Book: The Big Black Theory (Anthology)
Publisher: Bablo Publishers (Bablo Digitals)
Author/Editor: Dimeji Sodeke
Reviewer: Chinonso Ihekire
Pagination: 121 pages

Whenever poetry flees the mundane and directly attacks philosophy, the result is always enlightenment. That rare consciousness and curiosity that it awakens is the exact reason why intellectual poetry continues to remain a bedrock of a society’s growth, just like the anthology, The Big Black Theory, achieves in stimulating.

Edited by Dimeji Sodeke, the anthology positions itself as an intellectual counterpoint to the scientific framing of the “Big Bang,” shifting the conversation on origin from physics to culture, memory, and identity. It assembles 17 voices from across Africa and its diaspora, constructing a body of work that prioritises multiplicity over uniformity.

Sodeke wittingly opens the collection with “Mother Alkebulan,” a poem that establishes the thematic direction of the anthology. Africa is presented not merely as a geographical space but as origin and witness, with references to “historical antecedents, pre-colonial naivety and the evolution of culture” grounding the continent within a continuum of disruption and renewal.

The controversy on whether the garden of Eden was situated in Africa and the scholarly allusion of Africa as the ‘Black Eden’ is metaphorically exploited in The Big Black Theory; here, Sodeke assembles a collection of ‘truths’, each poem representing the author’s balanced perspective of ‘life in Africa’, Earth’s supposed Eden. The language is direct, favouring clarity over abstraction, and setting the tone for much of the writing that follows.

Across the anthology, this preference for accessibility remains consistent. Several contributions adopt a straightforward approach, articulating experience in ways that are immediate and unambiguous. In this sense, the work “tells tales of ordeals and a posited beam of hope,” maintaining a balance between hardship and affirmation. The effect is a body of writing that reflects contemporary African discourse, where pride and critique often exist in parallel.

What becomes increasingly evident, however, is the range of perspectives that shape the collection. Atamelang Adelaide-Free from Botswana had a different reality of Africa as a blossom and paradise in his poem My Botswana, My Pride, in contrast to other pieces shaped by displacement, inequality, and social tension. This variation reinforces the anthology’s central premise: that African identity cannot be reduced to a singular narrative, but must instead be understood through its plurality.

This multiplicity is central to the anthology’s structure. Contributors approach their subjects from differing angles, ranging from activism and political critique to explorations of beauty, belonging, and cultural memory. The absence of a singular narrative voice allows these perspectives to coexist without enforced alignment, creating a layered composition that mirrors the diversity it seeks to represent.

However, this same structure introduces a degree of poetic imbalance. The shifts between pieces are not always seamless, and the balance between thematic depth and stylistic execution varies across the collection. First, this is not bad at all, just risky. It becomes evident especially in Sodeke’s own contributions. In Mother Alkebulan, lines like “Exodus of mental slavery we await” and “Old pathway of our ancestors we crave” carry both historical weight and ideological direction. The poem feels like a capsule of traumatic nostalgia. It feels like a doctor’s prescription to wipe off a collective amnesia of our shared African history. In White Wars 1&2, the repeated insistence that “We know our history” works as both affirmation and argument, especially when it questions the idea of a “world war” that excludes the African experience.

Elsewhere, like in Ajimokunola Ibukunola’s We will not bury our Stories, the tone shifts even more bluntly. “The howling nursing mothers/ Snatched away from their babies/ How?/ How do we forget?” he asks. His refusal to join in the collective whitewashing of the gory colonial histories across Africa feels directly confrontational, elevating Sodeke’s own school of thought in the anthology. In his other piece, Fucking Immigrant that confrontation becomes more contemporary, and deeply personal. “Chain his right leg / Say you are free / With a white brain,” he writes, as if to expose the contradiction of modern migration; freedom that is still very one-sided, often discriminatory and somewhat violent. The anthology succinctly explores these themes of migration and identity, without sugar coating but saltened with a brashness that reflects Sodeke’s literary philosophy. In short, The Big Black Theory successfully reminds us that our oppression did not end with independence, it just wore new clothes coloured in modern migration.

Further, there are moments where the anthology feels thematically aligned but stylistically uneven, as affirmations of Blackness and heritage begin to echo each other rather than build new dimensions. In Sodeke’s Black Glows, the line “Let there be radiance / And there was black!” views Blackness as origin and light, not absence and darkness. In Bàtá Dancer, “The ‘bata’ speaks joy” shifts the conversation into culture as living expression rather than abstract pride. Some other poets approach similar ideas with less variation in language or structure. For instance, Coker Michael Oluwafemi’s Reparation Now! and Resource Control both interrogate historical injustice and ownership, but are as blunt as Ibukunola in their direct declarations. It flips the poem into an argumentative space, rather than just a bubble of creative imagery. We also see this in Ogini Bernard’s Correct Love and Emmanuel Addai’s Native Slave Masters, where the ideas are clear and relevant, but the stylistic approach remains relatively straightforward.

Nevertheless, the anthology achieves its primary objective. It functions less as a unified argument and more as a reflective body of work, capturing a range of perspectives without attempting to reconcile them into a single position. Its strength lies in its willingness to present African experience as complex and multifaceted, rather than definitive.
The Big Black Theory ultimately stands as a collective expression, defined more by the breadth of its voices than by structural cohesion. Its significance rests not in uniformity, but in its representation of difference.