Reluctant Flame [Pan African Pocket Poets Vol. I]
Ife, Nigeria: PPP / Pan African Pocket Poets, 1971. Very Good +. Item #48506
Ife, [Nigeria]: PPP / [Pan African Pocket Poets], 1971. First African Edition, also published the same year in Papua New Guinea under the Papua Pocket Poet imprint, with no known priority. 12mo; illustrated stapled wraps featuring a screen-printed design from Georgina Beier; [7]pp. Rubbing to wraps; binding sound; Very Good or better.
A rousing anti-colonial call to arms from the Papua New Guinea poet and here found in Ulli Beier's Pan African Pocket Poets variant. The most radical and political work published by Beier at this time, of which he wrote, "it was a poem inspired by the negritude poets and by Frantz Fanon, but it was the kind of healthy, exuberant, explosive exposure of colonialism that Papua New Guinea surely needed at the time."
Kasaipwalova walked the walk as well; in 1973 he became a leader of the Kabisawali Movement on his home island of Kiriwina. Inspired by indigenous systems of reciprocity, the movement liberated the island from colonialist structures, replacing them with their own courts, bank, and hotel, and largely living autonomously until the police intervened and eventually the experiment collapsed. Uncommon and notably bridging post colonial thought and revolutionary fervor between West Africa and Melanesia.
Ulli Beier. "Decolonising the Mind." Canberra, Australia: Pandanus Books, 2005. pp. 49.
Price: $500.00