When we turn from Nigeria to look at the poetry which had emerged in Ghana since the 1950s we enter an atmosphere at once akin and sharply different. No traveller from one country to the other can fail to notice a communality of cultural response, custom, gesture, expression, aspiration and attitude. At the same time no one who has lived or worked in both countries can also fail to be aware after a time of a fundamental difference of tempo, a different level of tension that marks one nation from the other, however arbitrary the boundaries of each may be. Ghana and Nigeria were both British colonies. Both were exposed from a period not long after the closing of the European middle ages to tentative but occasionally brutal incursions along the coast. Both were subject to the debilitating slave trade, the tentacles of which reached from trading posts and forts in the south into the remotest hinterland. Both were formerly occupied from the end of the nineteenth century, and were fed with a palliative promise of self-government throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Both attained independence at approximately the same period (Ghana, 1957; Nigeria, 1960), and have subsequently largely abandoned the Westminster model of legislative democracy for alternating phases of experimental democracy and military control.