In an essay published in Khartoum in 1934, Muhammad Ahmad Mahjub, a colonial government-employed engineer, spare-time poet and future Prime Minister of Sudan, lamented the lack of national sentiment around him. Declaring that nationalism required active construction, Mahjub urged his Arabic-speaking peers to create a national poetry (Mahjub 1970: 113–16).

Living in a political context shaped by European colonialism, Sudanese Arabic poets were not unique in pressing their art into the service of nationalism. By the time Mahjub wrote, poets in Egypt, such as Mahmoud Sami al-Barudi, Ahmad Shawqi and Hafiz Ibrahim, had been presiding over a nationalist literary nahda, or ‘awakening’, for more than half a century (Khouri 1971, Badawi 1993). Meanwhile, in India during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bengali poets in Calcutta were conscious of their own literary awakening, or nabajagaran (Sarkar 1997: 160), with luminaries like Rabindranath Tagore composing verse on behalf of the nation. Poet-nationalists emerged later in sub-Saharan Africa, after World War II. The Swahili poet Shaaban Robert, for example, helped to foster Tanganyikan (later Tanzanian) nationalism, while the French-language poet, Leopold Sedar Senghor, did much the same in Senegal (Iliffe 1979: 379; Ba 1973). These commonalities were not accidental. In the Middle East, South Asia and Africa alike, poetry was conducive and important to nationalist expression in this period, for at least four reasons.