Katherine Collins

During Kwame Dawes’s residency in Oxford in 2018, he gave generously of his time and enthusiasm for poetry in a series of events. These included the panel discussion The Poetic Arts of Africa: Creative and Critical Voices, where he was joined by poets and writers Belinda Zhawi, JC Niala, and Nana Oforiatta Ayim. The discussion ranged across a number of critical issues in contemporary African poetry and publishing: the emergence of the American-influenced spoken word movement; the connection between activism and performance; the international reception of African poetry as compared to African fiction; and the initiatives being taken to advance African Poetry, including Dawes’s exciting plans for the African Poetry Digital Portal. Following a lively discussion between panel members and the audience, Dawes launched an interactive exhibition that tells the story of the first five years of the African Poetry Book Fund and its promotion of African poetry worldwide. The exhibit was curated by Professor Lorna Dawes of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and features the work of award-winning artist Walter Kitundi.

African Poetry Digital Portal

The Portal that Kwame and Lorna Dawes are currently developing will provide access to book manuscripts, newspapers and periodicals, newsletters, audio and video recordings, websites and related images of African poetry written by Africans from antiquity to the present. It will index and, where possible, provide access to, the largest global collection of manuscript images. It also features specially curated digital projects on various aspects of African poetry, such as African Poetry in Performance and Fusion Africa: African National Poetries in Conversation.

The Portal will include featured research projects on: precolonial poetic, performance, and oratory traditions on the continent; a series of translated works modelled on Jalada’s Translation Issues, featuring traditional African poems written in African languages and translated into as many languages – both African and beyond – as possible; and online anthologies of African poetry in African languages. A link to the Portal will appear on this site in due course.

Cite the text: Collins, Katherine. “Kwame Dawes in Oxford” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2019, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 7 February 2026.

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On 27 November 2018, TORCH visiting professor and prize-winning poet Kwame Dawes spoke with JC Niala, Nana Aforiatta Ayim, and Belinda Zhawi about a number of critical issues in contemporary African poetry and publishing. These include the emergence of the American-influenced spoken word movement; the connection between activism and performance; the international reception of African poetry as compared to African fiction; and the initiatives being taken to advance African Poetry.

Kwame Dawes is Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the Glenna Luschei Editor of the literary magazine Prairie Schooner, and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. His many honours include the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, a Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, the Musgrave Silver Medal for contribution to the Arts in Jamaica, the Poets & Writers Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award, and a Pushcart Prize.

Born in Zimbabwe, poet, sound artist, and educator Belinda Zhawi moved to London aged 12. Her work explores, through her memories of living in rural and urban Zimbabwe, the impact of colonialism across Africa and the immigrant experience in Britain. She was a London Laureate and an Institute of Contemporary Arts Associate Poet, and her pamphlet, Small Inheritances, was published by Ignitionpress in 2018. She is the co-founder of community and performance platform BORN::FREE.

Nana Oforiatta Ayim is a Ghanaian writer, gallerist, filmmaker and art historian. She is director of the ANO Institute of Arts & Knowledge, through which she has pioneered a pan-African Cultural Encyclopaedia, reimagining narratives from across and about the continent; and a Mobile Museums project that travels into communities, collects material culture and exhibits them in those communities, creating discourse about narratives, memory and value. Her first novel, The God Child, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2019.

JC Niala is a Storyteller who writes. She performs stories that otherwise hide away in books and draws on inspiration from people’s stories to create plays, films, poems & books. JC’s work has been featured on BBC2, BBC Radio 4, CBS in the US, ABC in Australia among other media outlets. Her live performances are rich and varied, be they as part of a London Parks and Garden’s Trust poetry residency, at the Tate Modern or The Hay Festival.

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William Ghosh

We were in third form when we learnt the breadth
of the generation gap; and conferencing in concerned tones,
we lamented the waywardness of today’s youth, the impact

of television […]

                           Here was a feckless and weak generation;
a sad foundation upon which the school’s future was to be erected.
These were, as you would imagine, sad days for us.

Kwame Dawes, ‘The Third Former’s Burden’ from Progeny of Air (1994)

Progeny of Air, Kwame Dawes’s first book of poems, won the Forward Prize for best first collection in 1994, when its author was thirty-two. Three of the four sections present scenes from the life of the poet-persona: from childhood (‘Singing Stories’), from adolescence (‘Hall of Fame’), and from young adulthood (‘Grace’). The other section, ‘Cabinet of Beggars’ describes the power-struggles in a Kingston gang.

Kwame is the son of Neville Dawes, the eminent Jamaican novelist and academic. He was born in Ghana, where his father was lecturing. But he was brought up in Jamaica and educated at Jamaica College: an august boys’ school – in the pattern of English public schools – whose alumni included the social theorist Stuart Hall and the Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley. Manley, in fact, was prime minister of Jamaica from 1972 to 1980, so for almost all of Dawes’s time at secondary school.

Many of the poems in this book describe the institutions of male education in the Jamaica of the 1970s. The characters, legends, and topography of Jamaica College, namechecked in ‘The Old Zoology Labs (Jamaica College)’, are described in sometimes-loving, sometimes-bitter detail. Military formation, in the Army Cadets is also described (in ‘Bivouacked: Moneague 1977’ and ‘Head’). And there are uneasy parallels to be drawn between these two, middle-class institutions, and the gangland hierarchies of the ‘Cabinet of Beggars’. Some of the sexual politics and male bravado seem to be common to all three spaces.

‘The Third Former’s Burden’ is the concluding poem in the sequence of poems about childhood. The third form, in Jamaican schools, is for thirteen- or fourteen-year-olds: the equivalent of Year Nine in the British system and – similarly – the third year of secondary school. The third formers in this poem feel very mature and very superior to the new first form intake, and take it upon themselves to educate them. ‘Maybe a few blows,’ they think, ‘a few real rough moments of discipline / would straighten them out for good and salvage the school’s // waning dignity’.

The humour of the poem comes from the pretentious registers the students adopt. Sometimes they sound like Victorian English moralists: ‘Here was a feckless and weak generation’. At others, they adopt the faux sincerity of the politician: ‘These were, as you would imagine, sad days for us’. They sound most like thirteen-year-old boys when the prospect of a ‘a few blows’ is suggested (imagine the glee with which you might trill the ‘r’s in the line: ‘a few real rough moments of discipline’). A pulse of adolescent energy comes from the frequent internal rhymes and echoes (‘gap’, ‘impact’ or ‘generation’, ‘foundation’, ‘imagine’). The feverish energy of teenage boys will often have the potential to bubble over into violence.  For these boys, their schooling, and what they hear from their political leaders, both tacitly encourages this violence, and gives them a language for justifying it. 

The title of the poem alludes to Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’: an imperialist poem exhorting (white) readers to ‘take up the White Man’s burden’ and help ‘civilize’ the ‘new-caught, sullen peoples’ abroad. Jamaica is a former British colony, and Kipling’s poems would have been standard texts in Jamaican colonial schools. One classic Jamaican novel, Myal by Erna Brodber (1988), begins with the mixed-race protagonist, Ella O’Grady, giving a recitation of ‘The White Man’s Burden’ to a visiting Anglican parson.

One point Dawes is making is that, though the British may have gone (Jamaica became independent in 1962, the year of the poet’s birth), the institutions they have left behind for education and socialisation continue to instil ideas about hierarchy and masculinity, and to valorise violence and corporal punishment, in ways that can be traced to the colonial period. The effects of this formation can be seen in the highest levels of Jamaican politics, Dawes suggests: ‘It should come as no wonder to the casual observer | why this school has produced so many great leaders | for this little nation: They taught us well, very well.’ His tone here is dead-pan, detached and ambiguous. Is it humorous, sardonic, exasperated, or ominous? 

Cite this: Ghosh, William. “Close reading of Kwame Dawes’s ‘The Third Former’s Burden’ from Progeny of Air.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2019, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 7 February 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Kwame Dawes, Poetas de los cinco continentes, Di / Verso 2017, by Mariano Castillo / Secretaría de Cultura CDMX (CC-BY-SA 2.0) via Flickr

All Kwame Dawes’s work is pervaded by a conviction that writing, and in particular poetry, matters intensely to how we understand the world and relate to one another. This is also evident in the several plays he has written, acted in, directed and produced, most recently One Love at the Lyric Hammersmith in London. In 2007 he released A Far Cry from Plymouth Rock: A Personal Narrative. His essays have appeared in numerous journals and periodicals including the London Review of Books, Granta, The Washington Post, and USA Today. Among his many awards and prizes are a Pushcart Prize, a Musgrave Medal, the 2019 Windham-Campbell prize, and an Emmy for HOPE: Living and Loving with AIDS in Jamaica. In 2018 he was named a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, an honorary position held in the past by W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Mark Strand.

Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds aims to recognise the ways in which Black and Asian British writers confront particular challenges in their writing careers, not least the tendency for institutions, including the publishing industry, to overlook and mishear their voices. Founded in 2012 by Dawes, the African Poetry Book Fund (APBF) seeks to address this problem directly by publishing and promoting the work of African poets, including those of the diaspora. Writers Make Worlds is especially delighted to feature the APBF, and this panel discussing their work, convened by Dawes. In the UK, poets published by the APBF include: Warsan Shire, Janet Kofi-Tsekpo, Mary-Alice Daniel, Nick Makoha, and Victoria Adukwei Bulley.

—Katherine Collins, 2019

Cite this: Collins, Katherine. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2019, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 7 February 2026.

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