In March 1955, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, still imprisoned in Rawalpindi's Montgomery Jail where he had been interred since 1951 for 'seditious activities,' wrote Aa Jaao Africa (Come, Africa), a poem based on a phrase he had heard as a rallying cry among African anti-colonial rebels:
Aa jaao main ne sun li tere dhol ki tarang
Aa jaao mast ho gayi mere lahu ki chaal …
Come, that I have heard the sounds of your drum
Come that my blood flows to its rhythm
Come, Africa.
Come, for I have raised my forehead from the dust
Scraped away the hide of grief from my eyes
Broken away from the grip of pain
Torn away the web of helplessness
Come, Africa!
The earth's heart beats with mine, Africa
The river dances while the moon keeps time
I am Africa, for I have taken on your form
I am you, and my gait is your lion-walk.
Come, Africa
Come with a lion-walk
Come, Africa!
We always felt intrigued by the poem, not least because it troubled us. While Faiz's solidarity with Africa was obvious in the lines, the image of the continent was primal, wild, invoking jungles and wild animals. Our latter-day sensibilities could not reconcile Faiz's obvious commitment to international humanism with the image he obviously harboured of Africans as primal beings. It was much later that we learned that far from invoking racialised stereotypes, Faiz's imagery had been inspired by the poetic aesthetics developed by writers and intellectuals of the Negritude movement, which sought to reclaim the metaphors of blackness in the service of an international solidarity amongst people of colour. Faiz's friendship with African poets such as Aimé Césaire of Martinique must have led him to adopt these metaphors, which he then brought to the Subcontinent. Ultimately, other Urdu poets like Ali Sardar Jafri would use similar imagery in their poems celebrating black revolutionaries across the world.