ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that trends in the poetry of a people, nation, or region follow great events in their history. Modern African poetry is at a critical stage in which it has to reinvigorate itself or lapse into flatness without the literary resources to regain its erstwhile reputation of a vibrant genre. African poetry was, and still is, vibrant in the oral tradition and the early generations of its modernity. Modern African poetry is a byproduct of the European colonization of Africa and the subsequent colonial project to educate Africans to facilitate their economic, political, and other forms of exploitation of the continent. The colonialists built schools to educate interpreters and low-level assistants for the execution of their metropolitan projects in Africa. The period of political mismanagement and economic downturn in Africa coincided with the Cold War period with its ideological political battles between the United States and its Western partners and the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc partners.
