All Of Africa Belongs To Me

In All Of Africa Belongs To Me, Edward Ndopu explores faces of political and human experiences, invoking compassion and empathy in the reader. This collection of his poems shows the poet as he really is: a true son of Africa writing for his turbulent age. With eccentric twists the poems are passionate and emotional, contrasting war, freedom, poverty, corruption, violence, loss, tenderness and death. Many of the poems connect with the writer's prison experience as a SWAPO detainee in Lubango, Southern Angola, during Namibia's protracted liberation struggle and he also experiments with trying to find a voice for those less fortunate than himself. The poems are written against the backdrop of the hardship that most Africans battle every day of their lives. Ndopu's voice sorts through bruised truths and reverberant detail to deliver these poems of startling imagery and honesty. All Of Africa Belongs To Me is a landmark in the growing oevre of a Namibian poet whose influnce has only grown over the decades.

Edward Ndopu of Namibia has lived in Canada for nearly two decades. He is one of the most highly regarded of living Namibian poets. He is versatile, having written poems, plays, short stories and essays. His work appears in many journals and anthologies of African poetry. Ndopu was the most productive and the most genuinely experimental of Namibia"s younger poets until his controversial imprisonment in 1985. He was suspected and falsely accused of being a South African spy. SWAPO moved him to a detention camp near Lubango in Southern Angola, where he was kept with others under deplorable, inhumane conditions. This interrupted his creative phase for several years. Ndopu was freed in 1989 and returned to Namibia as a member of a group of almost 200 SWAPO ex-detainees. After that he played a prominent role in cultural affairs in Windhoek, and took up journalism, writing for Namibian and South African publications. In Canada, he is an effective literary voice for African writing, networking and serving in various public initiatives for the arts. He is much honoured for his work and is one of the leading voices among this generation of cultural interpreters from Africa. Ndopu has just completed a novel, Bridges, and two poetry collections, A Thousand Tears and The Other Side Of the Skin. 

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