Silver coin: Life in a man-eat-man society

The poem, ‘Silver coin’ by Karamagi Innocent is both sad and reflective. It can best be described as a protest poem. The poet is protesting against exploitation in his society.

And in so doing, he is also exposing the gap between the haves and have-nots in Tanzania. Through his hard-hitting imagery, figurative language, irony and contrast, he also brings out the theme of poverty and man-eat-man attitude that prevails in the society.

The poem is about young men, sitting outside a shop on a Monday morning and waiting for piece jobs. They get one when a rich woman comes to buy bags of chicken feed. A young man, who asks to help her is paid ‘a shiny silver’ coin picked from the bottom of what the poet describes as ‘a house of compact notes’.

Karamagi sets the mood of the poem in the very first line. He non-apologetically describes the day as a ‘Raw Monday’ morning.

By using the imagery of ‘rawness’ to describe the day, the poet is being frank and realistic in his depiction of the unpleasant situation around.

There is an element of bitterness, pain and bleakness that the poet goes on to portray in the lines that follow, where one gets to understand that hard times seem to have fallen on the people in this society.

The youth, who are either supposed to be in college or working somewhere are ‘smoking, chatting, joking and waiting’.

And the store, where they are sitting and finding comfort and hope, is ‘filthy’ and ‘mud-spattered’ with a ‘huge dust-filled’ ‘cob-webbed’ room. It is here where chicken feed is sold.

Here, he shifts the attention of the reader from the jobless youth in their ‘patched grimy shorts’, smoking and generally doing nothing, to a seemingly well-to-do woman, who emerges out of her car to buy twenty 50-kg bags of chicken feed.

On one hand are the poor youth, who cannot afford to clothe themselves, while on the other, is a rich woman, whose handbag is described as ‘house of compact notes’.

The rich woman, described as ‘her excellency’, is the one who finally gives the young men a job. After buying her 20 bags of chicken feed, she needed someone to carry them, and the youth were the readily available labour.

Then the unfairness with which casual labourers are treated comes out when the woman chooses a shiny coin to pay the youth who helped her load her 20 bags into the van.

For all the sweating and wrestling, the man gets just a coin. But the young man is happy anyway to be given that coin, showing his desperation and hopeless predicament.

“Then her excellency takes her bag, white leather imported and opens a house of compact notes… but searches beneath for a loose coin.”

Email: [email protected]