Best “New” African Poets 2022 Anthology / Anthologie des Meilleurs "Nouveaux" Poètes Africains 2022 / Antologia dos Melhores “Novos” Africanos 2022

Best New African Poets 2022 Anthology has poems, poem pieces, and reviews from over 100 poets from at least 30 African countries writing in English, Portuguese, French, Kiswahili and many other African languages. Idegwu, looks at how religion is used as a tool to make black Africans be slaves in the Middle East, how the black people, even though of the same religion with their Arabic brothers, are debased racially by their brothers. Sulaiman, Matshoba, and Munengwa want poetry to take us to the past and future, to open up great worlds of feeling and song, Sulaiman pinpoints ages in art movements from Chaucer to postmodernism. Chuma uses bible hero stories and characters to build the love characters in his poems whilst Muchirahondo uses place names, eg Jezebel, Stockholm, Phoenix, Delilah, and as tangent, Kassim draws back to old English masters like Austeen to dissect what love meant before the Romantic Movement, saying, “Love was meeting a stranger for the first time. And vowing to make life a service to each other.” Not to forget the Nigerians with the harmattan wind, the iroko tree metaphors, the dearth of democracy on the continent, some accruing into wars eg Sierra Leone war aptly depicted in Kamara’s poems…, it is a pot pourri of views, opinions, themes, styles….The beauty of the anthology is seeing as many new voices as keeping the old voices we started with. Eppel, Mhondera, Swanson, Ojonugwa, and Mwanaka were in our beginning anthology, 8 years ago, and there are still there, practicing poetry.