. ...Fears have been expressed that the execution could provoke a violent reaction from blacks at a time of serious unrest. A partial state of emergency has been in force in South Africa since July 20. [Article continues to describe other instances of violent unrest.]
• Black poet reprieved

  Lawyers won a 21-day stay of execution for black South African poet Benjamin Moloise who was due to have been hanged in Pretoria this morning for killing a policeman.
• Black poet defiant in face of death

  The mother of Benjamin Moloise, the poet convicted of killing a black security policeman, yesterday sang the song he intends to chant as he is led to the gallows in Pretoria Central prison today... Mrs. Moloise said her son gave a clenched fist black nationalist salute as he was led from the interview room back to his cell... The ANC said that if Moloise goes to the gallows his death would be avenged "in every corner of our land."