Analysis of Tarzan’s ‘Umgawa’ Burden

About this poem

“TARZAN” — A ZANY TARRED NAME! Rudyard Kipling’s (1865-1936) poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” offering justification for colonialism as the duty or burden of white nations to spread civilization to the non-white races, functions in synchronic harmony with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ (1875-1950) portrayal of the fictional heroic character of Tarzan, an archetypal feral apeman, with his ululating chest-thumping yell and his Swahili-like sounding coined utterance of “Umgawa” that, in earlier Tarzan shows, originally meant ‘Get Down,’ a command that morphed into whatever one chose it to mean; and which, to the natives of “Darkest Africa,” and Tarzan’s ‘entanglement’ with them, had Africa’s indigenous tribal folk ‘getting down’ or bowing down in perplexed lordship submission (In Kiswahili, the lingua franca word Umgawa or ‘Ngawa means entanglement). It is noteworthy to mention that Burroughs himself had never ‘entangled’ or set foot on the continent of Africa, employing only his fertile imagination to develop and compose the imaginary story of a British lord of the realm called Tarzan. What is even more fascinating to mention, is that it would appear that the two authors, Kipling, the Englishman, and Burroughs, the American, as contemporaries of each other in the hegemonic imperialist European world of Great Britain, politically allied with the United States of America as an emerging world power, were complicated admirers, the one with the other, as evidenced by a poem that Burroughs wrote, in April 1899, called “The Black Man’s Burden” that followed swiftly Kipling’s own publication of “The White Man’s Burden” in February 1899. While Kipling’s rhymed poem was composed in four stanzas of eight lines each, Burroughs’ poem, although maintaining Kipling’s rhymed feature, varied in structural composition. The first stanza of Kipling’s February 1899 poem reads as follows: “Take up the White Man’s burden - Send forth the best ye breed - Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives’ need; To want in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild - Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half- child.” In contrast, Burroughs’ April 1899 poem, “The Black Man’s Burden,” is composed in a block style, rhymed verse of seventy two lines that seems to be written in the form of a debating retort to Kipling’s poem. Burroughs’ poem is written in the style of a parody and has an underlying tone of sarcasm that appears to weaken or destroy the abrasive imperialist tone of Kipling’s poem (or does it?). As example, the closing eight lines of Burroughs’ block-style poem reads as follows: “Take up the white man’s burden; Go learn to wear his clothes; You May look like the devil; But nobody cares who knows. Peruse a work of Darwin — Thank God that you’re alive —And learn the reason clearly: — The fittest alone survive.” Readers of this unrhymed seven-line one-stanza tanka poem, “Tarzan’s ‘Umgawa’ Burden,” are invited to read in entirety Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” and Burroughs’ “The Black Man’s Burden;” and compare and contrast their cultural messages and understanding for audiences of the twenty first century. more »