Notes of a Baobab - A travel through Africa with African poets takes you on a literary trip through Africa. Different poets of different regions of Africa, get you an insight look and different perspective at the people and cultures of African societies. The intellectually view and contention of different facets - religion, tradition, history, conflicts, nature, love, rites, politics, education etc. - shows a colored variety of visions of the "African continent" and at the same time that life and living together can have many images and ways. The dispute leads to self-questions as well the examination of current concepts of how we see history, other cultures, intercultural learning and working, development...  

I think of all that pains to praise without the urge to misinform.

To praise in a drum.

A drum calls, I cannot think. Is it an outbreak of fire or war,

A soul is drowning or missing?

We saw no god’s face in the drum’s call,

or in the lonely voice of the town crier.

I cannot think of all the sounds that have come

and gone,

drums in men’s waists

and in womens’s hearts –

i can only hear the master-drummers drum,

wearing a smock and playing on market days.

i run around in a talking drum, between the knees.

I heard the rhythm and the dance like a local durbar.

A big drum and a small drum cry out loud with the arrival of a chief.

All the drums and all the rhythms in hamlet rooms,

and all the souls that lie out frozen, in desolate villages

run out old, like ancient

and watch a child pregnant with all that drums.

Ayo Ayoola-Amale