When Africa was A Young Woman

When Africa was A Young Woman was published at the Writers Workshop of Calcutta, India, in 1980. It is a collection of 36 poems. The work is divided into two parts: The first part, On Africa, is made up of 9 poems and the second part, On People, Places and Things, has 27 poems. Then Tijan was only 22. He best explains the poems published in this book in an interview with Sandra Grayson. He says “My earlier poetry was simpler, message oriented – the use of poetry as ‘talking and fighting words’. There is for example, my poem “When Africa was A Young Woman”, which compares Africa’s anguished history with the image of a beautiful woman who is raped of her treasures, and another poem “Tarzan Never Lived in My Africa”, which is a defense against the negative stereotyping Africa, the so call ‘Tarzan myth,’ the jungle Africa of social Darwinian struggles, where you have continuous war, famine and death, where life is ‘nasty, brutish and short’ – to borrow from Hobbesian categories".

As Samuel Baity Garren will note in his review of Tijan’s poetry in Wasafiri entitled Exile and Return: The Poetry and Fiction of Tijan Sallah, this first publication is the beginning of a journey that Tijan has taken and in this one the poet draws the person to a sense of what Africa was in its unspoiled wholeness. Tijan tries to defend Africa’s cultural heritage in many ways. He shows what that beautiful Africa is about and extends an innocent image of the cultural richness of its children.