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Transcription: [00:02:23]
{SPEAKER name="Daniel Kunene"}
"... never really seen it. Part of our colonial thing within the... and I remember the last week that I was at home. I travel all over the island trying to get [to] understand... trying to get to know it and I began writing poems about it.

[00:02:34]
{SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}
"Now you talked about the situation that prompted you to write. Since that time in your many works, are most of them by situations or events?"

[00:02:45]
{SPEAKER name="Daniel Kunene"}
"Yes, I think this continues it. It's prompted by experiences. Because having got to Britain, I had the experience of discovering that my education hadn't prepared me for what I found there. You know me education, in a Caribbean island which is called Little England, really gave me the idea that I should have been as a writer, a citizen of the world, all writers were equal and all that, and I came upon racial and color prejudice. And my poetry then began to reflect, as best as I could, the nature of that experience. The English experience was only the beginning, or the extension of a Colonial experience. The thing is that I then got a job in West Africa, in Ghana, on the eve of Ghana's independence."

[00:03:32]
{SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}
"Yes."


[00:03:32]
{SPEAKER name="Daniel Kunene"}
And this is when the de-education and the real writing started because for the first time I began to understand what it was like not only to be black, but really what it was like to have a culture."

[00:03:46]
{SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}
"Mhm."

[00:03:47]
{SPEAKER name="Daniel Kunene"}
"I think that was the important element of it. I began to understand something about what it meant to be part of a community."

[00:03:53]
{SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}
"Now are you saying that, uh, your experiences in Africa were so totally different from those in your native land? That, uh, you began to realize, for the first time, the essence of..."

[00:04:03]
{SPEAKER name="Daniel Kunene"}
"Right, Right."

[00:04:04]
{SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}
"...culture?"

[00:04:05]
{SPEAKER name="Daniel Kunene"}
"You see in my native land, and [[?]] has that same problem, uses the same phrase in his book. You see, it was a fault understanding of what the native land was, it was a fault business of consciousness. We did not really, as I said, understand our own landscape, we didn't appreciate our own customs. When I got to Africa, it is then..."
[00:04:22]