A SELECTION OF JENNIFER JOHNSON’S AFRICAN POEMS

The White Nile. Photograph Flavia Corpas

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At Ars Notoria we are pleased to be able to introduce Jennifer Johnson to our readers. She was born in 1956 in Sudan, by the side of the Nile, between Khartoum and what is now the border of South Sudan – on the edge of the dividing line between the desert and the green. When she was four, her family fled the First Sudanese Civil War (1955–1972) to live in Ghana, and then she came to England. Later, she returned to Africa to work for the VSO as an agriculturalist in Zambia.

As a fellow uprooted African who also had to flee a civil war at the age of 4 to live in another African country, and from there go to school in England, I can readily appreciate her African poetry and identify with Jennifer. We both had barefoot childhoods. Graham Greene said, “Childhood is the bank balance of the writer.” And Rilke said: “Die wahre Heimat des Menschen ist seine Kindheit” (A person’s true home is their childhood).

Poets exploit their childhoods their whole lives. Johnson’s poetry, including the well-known “Day-Old Chicks in Zambia,” draws heavily on her African experiences and has been widely published in magazines and anthologies. How difficult it is to explain lost and distant worlds. I can hear Jennifer Johnson say in my imagination. No, read it again. You haven’t quite understood. Again!

Johnson has two chapbooks: Footprints on Africa and Beyond (Hearing Eye, 2006) and Hints and Shadows (Nettle Press, 2017). She won a Bread and Roses award for a single poem in The Shouting Tories (2022) and has received commended placements in competitions including Poetry on the Lake (2005), Ware Poets (2018) and Forest Poets (2025). She currently reviews poetry collections for London Grip.

Philip Hall

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Day old chicks in Zambia

The aged Land Rover lost its voice
half-way along the old earth road.
Mechanical male egos competed
while the sun overthrew the breeze.
A little girl – her face shining
stared at my official box,
then gently touched the alien.

I opened the cardboard lid
and her face was wakened by
the symphony of a hundred chirps.
Nearby I saw a village hen
followed by her six young
but the girl remained impressed
by mass-produced Western orphans.

Originally published in Poetry Nottingham, later in Footprints on Africa and Beyond and Hints and Shadows.

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Groundnut Chop

I remember groundnut chop
in sunny, sixties Ghana
reminding me of when I played
with shanty kids climbing trees,
spinning around to ‘I’m so dizzy’.

I remember trips to Winneba
where surf tumbled me over,
the only access to that beach
on narrow roads between lagoons
where drowned cars rusted.

I remember my sandy school,
studying geography with Kofi,
Mrs Bapat draping a snake
between her tiny arms,
an eclipse that cooled the morning.

I remember biting
into a roll full of ants, screaming
at my mother’s orange dress,
obeying her shout to ‘run’
when the earthquake shook.

I remember being bitten
by next door’s Alsatian,
my parents rushing me
to the military hospital
for rabies jabs and iodine.

I remember a road block
where soldiers told my father
to open the boot. They jumped
when they saw something
wrapped in paper, a paw-paw.

I remember when it all ended,
a morning woken by gunfire.
After the silence, a general
shouted on the radio for hours.
My school was closed.

The holes in the buildings sent us
back to England where no-one
wanted to hear about Ghana.
Groundnut chop gave way
to news-wrapped fish and chips.

Originally published in Hints and Shadows.

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Sand

Blake saw a world in a grain of sand.
I see two worlds. There was the one
I was born in where my feet sank
with every step leaving footprints
that lasted until erased by desert winds.
It took an hour or so to walk
the mile or so with leaking buckets,
collect the water needed for our crops.
We tried to make the sand stick
with manure from our goats
but the water kept draining away.
Hunger drained the colour from our lives.

I remember sitting by the lake
wishing it was in the West
like the ones I’d seen in magazines
with terraces covered in fruit
so plentiful no-one rushed to devour it;
with tourists obsessed with how
they looked in brand new clothes
drinking from bottles with expensive labels.
They would see in our lake
the kind of paradise they pay for.
Perhaps it’s just as well they can’t get here.
I can see them never watching out;
a naïve faith in their own safety.
To us the lake was a fishless nightmare,
the last caught with mosquito nets.
I know every spot where crocodiles
and other tribes have taken lives.

Now I live in a world
where sand and water
have been mixed with cement.
Each day I walk on that concrete
which blocks out the sky.
I walk up carpeted stairs
in shoes with padded soles,
read books hoping to get excited
by what happens to someone else.

I miss sand grains under my toenails,
the ones that made up the sands
my feet used to sink into.

Originally in The Frogmore Papers, later in Footprints on Africa and Beyond and Hints and Shadows.

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Zambian Township

Windows broken, jagged teeth,
children searching for old corn cobs:
the hunger of this town.

A woman cooks Nshima,
feels a shadow swallowing the air, looks up.
A knife flashes towards her throat.
She tries to scream but can only whimper
as a hand snatches away her last pan.

She runs out, tells her neighbour
who can offer no comfort.
Her knees tremble, fearing her husband’s rage
and the night when her children
will cry with empty stomachs.

Returning, she looks at her concrete house,
her Independence dream,
her ‘permanent’ home come true,
at the cracks that will never be repaired:
one day this will fall to the ground
like the hut she grew up in.

Originally published in Brittle Star, later in Footprints on Africa and Beyond and Hints and Shadows.