Yoke of Oppression

Yoke of Oppression

When the red coats trampled us into the dirt

and the clouds of hunger swallowed our skies,

the yoke of oppression found our necks,

while squalid futures bled the fields dry.

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The poem was inspired by David Diop’s Poem “Vultures”

Vultures

In those days,
when civilization kicked us in the face
the vultures built in the shadows of their talons
the blood-stained monument of tutelage.

David Diop - (born July 9, 1927, Bordeaux, Fr.—died 1960, Dakar, Senegal), was one of the most talented French West African poets of the 1950s, whose tragic death in an airplane crash cut short a promising career.

Diop’s works in Coups de pilon (1956; “Pounding”), his only surviving collection, are angry poems of protest against European cultural values, enumerating the sufferings of his people first under the slave trade and then under the domination of colonial rule and calling for revolution to lead to a glorious future for Africa.