For poet and diplomat Abhay K, Africa was never a subject to be “covered” so much as a world to be entered with humility. Vast and layered, the continent is home to coffee, sweeping deserts, dishes like fufu and jollof, and towering figures such as Nelson Mandela, Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. All of them find a place in his latest poetry collection, The Alphabets of Africa (Penguin). The book takes on the vastness of an entire continent through an unusual framework: the alphabet.
Organised from A to Z, moves across histories, landscapes, animals, political figures, ancient kingdoms, everyday objects and cultural memories. Spread across 180 poems, which become an archive and a reflection of the poet’s personal journey through the continent.
The book was inspired by his earlier collection The Alphabets of Latin America (Bloomsbury), which he wrote between 2016 and 2019, which was widely appreciated and translated into Italian, Spanish and Malayalam. “As children, we all begin our learning journey with alphabets, and as I knew nothing about Africa before writing these poems, with all humility, I could only hope to learn the alphabets of Africa, to begin with. The format gave me the opportunity to transcend the barriers of time and space and juxtapose poems on contemporary Africa with ancient ones,” he tells TMS.
That sense of movement runs throughout the collection. “It is a pilgrimage to the birthplace of our species,” he says. Rejecting the idea of writing as an “outsider”, he argues, Africa belongs to all of humanity. “It is the real Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve evolved and migrated out of Africa. That makes our species an African species and all of us migrant Africans,” he adds.
Beyond stereotypes
Even as the book travels through different regions and eras, it remains firmly opposed to the stereotypes—the persistent framing of Africa through crisis, conflict and suffering. Abhay says the collection began as an attempt to challenge the idea of Africa as merely a “heart of darkness”.
Initially, he had planned to call the collection ‘In Light of Africa’, inspired by Mexican poet-diplomat Octavio Paz’s In Light of India. The intention was to challenge the long-standing image of Africa as a “heart of darkness and horror.” He focused on Africa’s contributions to the modern world rather than repeating familiar narratives that “stereotype and contain” it.
Later, once the poems were organised alphabetically, the title evolved into The Alphabets of Africa.
From journeys to verse
Many of the poems emerged from Abhay’s own travels. He lived in Madagascar for three-and-a-half years and travelled to countries including Kenya, Ethiopia, South Africa, Mauritius and Comoros. “I experienced its astounding beauty, diversity and underlying unity first hand during my travels, which gradually became poems,” he says.
One of the moments that stayed with him most deeply took place in Kenya’s Masai Mara. After spending an entire day on safari without seeing any lions, he had begun to lose hope. Then, just before sunset, on the drive back, he spotted a pride of lions resting on the path. “That'll be forever etched in mind and the learned lesson of not giving up hope till the end,” he says.
Another memory comes from Durban, where Abhay encountered a portrait of Nelson Mandela at the Phoenix Settlement, showing him casting his vote.
Poetry speaks
Abhay believes poetry allows him to do something with history that nonfiction cannot. “Poetry allows me to become the character and speak in the first person. You’ll find Ramesses the Great [the Egyptian Pharaoh], Mansa Musa [his reign is regarded as the zenith of Mali's power] or Shaka Zulu [an influential Zulu monarch] speaking through these poems, rather than the poet,” he notes.
In one poem, coffee becomes the speaker. Since coffee originates in Ethiopia, Abhay saw it as an “essential alphabet of Africa”. “Well, I felt that coffee should get a chance to tell its own interesting story,” he says. Through poetry, he says, even an everyday object can tell its own tale.
It is also a form that, in Abhay’s view, remains relevant in an age of shrinking attention spans. “With the decline in our attention spans, all we can manage to read on our portable devices is a short poem at a time,” he says. “Something succinct, rich in feelings, and something we can engage with, in a short span of time.”
Abhay is now working on a similar project closer to home. After spending the last few years travelling across India, he says he has already begun discovering new “alphabets” that could define India. If The Alphabets of Africa is any indication, that next journey promises to be just as expansive.