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Freedomways Fourth Quarter 1966

"Is This Africa?" and David Diop from Senegal supplies an answer: 
Impetuous son, this tree, young, and strong, 
This tree there in splendid isolation
Amidst white and faded flowers,
That is Africa, your Africa,
That grows again, patiently obstinately
As its fruit gradually acquires
The bitter taste of liberty.

The contact between white and black can revitalize the jaded and withered western civilization as Senghor pleads in his "To New York":

New York! I say to you: New York! let black
blood flow into your blood
That it may rub the rust from your steel joints,
like an oil of life.
That it may give to your bridges the bend of
buttocks and the suppleness of creepers.

And echo that is found in "You Laughed and Laughed"
of Nigeria's Gabriel Okara:

My laughter is the fire
of the eye of the sky, the fire
of the earth, the fire of the air
the fire of the seas and the
rivers fishes animals trees
and it thawed your inside,
thawed your voice, thawed your
ears, thawed your eyes, and
thawed your tongue.

The South African poet, Richard Rive, takes a slightly different attitude following the anit-Negritude lead of Ezekiel Mphahlele, his countryman, now in exile in East Africa. This new school of "integrationists" has this handicap that the white man in Africa, with whom they want to integrate, is not prepared for it for he does not by white civilization, no matter for how long he is allowed to develop. Yet Rive insists in his "Where the Rainbow Ends":

But we can learn brother, you and I.
There's no such tune as a black tune.
There's no such tune as a white tune.
There's only music, brother.
And it's music we're going to sing
Where the rainbow ends

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