The Zulu Girl by Roy Campbell focuses on pitiable plight of African people who are under domination and exploitation of European Civilization. It evokes the context of one particular African tribe that is “Zulu”. The speaker is looking at the “sweating gang” for workers form a high position and demonstrates the situation of poor African people. On the one hand speaker merely focuses on the pitiable situation and on the other hand he implied the possible rebellious attitude because of extreme dehumanization and exploitation.

      From the third line of the poem the poet becomes specific in his observation and focuses on a lady who prepares to leave the gang in order to breast her child. In the description of the child as “tormented by the flies” the poet is reinforcing the pity suffered by people. Though the lady separates from the gang she is referred as a girl that she is still unable to acquire individual identity. The way she leaves the work throwing hoe can be seen as an act of defense of authority. In the second stanza the poet focuses on her motherly care and love for her child. It evokes the image of a mother who suffers but does not give her baby to suffer. Her act of killing the lice that torment her baby can be related to her desire to defend the future generation from dehumanizing exploitation of white colonizers.
      In the third stanza, mother starts breast feeding to her baby. Due to the hunger, the child tugs like a puppy. At the same time he is grunting and producing a sound of satisfaction that sounds like the sighing like a river. There are two comparisons at the same time baby compared with puppy and sucking sound with rive sound. The comparison of baby with puppy reinforces the theme off non human treatment done by the mainstream culture. If a child is puppy, mother is bitch. Thus mother and child both are taken as non human being and behaved accordingly. And the grunting sound like river while sucking the breast stand for the passing of rebellious attitude that the mother harbors inside her. The child is not one to suffer. There are other children who are suffering from very long time. They are defeated at dignity. The girl becomes mother, she has baby but he is not someone’s wife, she is made pregnant. She does not surrender herself to male she is too defeated at dignity.
      The mother is a hill. She gives shadow to the village she is not the mother of a single child. She is the mother of whole beaten tribes. She is the first cloud. She is the symbol of rainfall which enhances productivity. She is preparing a baby. This baby will destroy all the limitations set upon the beaten tribes. The child is not the child of a single mother but of a whole beaten tribe. Both the mother and the child are the representatives of whole beaten tribes. The baby is Messiah (Saver) of whole tribes.

The Zulu Girl - Poem by Roy Campbell

To F. C. Slater

When in the sun the hot red acres smoulder,
Down where the sweating gang its labour plies,
A girl flings down her hoe, and from her shoulder
Unsling her child tormented by the flies.

She takes him to a ring of shadow pooled
By thorn-trees: purpled with the blood of ticks,
While her sharp nails, in slow caresses ruled,
Prowl through his hair with sharp electric clicks,

His sleepy mouth, plugged by the heavy nipple,
Tugs like a puppy, grunting as he feeds:
Through his frail nerves his own deep languors ripple
Like a broad river sighing through its reeds.

Yet in that drowsy stream his flesh imbibes
An old unquenched unsmotherable heat –
The curbed ferocity of beaten tribes,
The sullen dignity of their defeat.

Her body looms above him like a hill
Within whose shade a village lies at rest,
Or the first cloud so terrible and still
That bears the coming harvest in its breast.