The Zulu Girl

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The poem Zulu Girl is a powerful yet pathetic recreation of the hardship and endurance of the South African people. Roy Campbell makes the masculinist equation i.e. male is equals to culture and female is equals to nature. It poses an immediate problem of how miserably the poor South African people are forced to work on the farm. The poem is powerful both in sound and in effect. The poem begins with a fairly simple observed situation, and as the poet develops and reflects upon it, its references broader out until it is of world-wide significance. The first strong impression we are given in the poem is of the heat which scorches the landscape where the girl is working: the acres, we are told, are red, which we know is the predominant color of the African earth, but ‘hot red’, and obvious pair of adjectives suggest in our mind something similar- ‘red hot’ the epithet usually applied to heated iron. This together with the metaphor of ‘smoulder’ gives the impression that the land is almost too hot to bear. And could almost burst into females. We are given other details that emphasize the unpleasant nature of the ‘gang’s’ work: they are ‘sweating’; the child is ‘tormented by the flies’. At last she flings down her hoe. She does not just ‘drop it’ or throw it down: the word ‘filings’ suggests impatience and exasperation. An interesting point to notice in the first stanza is the way in which the rhythmic and rhyming pattern emphasizes the physical effort made by the girl when she takes the child form her back. “When in the sun the hot red acres smoulder / A girl flings down her hoe, and from her shoulder / Unslings her child, (tormented by the flies).” In stanza two, we read how the mother, in the meager shade of the thorn trees, is searching the hair of her child for ticks – again a detail which suggest the poverty and insanitary conditions under which these laborers
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