Mafika Gwala's 'We lie under Tall Gum-Trees' explores a new level of sexual intercourse. In this essay Gwala's ironic ideas of love, union, emotional wars and sexual activities will become apparent throughout his poem by exploring his past and splashing into the deep end of his creativity of 'We lie under Tall gum-Trees'
             Mafika Pascal Gwala was born in 1946 in Kwa-Zulu Natal. He spent much of his childhood in Mpumalanga and in a predominantly working-class township near Durban. Later in life after being a teacher and a legal clerk he lived in Johannesburg and later on in England where he did research on adult education at the University of Manchester.
             'Gwala emerged as a significant writer and theorist in the late 1960's and early 1970's, during a crucial period' in which, South Africa experienced a literacy revival of black voices that had previously been silenced by repression.
             Gwala was closely connected with 'the black South Africans Student Organization.' Gwala together with many other creative workers such as Mbuyiseni Mtshali 'wrote and encouraged others to think in a way that expressed the political, social, cultural and emotional needs and aspirations of all those who had been victimized by apartheid.'
             Gwala's poems have a wide variety of styles including "descriptive evocations, contrasts and continuities between the 'urban-new' and the 'rural-traditions'" His poetry extends to love and family relationships. Throughout Gwala's poems there is a focus on emotions and experience and thus Gwala moved away from traditional Black Consciousness towards a more 'explicitly non-racial socialism' with liberation as a birth of hope.
             In the 1970's Gwala wrote a poem called 'we lie under Tall Gum-Trees' which was inspired by John Donnes poem 'The Flea.' In John Donne's p...