Gladys May Casely Hayford was a pioneering Sierra Leonean poet and visual artist, born in 1904 and writing during the last decades of British colonial rule in West Africa. Her mother, Adelaide Casely-Hayford, was a well-known educator and cultural nationalist, and that atmosphere of pride in African identity shapes much of her daughter’s work. “Baby Cobina” comes from that world: a short lyric that feels at once like a lullaby, a nursery rhyme, and a protective incantation. It was written at a time when African children were often viewed through a colonial lens of pity or stereotype, so simply placing a brown baby at the center of joy and devotion was a quietly radical act.
The poem itself is a celebration of a child named Cobina—a West African name—whose “large black velvet eyes” and “little coos of ecstasies” fill the first stanza with sensory delight. But alongside that delight sits adult anxiety: the child is “so precious that we fear / Something might come and steal him, when we grownups are not near.” The central idea grows from that tension. Love, especially parental love, is not only tenderness; it is also the urge to shield what is most vulnerable. The speakers respond by tying brass bells to the baby’s ankles and kissing a charm into them, turning longing for safety into an action, a ritual.
The structure carries that ritual feeling. The poem unfolds in two four-line stanzas of rhyming couplets—“eyes” with “surprise,” “goes” with “toes,” “fear” with “near,” “charm” with “harm.” The long lines move with a swaying, sing-song rhythm, close to a lullaby, and the repeated apostrophe to “Brown BABY COBINA” works like an invocation. That phrase appears twice, first as “Brown BABY COBINA” at the opening, then as the fully capitalized “BROWN BABY COBINA” in the second stanza, as if the speaker’s voice is growing more deliberate, more protective. The placement of “Brown” in that chant is important: it is not a neutral description but a badge of beauty and worth. The child’s brownness is celebrated through textures—“black velvet eyes,” “brown dimpled toes”—and through sound, from the “gurgling of surprise” to the “brass bells on his ankles, that laugh where’er he goes.” The bells are not mere decoration. They “laugh,” and their “tinkle” is described as something “rare” and wonderful above those dimpled toes. That word “rare” catches the poem’s tender shock: the ordinary movement of a child becomes extraordinary because he is so loved.
The second stanza opens with fear. The word “steal” is stark and unsettling, especially in a poem otherwise filled with coos and laughter. The fear is not named precisely—spiritual danger, illness, the unknown—but the poem’s remedy is specific. The adults do not just worry; they tie bells on his ankles and kiss them with a spoken charm: “Bells, guard our Baby Cobina from all devils and all harm.” Here the poem leans into West African traditions of protective charms and spoken blessings, where objects can carry spiritual force. The verb “kissed” is crucial because it joins affection to protection. The charm is not cold or distant; it is pressed onto the child’s body with love. The direct address to the bells gives them a voice and a duty. They become at once music, adornment, and sentinel.
What makes “Baby Cobina” significant is how effortlessly it blends ordinary nursery tenderness with African spiritual practice. Casely Hayford does not explain or translate the charm for outsiders; she simply lets it stand as part of the child’s world. In doing so, she writes against the dominant colonial narratives of her time that often diminished Black life. A brown baby is not presented as pitiable or exotic but as “precious,” worthy of poetry, of bells, of fear, and of protection. The poem’s small size works in its favor: it is memorable, chant-like, close to the oral lullabies and charms it imitates. Cobina’s name becomes a refrain, a small spell of belonging, and the bells around his ankles ring with both joy and watchfulness.