by Landeg White
Published by Peterloo Poets 1983

Captain John Stedman of the title poem served in the Scots Brigade under the Dutch in Surinam during the slave revolts of 1773-8. Joanna (cover picture) whom he married was a slave on the Fauconberg sugar estate. He could not afford to buy her freedom and suffered the agony of her public auction and of seeing their son born into slavery. His Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, with sketches by the author engraved by William Blake, is a neglected classic – neglected partly because Surinam is small and poor and unimportant but also because Stedman has been unfortunate in his editors who have viewed the affair with Joanna as an indiscretion rather than as the centre to which all his metaphors constantly return.

Reviews

“White deploys his verse forms – terza rima, syllabics, stress-count lines, free verse – with a fine ear for ironic aptness: the approximate iambics of ‘Ministering’ are wryly appropriate in an Achebe-like piece describing conflict between tribal origins and ministerial splendour, while the lush texture of the opening of ‘After the Revolution’ recalls Matthew Arnold’s ‘a Dream’ and that poem’s ‘river of life’. For Captain Stedman is a sensitive, carefully crafted collection, which besides its alert colonial commentaries offers other pleasures – West Indian speech patterns zestfully recreated, or an evocative description of flamingos – that make highly enjoyable reading.”

Times Literary Supplement

by Landeg White
Cambridge University Press 1987

This book provides an informative example of the manner in which capitalism has underdeveloped Africa. It describes the economic and social history of the Quelimane district of Mozambique from the mid-nineteenth century until independence in 1975.

It has two features of particular originality. Firstly, it concentrates on the local impact of capitalism, making extensive use of state and company archives.

Secondly, novel use is made of popular protest and work songs to supplement other data. They are revealed as vivid indicators of the African population’s reaction to alien rule.

Reviews

“This book fully lives up to the promise of a series of excellent articles published over recent years … Rarely have the fundamental developments in a single African region over the last century been given such searching investigation … Vail and White produce a finely-worked succession of arguments about capitalist strategies on competition and markets, but above all labor over more than half a century … A final chapter of great value considers the plantation economy in the light of the independence war … Vail and White offer one of the more sensitive considerations of the dilemmas facing socialist construction in Africa yet to have appeared … an excellent conclusion to a work of very high quality.”

African Studies Review

translated by Landeg White
Princeton University Press 2008

Luís de Camões is world famous as the author of the great Renaissance epic The Lusíads, but his large and equally great body of lyric poetry is still almost completely unknown outside his native Portugal. In The Collected Lyric Poems of Luís de Camões, the award-winning translator of The Lusíads gives English readers the first comprehensive collection of Camões’s sonnets, songs, elegies, hymns, odes, eclogues, and other poems–more than 280 lyrics altogether, all rendered in engaging verse.

Camões (1524-1580) was the first great European artist to cross into the Southern Hemisphere, and his poetry bears the marks of nearly two decades spent in north and east Africa, the Persian Gulf, India, and Macau. From an elegy set in Morocco, to a hymn written at Cape Guardafui on the northern tip of Somalia, to the first modern European love poems for a non-European woman, these lyrics reflect Camões’s encounters with radically unfamiliar peoples and places. Translator Landeg White has arranged the poems to follow the order of Camões’s travels, making the book read like a journey. The work of one of the first European cosmopolitans, these poems demonstrate that Camões would deserve his place among the great poets even if he had never written his epic.

by Landeg White
Macmillan Press 1993
Now out of print.
This book is now available to purchase in PDF format.

Price: €59.99 (£40.00)

In January 1935, a railway bridge 2.3 miles long was opened across the Zambezi delta in Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique). Fifty-one years later, it was blown up by anti-government forces fighting with Renamo. This book brings together politics, diplomacy, economics, labour history and technology to show how the constructions of the ‘longest bridge in the world’ was both a major engineering feat and a disaster of colonial planning.

It is based on Portuguese and British archives including materials newly available and it tells the story of Libert Oury, financier and railway king, whose associates nicknamed him ‘the other Rhodes’ but whose career has never before been described. But the book’s real hero is the Zambezi River, that ‘treacherous highway’ which the bridge was intended to conquer.
Today the lower Zambezi bridge is by far the grandest of the ruins of colonial enterprise littering the vast river valley.

by Landeg White
Parthian Press 2006

After a lifetime of travelling, and six books of poetry on the move, Landeg White in Arab Work is trying something new – with poems about settling, building and planting in a country where he is a stranger.

His chosen forms – lyric, ode, sonnet, eclogue, elegy, epithalamium – point to a new engagement with British tradition; but his older themes are still present, as poetry fights back in an embattled world with tenderness and lyricism, celebrations of family love and the ramshackle heroism of ordinary people.