“Admonition to the Black World” begins with four prose paragraphs that summarize 25 centuries of foreign assault on Africa. Chinweizu thus gives his spectacular, 21-page prophetic harangue a historical and ideological context. Before the poem proper, readers are reminded that since 525 B.C., when parts of Africa were conquered by “white Persians,” the African peoples have endured an uninterrupted series of invasions—by Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Western Europeans, Russians, and (most recently) “the agents and money-lenders of the West.”
The poem itself is divided into four numbered and subtitled sections. Overall, the tone of the poem is ominous, acrimonious, and oracular. The voice is that of an inspired prophet whose premonitory vision includes images of Africa as a “manacled bitch / Tied to a post and raped / By every passing white dog” (ll. 3–5). The poem’s first stanza ends with the lines “Listen! Listen to the pack / Of scavenger dogs from white heartlands / Snarling in their gang rape of Africa!” (ll. 9–11). That urgent, monitory temper is sustained to the end of the poem.
The poem’s first section (“I: Scatterbrained Land”) is composed of 10 free-verse stanzas of varying lengths. In stanza 2, we learn that Africa is not the “bitch” that the dogs consider her, but a “Black Lady” forced to wear “A white turban of shame” as she is violated.
Stanza 3 sees Africa as male as well as female, calling the continent the “father of sciences” and exclaiming how “unlucky in its rulers” it has been: “Like an eagle / Shot in soaring flight” and “dropped . . . / Into the lightless ooze / Of a mangrove ravine” from which it cannot free itself.
Stanza 4 gives the African ancestry of the world’s religions, symbolized by “Tablet, Cross, Crescent and Red Star,” and asks the reader (or auditor) to “Behold” the “venerable land / Assaulted, dismembered . . . / By the mongrel progeny” of the god Aten, whom Africa “discarded!”
Stanza 5 compares Africans to whales, their brains polluted by infections, “beached . . . on white shores” and “panting for white theologies.”
Stanza 6 mocks the African who “claims he is an Arab.”
Stanza 7 ridicules the Christian African who in assembly “Lustily chants / The [blond] identity of his desire.”
Stanza 8 conveys the warped ideology of the socialist African, who (“deracialized . . . denationalized . . . purified”) abhors the “taint” of “black identity” and prays to the “Prophet Marx” for “assimilation / Into the Universal!”
Stanza 9 relays a bit of dialogue between a white boy and an African who complains that the white boy does not relate to him as an equal, despite the African’s efforts to bleach his body, mind, and faith—to which the white boy responds: “Who would treat his mimic as an equal? / Do you think I am dotty like you?”
The final stanza of the first section begins with the expostulation, “O terrible, terrible, terrible! / What meningitis of the soul / Has twisted their identity spines?” Africans are, the prophet intones, “Like yam tendrils fleeing earth damp” and groping “For any genealogical tree / With white bark.”
In the first of three stanzas that constitute Section II of the poem (“The Anger of Ancestors”), the prophet asks the reader to “Behold the ancestors!” and their “volcanic anger” over the “circus of absurdities” displayed before them—ancestors “thirsting for the new black man” who would know how to resist being “trampled by shined boots spiked with dollars.”
The second stanza of this section catalogs—fiercely and at length—the unreasonable desires of Africans bombarded with inferiorizing propaganda and drowning in “elixirs of mad modernity / sold by titillation” and “from the podia of academia.”
The final stanza of the section asks Africans to “Behold our new notables,” drunk: “Trans-civilized idolators all / Craving a white massage!”
Section “III: If You Let Them” begins “O Blacks, hear and heed!” This section hammers the message that the “white predators” will not readily be driven from Africa and will, instead, drug, lie to, and hack their enemies to death.
The last stanza of this section (which begins, “If you let them, if you let them, / They will use your fears against you”) addresses the African soul and contains an extensive list of the insolent psychological tactics the “white foes” will use “against you” to get their way. It ends with the soothsayer’s warning: “Woe to them who forget their history / And drug their hearts with false memories.”
Section “IV: The Pyramid Is Our Icon” constitutes the longest part of the poem. In 24 stanzas of varied lengths, it chronicles the feats of the “Grand lords of the Land of Khemet . . . the founding fathers / Of Black civilization.” In impassioned tones the poet praises the ancestral geniuses who built up whole civilizations and filled them with wonders.
In stanza 20 the poet exclaims: “Look what their minds conceived! / Look what they taught the world! / Look what their hands had wrought!” After designating the pyramid as the “Venerable symbol of Black Civilization,” the poet questions why Africans have abandoned their true icon (the pyramid) to “kneel and bow” and to “adore” the Cross, Crescent, and Red Star.
In the poem’s last two stanzas the poet-prophet commands the “Demented, delirious black sheep” to return to the Nile and “Drink deep of its waters of wisdom” (st. 23) and to “douse the acid of humiliations / From your anciently merry eyes” (st. 24).
Bibliography
Chinweizu. Invocations and Admonitions: 49 Poems and a Triptych of Parables. Lagos, Nigeria: Pero Press, 1986.
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