"AND THE WEST IS LET IN": A LOOK INTO DAVID RUBADIRI'S "STANLEY MEETS MUTESA" by Samuel Obono Jr.

David Rubadiri has been one of my favourite East African poet ever since I read "An African Thunderstorm" as a High School student. Born in Malawi in 1930, he is one of the early creators of modern African literature from East Africa.
Colonialism is one of the shared thematic preoccupation of African poets across the continent even though the experience is narrated in different forms and expression.
Rubadiri's account of the arrival of the west can be viewed as a mere tip of the iceberg as the poet intentionally refuses to go into details of the aftermath of their arrival in the poem and its effect on the entire continent and people.
From the title, we are left to wonder what happens after "Stanley meets Mutesa"? "Stanley" can be seen as a representative of the west, one of the great explorers of the African interior who meet king Mutesa of Buganda. Rubadiri spends half of the poem narrating the ordeal of the westerners in Africa:
"Such a time of it that had;
The heat of the day
The chill of the night
And the mosquitoes that followed
Such was the time and
They were bound for a kingdom" (lines 1-6)
As the poem progresses, one can visualize a group of white men who are on a mission to conquer more kingdoms for the British Government. They are left to battle with the African climatic condition as they marched:
"The sun was fierce and scorching- (12)
And hot was the season just breaking" (18).
We also come to term with the positive and negative effects of the sun:
"With it rose their spirits
With its fall their hope" (13-14)
Despite the unfavourable conditions they go through, Stanley and his men still forge ahead.
"But the march trudging on
Its khaki leader in front
He the spirit that inspired
He the light of hope" (24-26)
Rubadiri gives an unbiased exposition of the ordeal of the explorers without any sympathetic undertone. The mood of the poem changes as they approach the courts of Buganda, Stanley and his men are in high spirit:
"The march leapt on chaunting
Like young gazelles to a water hole.
Hearts beat faster
loads felt lighter" (32-35)
This portrays the sense of victory the colonialist derived as they conquered from kingdom to kingdom.
One thing is significant in this poem: the response of the Bugandan people as Stanley and his men arrives.
The usual African traditional music and drummings used to welcome visitors to the land is left out due to the features that differentiated Stanley and his men from other black visitors.

"The village looks on behind banana groves
Children peer behind reed fences." (43-44)
The above lines suggests that the villagers were suspicious of the white visitors, a sense of insecurity that could not give way for association as better expressed in (line 50) below:

"For the country was not sure"
but Rubadiri sees it as
"A silence of assessment" (54)
As said earlier, Rubadiri leaves us lost in the middle of a beautiful piece. After king Mutesa welcomes the white man, we are not told what transpired afterwards but since the mission of British Colonialism is to subdue and Conquer, we are certain that the poem has been able to open us to the beginning of British domination of East Africa.

Reference:
David Rubadiri: A Selection of African Poetry. Pg (90-95). Ed. K.E Senanu & T. Vincent. Longman, Essex, U.K. (1976).