Zulu Girl.

Write a critical analysis of ‘The Zulu Girl’ by Roy Campbell
The Zulu Girl is a poem written by Roy Campbell, which at a glance appears to be about a Zulu girl and her son. An in-depth analysis reveals it to be a poem about the life of African people being dominated by European civilisation. The title refers to a girl. Not just any girl but ‘the Zulu Girl’. This implies that there is something unique about her, something that sets her apart from the rest who are around her. The Zulu Girl seems unfamiliar to the poet, and he writes about her in a manner which shows he is puzzled by her. He chose to mainly focus on the Zulu girl in the poem, as well as her son, and it could be he views them as the perfect embodiment of what he intends to convey. He writes in awe, and this could be due to the strangeness of the African figure to him.
The poem begins with the observation of workers in the field under the scorching heat of the sun, ploughing away. Amongst them is a Zulu girl, who digs along with them while carrying a baby on her back. She later unslings her child from her back and takes him to the shadow of thorn trees where she suckles him while gently pulling out the ticks from his hair. In his drowsiness still, the sun burns his skin. However his mother’s body acts like a shade, similar to how a hill protects a village within its shadow from the sun.
The poet uses highly descriptive language, capturing the readers and ensuring they are hooked to the poem. As seen in the first stanza, ‘When in the sun the hot red acres smoulder, down where the sweating gang its labour plies.’ The poet has used highly vivid description, enabling the readers to have a close to accurate mental picture of the working conditions of the Africans. They have to work ‘in the sun’ where ‘the red hot acres smoulder’. These unfair conditions suggest that they are under some form of oppression, a reflection of how Africans worked under the white colonialists. The workers have been referred to