Ile de Goree is a special place. A small island approximately a mile off the coast of Senegal, it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site with no cars and only about a thousand inhabitants. It was here that 22 poets spent four days this month, producing works for the purpose of “rethinking Africa”—an endeavor perhaps better suited to poetry than policy papers.

“Poetry is to good storytelling what revolution is to politics,” says Breyten Breytenbach. “Poetry helps sharpen the blade through which we can cut through deeper issues.”

Breytenbach, a well-known poet from South Africa, is a founding member of the Goree Institute, an organization that promotes arts and culture in Africa, and was one of the two instructors at the poets’ residency on Goree Island. Organized by the Open Society Initiative for West Africa, the residency was led by Breytenbach and Veronique Tadjo, a prominent Ivorian writer and scholar. It welcomed participants from Benin, Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Togo—all of whom came to reignite a literary tradition that has begun to fade, and to help promote arts, culture, and freedom of expression as intrinsically effective methods of fostering open societies in the region.

Many of the residents weren’t poets by trade, but rather a broad cross-section of West African society. There was the biotechnologist from Togo who had never written a poem in his life. There was the Nigerian Canadian civil engineer who decided to move back to frenetic Lagos from the quiet prairie city of Edmonton, Alberta, so her poetry could be inspired by the hardships of life in Nigeria.

Over the course of four days, each of the poets worked on four poems, at times splitting into separate Anglophone and Francophone groups to workshop and discuss their efforts. Some of them worked for more than 10 hours a day. There were poetry slams and spoken word performances, and on the final night, a reading by all the participants. Each of them had written a poem dedicated to Goree Island on pieces of cloth, which were then pinned together to form a united Francophone/Anglophone West African poetry flag. That flag is now on display at the Musée Historique (Historical Museum) on the island for a month, after which it will be stored at the Goree Institute.

The residency encouraged even those who had lived in Africa for their whole lives to reimagine the continent, and in turn, how they exist within it. “Rethinking Africa is to rethink Africans,” said Urbain Amoussou, a Togolese participant.

Below, read one of the poems created at the residency, written by Gbenga Adesina, a 24-year-old poet from Nigeria.