George Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor-Williams (1935–2013) was a Ghanaian poet, author, and diplomat. From the 70s to the 90s, primary and secondary school students across English-speaking West Africa were very likely to have read his short poem, “The Weaver Bird”, as part of their compulsory Literature or English studies, alongside other political poetry like those of Leopold Sédar Senghor, David Diop, John Pepper Clark, Niyi Osundare, and Kwesi Brew. In this post, I reproduce the poem, followed by a few observations about the verse and the wider socio-political context into which it was written.
The weaver bird built in our house
And laid its eggs on our only tree
We did not want to send it away
We watched the building of the nest
And supervised the egg-laying.
And the weaver returned in the guise of the owner
Preaching salvation to us that owned the house
They say it came from the west
Where the storms at sea had felled the gulls
And the fishers dried their nets by lantern light
Its sermon is the divination of ourselves
And our new horizons limit at its nest
But we cannot join the prayers and answers of the communicants.
We look for new homes every day,
For new altars we strive to rebuild
The old shrines defiled by the weaver’s excrement.
As someone who worked on Kwame Nkrumah’s Pan-African campaigns and wrote plays for the BBC, Awoonor had quite a cultural and political footprint. He was also an influential statesman. Awoonor was Ghana’s ambassador to Brazil and later to Cuba. From 1990 to 1994, Awoonor was Ghana’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, heading the committee against apartheid. Kofi Awoonor can also be described as a postcolonial poet. Postcolonial theory has often been used as a tool that analyses the consequences of colonialism on the colonised. Its theorists consider ideas of hierarchical difference in how the image of Africa is reproduced or represented in literature as well as new and old media. For them, the idea or invention of Africa cannot be divorced from the ideology that drove colonisation – a manufactured distinction between the “civilised” and the “uncivilised”. That ideology pervades Africa’s current relations with the rest of the world—power structures, politics, language, and knowledge. Examples of the use of postcolonial theory include Chinua Achebe’s commentary on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). Achebe states that, despite its seemingly progressive motives, the book’s thesis is based on a presumption of African savagery, barbarism, and intellectual inferiority. Similarly, Edward Said’s critique of Conrad in Culture and Imperialism notes that, despite Conrad’s disgust for colonial horrors, a world where Europe did not exercise mastery over Africa was beyond Conrad’s imagination.
In essence, postcolonial theory recognises that the incompetence and dependence of Africa’s contemporary political and intellectual elite on external approval and assistance result from the hybridity of supposed African authenticity and the attempted replication of colonial character, all carried out within an inherited colonial structure. As such, it could be argued that postcolonialism is concerned with:
the purely methodological question of knowing whether it is possible to offer an intelligible reading of contemporary Africa solely through conceptual structures and fictional representations used precisely to deny African societies any historical depth and to define them as radically other, as all that the West is not. Achille Mbembé, On the Postcolony 11
It is these questions that animate Awoonor’s verse in “The Weaver Bird”. The weaver is known for making and living in colonies and is thus an apt metaphor for Awoonor to express his ire at imperialism, as the bird displaces its host by claiming superiority of faith and material know-how. Yet this displacement is also underwritten by theft of labour and resources. The direct outcome, as noted by Awoonor, is a deep and multilayered loss of home – by making home unlivable, yet trapping the African in those unlivable, ransacked spaces within impenetrable borders through ever-moving racist border regimes:
for racialised people, the border is not epistemically, ‘spatially or temporally limited.’ The border follows them, even when they cross it, even after they cross it, wherever they cross it to, whenever they cross it to. The world is continually (re)made white space. The settler has come to stay – everywhere, for all time. The racialised body is no longer at home. The racialised body is never at home. The racialised body is homeless. “Go back where you came from,” is a command to be cast into the abyssal zone of time. It is a demand for human sacrifice. There is no non-white space that is not Hell. There is no home to go to that is not the jaws of a killing machine. Racialised bodies are trapped in the death zone, in the sunken place, continually cast beneath the abyssal line. Folúkẹ́ Adébísí,. Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility. 106.
As Awoonor reminds us rather politely:
We look for new homes every day,
For new altars we strive to rebuild
The old shrines defiled by the weaver’s excrement.
We need new homes. Now. Yet, one of the critiques of postcolonial theory is that it merely describes this state of postcolonial melancholia without really prescribing a way out of it. We need new homes… but how do we build them? Where do we build them? With whom do we build? With what do we build them? It is suggested that decolonisation involves the dismantling of worlds that those disadvantaged by the current darkness and those who dream with them of worlds otherwise cannot live within. Shadowed as we are by environmental disaster, decolonisation involves imagining and crafting the worlds we all cannot live without. Decolonisation, done properly, could mean the building of new homes as well as new ways of being, thinking, doing, and living in the world. Ways that will not allow the weaver bird to continue to defile our homes—this planet—with its excrement.
