[In the following essay, Sole presents an overview of South African poetry since the end of apartheid in 1990, noting how contemporary South African poets “attempt to embrace and represent a world in transition.”]

In the half a decade since 1990 a plethora of new South African art has become visible to the outside world, especially in such areas as the fine arts, music, theatre, and film. In recent written literature, however, there is less evidence of a revitalized consciousness seeking to confront the country's changed political and social circumstances than in these other forms of expression. When critics discuss the output of South African writers today, what is striking is the degree to which it is established literary figures—Gordimer, Coetzee, Ndebele, Brink—who are praised. Moreover, those new writing talents who have attracted attention, such as Behr and Vladislavić, have been primarily individuals working in the genre of fiction.

Yet there has been a fascinating, if quiet, upwelling of new expression in a genre to which little attention is usually given by literary commentators: poetry. Beginning a number of years before liberation, poets using oral and written means have started to emerge in South Africa who have a purpose beyond the confines of both (on the one hand) the ungainly platitudes and sloganizing of a certain amount of previous political poetry, and (on the other) the sterile aestheticism and mimicking provincialism of a dated, predominantly Eurocentric, liberal poetic tradition.

For those poets who use the written word, relatively few venues for publication have until recently offered themselves. During the early years of the 1990s, when avenues for publishing seemed to be in particularly short supply, there were at best two or three literary journals prepared to give space to poetry; while mainstream publishers showed a waning interest in putting out all but a bare handful of collections per year. More promisingly at the moment, though, a number of small journals and magazines, often hand—or DTP-produced, are making an appearance. This, as one commentator remarks, can only have positive effects for the future of the genre.

Many of the new initiatives … acknowledge that there's little or nothing to expect from mainstream publishers in the way of support for new poetry, and that poets had better take control of the means of production themselves if they want to reach any audience at all.

There is … a sense of liberation in these pamphlets and booklets: an air of having given themselves permission to publish on themes that don't have any pedigree of political relevance in the narrowly defined sense that has influenced so many poets during the last decade. For some of these journals, this means more than reclaiming individual artistic freedom; it is part of the process of growing the new cultural energy we've always known must be lying somewhere.¹

It is noteworthy that most of the poets who are active in forging this new poetry wish to combine sociopolitical commitment with a concern for appropriate poetic style. Some of them, such as Tatamkhulu Afrika, have been political activists who were harassed and imprisoned for their trouble. Yet even with the least immediately political of them—such as Ian Tromp, whose work combines a delight in, and careful delineation of, the play of light and texture across surfaces with a concern for social meanings and artifacts—there is a recognition that the realities of contemporary South Africa are too complex to allow for a retreat into either a blinkered public, or private, poetry.

It is in the last years of the 1980s that this pattern can be first observed. The publication of Farouk Asvat's Celebration of Flames in 1986 in particular put before readers an overtly political poetry which (despite Asvat's obvious commitment to the struggle against apartheid) was not content with superficial moralizing or two-dimensional political descriptions and utterances of support for anti-apartheid initiatives. Condemning in the harshest terms the fratricide taking place at the time between supporters of the United Democratic Front and the Black Consciousness organizations, Asvat's volume subjects the actions of his political compeers to as close an ethical scrutiny as those they were opposing. This opened the way for other poets to feel less constrained about adopting a critical role in their social utterances, rather than feeling compelled to demonstrate an unnuanced, routine solidarity with the organizations and political programmes with which they identified.²

This emancipatory example coexisted with a number of other poets—such as Donald Parenzee, Ingrid de Kok, Achmat Dangor, and Robert Berold—who not only demonstrated a concern for the political issues of the day, but also attempted to juxtapose these with, and often filter them through, a delineation of the contradictory, paradoxical, bitter, and even amusing ways in which people experienced their everyday lives in the midst of political strife. Such poets first gave an example, in their poems, of how private and intimate experience is ineluctably tinged by the wider political struggles taking place. Moreover, they sought simultaneously to work on technical aspects of poetic craft and search for an aesthetic and a viewpoint more personally adequate to the fragmented and fragmenting world in which South Africans find themselves. Thus, in a letter to the literary journal Contrast in 1989, John Charlton, a poet who writes under the pseudonym of Tatamkhulu Afrika, criticized previous South African poetry for still containing “much of the imperial drawing room, dressed up in African motifs and blurred with accidental obscurities”; arguing instead for a poetry which could reach the ordinary men and women of South Africa while avoiding the “charlatan, the purveyor under the guise of ‘people's art’ of the slogan and the cliche.”³ Added to this new orientation, the shock waves caused inside the country by Albie Sachs's 1989 position paper on culture⁴ and, after 1990, by the influx of political returnees enriched local debate and acted as a source of influence. Here especially, the figure and work of Keorapetse Kgositsile provided inspiration to many of the younger poets in the townships.

This renewed emphasis on skill is now everywhere apparent. Afrika is merely one of a number of poets who have made the same point since, such as the Gauteng-based poet Kaizer Nyatsumba in his poem “Words.”

on their own
they look like
lost sheep
on a precipice:
meaningless
unimportant
and vulnerable
but shepherd them
cull them carefully
adorn and string them
together
and they will sing.

Among some poets, there has been a willingness to explore new usages of description and imagery. The Cape Town poet Karen Press gives voice to this growing preoccupation when she speaks of her attraction for “powerfully imagistic poetry because it provokes energies in me that I find really exciting.”⁵ A general tendency, again, is to wish to explore political experiences and predicaments as they are filtered through the human psyche. In other words, several of these poets undertake a spiritual orientation which includes, rather than negates, politics. With such an approach, the personal and the political cease to be viewed as opposite and antagonistic poles. Rather, poets such as Press give voice to powerfully political themes in a manner which does not preclude the private, the dissonant, and the bewildered space of individual life and consciousness. There have been few more compelling recollections of the “days of struggle” than Press's “Tiresias in the City of Heroes.”

What do I remember? Standing in the sun for hours listening to speeches while my feet burned on the ground. Walking along streets where women stood at every door crying. Hacked bodies. A little man who followed me for three kilometres and when I finally tried to grab him he begged me to teach him to sing, but I thought he was lying and killed him. A baby with its stomach carved out and a policeman standing next to it, vomiting …

In Boipatong your eyes died.
In Katlehong and Bekkersdal and Empangeni you died
          and you died and you died.
That's what I remember.
In Pretoria your fingernails became joint chiefs of staff.
In Pretoria your teeth ran the central bank.
In Pretoria your hair was the president.
That's what I remember.

This exploration in imagery sometimes borders on the surrealistic, a formal influence oddly little in evidence previously in a country where social reality often borders on the surreal. But in a recent poem, for instance, the Durban-based activist and academic Ari Sitas sees fit to describe his home city as a place where “mechanical bullfrogs and cicadas grind away / and sometimes wounded cars cough by pierced by assegais / and sometimes surfers emerge from the mouths / of microwave ovens / and always / life continues like the sound of splintering glass” (“Ethekwini”), while Khulile Nxumalo can remember the April 1994 elections as a time when “canned frog toes in telkom wrappings were / served to the newcomers we taught them how to / vote they taught us how to wait / in mamba long queues / it rained glass and cadbury eclairs that year” (“Xstacy”).

Such formal experimentation can also result in a “leaping poetry” reminiscent of that advocated by the U.S. poet Robert Bly. The result is often truly memorable juxtapositions of imagery and meaning, as in Lisa Combrinck's “Ghazal”:

The eye of the penis is always round and howling
ever eager for release from its hydrocephalic head.
The red cherries on your plate
are both intensely sour and deeply sweet.
No-one at the cafe knows why we speak so much and
          eat so little,
nor why every satisfying sex act is recalled as a small
          miracle.

A stylistic inclination to mix conversational language and street slang with more heightened, “poetic” speech is also apparent among a number of these poets. Others favour enjambment as a way of alluding to the characteristic cadences, modulations, and slurrings of sentences in South African English, as well as a means of inducing more complicated rhythmic patterns in their poems.

There is a general willingness to borrow from a variety of traditions and styles. For example, the Soweto-born Lesego Rampolokeng (“rapmaster supreme”), perhaps the best known of the new generation of poets, speaks of the mixed influence of Sotho song styles, traditional praise poetry, rap, and metropolitan writers such as William Burroughs in his work. Rampolokeng makes manifest another stylistic point of departure of much of the best recent poetry: a desire to emphasize the musical underpinnings of poetry. Rampolokeng and one or two others, such as Sitas and Heather Robertson, perform as well as publish their poetry, while others give notice of the influence of jazz, reggae, and rap music and musicians in their work. Whatever the case, a recognition of the music inherent in poetry is recognizable in the expression of many of the more exciting poets.

Although the poets who are emerging in the 1990s to some extent show a diversity of styles, backgrounds, influences, and goals, there are other similarities which are so striking as to reflect a great deal more than idiosyncrasies of personal biography and interest. The first is a desire to explore the contradictory nature of the “hidden corners” of South African experience—those which were flattened out by previous writers by either being ignored or elevated into objects of an easy pity. Such a preoccupation has been the overwhelming concern of Tatamkhulu Afrika. By far the oldest of the poets who have begun to publish recently, Afrika was born of Egyptian and Turkish parents in 1920 and came to South Africa (and was orphaned) at an early age. Brought up as “white” by foster parents, Afrika had, by his midtwenties, published one novel and seen another destroyed by a Nazi guard in a POW camp during World War II. A devout Muslim, by the 1980s Afrika found himself involved in political activities; and while detained in 1987, he began writing poetry seriously again. Since the beginning of the 1990s he has published five volumes of verse.

Afrika's poetry conjoins a focus on the fragile, insistent, ignored beauty of the natural world to an uncompromising concern with the textures and conditions of the life of those who inhabit the wastelands and hidden margins of city life in Cape Town. Typically, his poems are narratives, written from the position of an interlocutor who lives close to and describes the harsh lives of those, marginalized and forgotten, whom political change has affected not at all. This point of view allows Afrika to be implicitly, and at times explicitly, scathing about the lack of significant social or economic improvements since 1990 for society's social detritus. His desire to transpose newspaper headlines and economic statistics into breathing, suffering human beings, and his emphasis on the urgent need for psychological and spiritual as well as social change among all the country's people, allow him to critique the manner in which South Africa's public affairs have been, and are still being, conducted. At bottom there remains the conviction that South Africa will, one day, truly belong to all its inhabitants. Marching in a political rally shortly after the relaxing of restrictions on social gatherings, Afrika writes:

Incredibly,
they have kept their promise:
they have left us
to dance, and sing, and flaunt our banners,
but my feet move heavily on the dull, blue tarmac:
I have been too long away from the once beloved
          city …
But then I see her:
the little, yellow, dancing woman,
the rapt yet graven, shrivelled features,
generous San buttocks rolling
with a gentle, rhythmic, effortless abandon,
small feet skittering,
lightly as a water-bug on dust-glazed water …
And my feet move on again, knowing
that under them,
lies still a soil forever Africa,
and it is not I that am the alien,
but they that stand here, streetside,
watching me
dancing in my city.

(“Dancing in My City”)

The other better-known poet among those already mentioned, Rampolokeng, uses oral and written media of a completely different vintage to mainstream “struggle” poets such as Mzwakhe Mbuli.⁶ He combines the ethical role of the traditional imbongi with a profound suspicion of all forms of authority, recently noting that

… holding our scars up is no solution. When somebody can shout to the world that … they suffered in that or this way—it means that we actually have some gratitude towards the evils of the world—where we actually owe a lot to apartheid for having made us. All that has actually made me start questioning myself even more, questioning all the values I embraced, and everything I stood for: I've realized that the rot exists at every step of the ladder—at all levels of society.⁷

In the poem “Maze Generation” he further declaims, “i search through my faeces / for praises gone rusted / on the tongue / pushing daisies up / with their sheer bad breath.” This penchant for saying exactly what he thinks, along with a laid-back, sarcastic oral delivery style and stance, has occasionally brought Rampolokeng into conflict with the post-1990 powers-that-be.⁸ Nevertheless, his work displays a serious intention, laying bare the machinations of all forms of what he calls “political expediency” and sycophancy.

Rampolokeng's contemporary Seitlhamo Motsapi, a teacher and academic living in the Northern Province, displays along with Rampolokeng a tendency little apparent among earlier South African poets to whom English is not a first language: an ability to manipulate, play with, and subvert its forms and expressions “from the inside.” Both are poets who rely on a verse of compression and energy, and use wordplay and puns to create multiple levels of meaning filled with political irony. Thus, Motsapi characterizes the slide of the continent into the embrace of colonialism and capitalism as “ancestor maasai / melting into the purple nikon pose / of tourorist disca / dence” (“the sun used to be white”)—a degeneration assisted by “hell / meted mishinari” (“ityopia phase-in”). Both draw attention to the vulnerability of ordinary people to an official language that appears to espouse democracy but can become overburdened by the rhetorical claims and glib phraseology of smooth-talking politicians and intellectuals, where, in Rampolokeng's phrase, “gods of dialogue talk the wind to silence” (“Dawn of a Dying Time”). The latter denounces both “negotiation-table manners / fuck-ademics unrolling scrotals of fartastic words / to ennighten the illiterate” (“In Transition”) and “toyi-toyi boys,” while Motsapi points out the continuing problems people face in a world of “politricks,” “politishams,” “non-retiefable thievings of land,” “conputers,” and so on. Rampolokeng goes one further, often employing the end-stopped line and the rhyming couplet of the English canon as simultaneously a rhythmic and a satiric device.

i want to give you beautiful lines
poems deeper richer than south africa's mines
but those mines have broken many bones …
still i come like a flood
my words are wine & rose
a lover's perfume in a progressive nose
my words gush rush in a storm
lacking all poetic form
soft-nosed-bullet-words tearing minds apart
infernal winds bending the stubborn heart …
i'm no william shakespeare
i write in the flight of the nation's spear

(“rap century 1”)

The syncretism of influence on black and white poets alike shows that the identities and cultural traditions people have grown up with in South Africa, the foundations from which they are attempting to build a new sense of place and being, are immeasurably fractured and dissonant.

Since 1990 South Africans have lived in a society they know the rest of the world holds up as an example of how peace and concordance can be achieved between people with the most irreconcilable of differences. Along with the pride that is felt in this is a knowledge that endemic violence, crime, and distrust have not significantly abated around them. This phenomenon has caused a further dislocation in consciousness. A concomitant double vision therefore exists in the poetry: a need to analyze and try to come to terms with death and destruction, alongside an urge to keep faith in the promises and gains of the new society which is struggling toward birth. This is palpable in poems such as “Music from the Rain,” by Mamelodi-based Lance Nawa.

… we walked with pride, knowing that a day
would come when a rainbow flag would unfurl
humanity into a single golden pot …
I knew then as I do now that beautiful ones
have long been born, save that I first have to
release them from the barbs around my heart
for me to hold and the world to see

The difficult endeavour to reorientate personal attitudes and behaviour in a deracialised society is visible in many of the poets. Mzi Mahola, an ANC activist brought up in the rural Ciskei and currently working in Port Elizabeth, articulates this:

I was born an automaton
Guided by signs
All my life conditioned,
Now I'm adjusting
On my own
Measuring each step
Like a chameleon.
How will I trust my ears?
I've been hurt
Physically and mentally
Seen things
Not fit for mortal eyes …
But I bear no grudge
Only struggling to adjust.
How will I trust their tongues? …
As I savour dawn
Testing the ground
Like a newborn calf
The leopard might strike,
How will I trust their word?

(“How will I trust”)

Meanwhile, Motsapi asserts:

i have one eye full of dreams and hintentions
the other is full of broken mirrors
& cracked churchbells …
& a hope that corrodes the convulsions
we bless the long rough road
we bless the inscrutable darkness
where our names are rent into spirit
we bless the splinters & the air
full of asphyxiations and amnesia
we bless our lacerations & our deformities
we bless the belligerent strangers
who stay on in our throats

(“river robert”)

Most of the poets mentioned here spurn any easy “forgetting” of South Africa's history, or any turning away from its persistent social problems. Rather, the subcontinent's bloody past of colonial incursion and social deprivation is constantly invoked, remembered, and analyzed inter alia as a means of understanding the present. Thus, Sitas has more recently begun an epic poem, “Slave Trades,” using a number of voices speaking from different social positions—colonizer and colonized—to examine the onset and workings of colonialism in Ethiopia, while Press's long poem “Krotoa's Story” fleshes out the tale of the Khoi woman who was ordered by her chief Oedasoa to live in van Riebeeck's settlement in the Cape in the 1650s. In a stunning mixture of narrative and lyric, Press embodies the doubts, fears, and courage of a woman who has too often in the past merely been dismissed as one of South Africa's first “sell-outs.” Instead, the poem examines (and forces the reader to meditate on) the conflicting interests which place Krotoa between contending and uncaring historical forces which, eventually, destroy her. This is actualized in the admixture of historical statement and lyrical imagery one comes to associate with Press's work.

What is generally striking is that few of these poets share the unproblematic immediate optimism about the future that washes through official pronouncements and the media. A number of poems have emerged which deal with the phenomenon of leaders who seem to have turned their back on the ideals for which their supporters fought—poems such as Afrika's “Tamed,” Robertson's “Mr Mandela,” Sitas's “Motto,” and Mahola's “Forget the Past—Forget Yourselves.” Condemnations of the superficial money-grubbing and love of spectacle without substance of a new society “dazzled by the judas coins of commerce” (in Rampolokeng's words from “Broederbondage”), where—to quote in turn from Motsapi—“our diviners talk of new gods / while the shrines gather dust” (“maasai dreadbeat”), are a frequent source of focus and censure. In one such scenario Joan Metelerkamp witheringly invokes the ambience of Musgrave Road in Durban.

… this macabre mirror-sharp everyday
mall of getting and spending, where nothing
is authentic nothing is worth knowing
nothing is admissible, uncivil
centre, aetiolation of friendlessness,
glossy women from another climate
made-up for combatting the elements
as well as each other, people this place
invites me to despise, barely veneered
back-fangs of capital, you gangrenous
Musgrave, severed from the life-line of trees …

(“Joan”)

The loss of some of the positive aspects of the anti-apartheid struggle—its initial attempts, in the 1970s and early 1980s, to achieve a sense of community and fraternity—and the fratricide and lack of tolerance for dissent found even among the anti-apartheid fighters in the late 1980s and early 1990s are frequently employed themes. Motsapi, concerned as he is with a pan-Africanism that maintains, and promotes, spiritual identity and growth, reiterates his dislike for the new class of nouveaux riches in the country and shows (along with Rampolokeng) an awareness of the danger South Africa faces in accepting the punishing round of foreign loans and resulting debt its neighbours know all too well. “Run clear,” suggests Rampolokeng, “it's an ecological alert / the i.m.f. has opened its wallet” (“Broederbondage”). While generally aware that the ironclad certainties and Manichaean polarities of the anti-apartheid struggle have gone for good (Sitas remarks, “I was told that— / From the hill my dear on a clear day you can see the class struggle forever / on the hill my dear / lives get caught in these damp afternoons / and it's too hot my dear to read Frantz Fanon / you are condemned to consume / to suffer the melancholy stalking of shopping malls” [“Our Little Tropical Scars”]), many of the poets—here Motsapi—address the schism that has opened between ordinary people and a new black middle class.

i offer him
the deep dizzying water of respects
from the hills & the herds
but he barks into the wearying puddle
of offich inglish & boss shittish
so now
the purple of his rubber stabs
grows into a wall
but the drums won't fall asleep
               the drums won't fall asleep

(“missa joe”)

The desire to explore the “hidden corners” of people's emotions and lives during a time of social flux and upheaval has allowed poets to move into realms once frowned upon. No aspect of experience is regarded as an unfitting subject for the poems that are emerging. Poets like Metelerkamp, Combrinck, and Robertson have published intimate, erotic poems, none more beautiful perhaps than Combrinck's “In the Moonlight,” here quoted in full:

As I came in the moonlight
I saw your ribs
suddenly stand out of your skin
and glow in the dark
like the long strands
of a string instrument.
So I ran my fingers down your chest
and plucked the strings,
my curling lips clicking and singing
sucking the sap of your bone,
slowly honing into the song of your soul,
that bursts its whiteness into my womb.

In Press's “Heart's Hunger” the ability to interweave the personal and political in familiar and chilling ways is made superbly manifest, as she explores the consciousness of a woman whose lover has been lost to migrant labour, investing her psychic anguish with a precision of metaphor and image.

I stored you against my eyelids
my treasure, more precious than water.
                    Then they stole my home, my land,
                    the possibility of my hands, my last dress.
I saw them, and when my eyes closed
I could not remember you.
                              Hunger has eaten my dreams.
                              You are a scarecrow in a field
                              the birds have plundered—useless love.
                              Send money; I cannot eat your pink words.

As chillingly, Metelerkamp explores the dissonance between the personal and political in a different way: the human wreckage that has resulted from a society where the personal was regarded as simply an adjunct of political programmes and orientation. In a poem to her grandmother, who committed suicide in 1950 after being “listed” as a member of the Communist Party, she demonstrates the inability of her grandmother's comrades to offer human sympathy and support: “Image of community severed at the core: / where were you espousing freedom community / solidarity, did you turn your backs to her / bleeding on the floor?” (“Joan”).

The movement of a younger generation of South Africans to see the requirements and rhetoric of overtly political issues, national construction, and the fault lines of class and racial issues as not the only valid arenas of poetic utterance and commentary can be perceived in the appearance of poems dealing much more immediately and explicitly with forms of politics and experience less valued by the anti-apartheid, national, and trade-union struggles in the past, such as gay rights and women's rights.⁹ Press, Combrinck, and Metelerkamp, for example, perceive as a necessary part of their oeuvre poems which highlight women's issues. Elsewhere, the poems of Kenneth John allow the reader an insight into the fraught experiences of those who are HIV-positive.

A new certainty prevails in women's poetry: as Sizakhele Nkosi observes, “No one will call me / his little girl again” (“No Man Will Ever Control Me Again”). Metelerkamp in particular has focused, in her poems and published interviews, on gender relationships and women's issues, establishing her need to move both “out of the realm of men [and] … also into the realm of the brilliance of men, but on my own terms.”¹⁰ Using a variety of poetic voices—philosophical, angry, critical, sensuous—she reveals, predominantly through a first-person narrator, a woman's attitudes and experiences in relation not only to men but also to the weft of social and emotional bonds, ties of family and kinship, and intellectual and artistic traditions with which she lives as feminist and mother in Durban. She focuses often on the contradictory richness of such a life, the “day- / to-day process of tasks of love and / repetition of the preparing, / like fields for sowing, the repairing, / like blades for cutting—food and sleep and / work for food and sleep and sometimes, like / a breeze, a breath of home-made holy / spirit” (“Ripped like the ragged piece of paper”). One of the most arresting of her poems is “Jeremy Cronin (from inside) calls,” a searing indictment of women's historical complicity in the universe of swaggering heroics, rhetoric, and murder that has been bred into South African men.

                                                                                          All over South
Africa, black and white
                                                                      women are spilling boys' blood
and holding buckets and watering-cans to catch it
again with their falling tears to cultivate
                                                                                                                                                      heroes. …
                                                                                          Loving them, women
kindle what men have ignited; we bear it, support
it, give it growth. But some time! This time! Now—
                    when, god knows
when will we labour to bring forth
                                                                                                                                  this killing,
still born?
(Listen, when there is bleeding
                                                                                                    it means death,
                                                                                                                        where there is
bleeding
                              it means no life, know
                                                                                               that blood flowing is death.)
When will we pull it out by its bloody roots, this myth
planted in us (for Christ's sake)
                                                                                                    new life
                                                                                                                        coming
                                                                                                                                            through death.

Focusing on the need to change these attitudes from a different perspective, Combrinck voices a hope that the next generation will instead be able to discover a sense of shared purpose and identity in a society where

You will speak in greeting
Agee, Lekae, Hello, Hoesit Broer,
and everyone wena will surely understand …
This is your birthright, my son.
This poem is not a bandage.
It does not hide wounds.
It is not a rope.
It does not hang the reader.
This poem simply warms you to the future.
It is a blanket covering the back.
Your birthright is the backbone.
So clasp it with both hands
grip it with both thighs
and on the back,
you ride, my son,
you ride.

(“For My Firstborn”)

The task of confronting the negative in a society which has only recently emerged from the cruelty of its political nightmare has at heart a utopian impulse—a profoundly moral attempt to render society in all its paradoxes and complexity, and to reveal its social processes and outcomes more truthfully than has happened before. Never is the aspiration that South Africans should fashion a meaningful future together negated, despite the burden of their heritage. This simultaneously uncompromising and gentle stance is indeed difficult to muster and maintain. Yet it is this attitude which strikes the reader of these new poets again and again, as they attempt to embrace and represent a world in transition, uncertain as to its identity and the outcome of the processes so bravely initiated in 1990. Phedi Tlhobolo, a poet from Atteridgeville, perhaps sums it up best:

It takes a great love
to walk in the shade of peace
darkness is our trouble
not just sorrow,
with its million teeth it devours
every bit of life …
you have to speak in tongues
tongues of gods, angels and birds
dance the morning samba
to be the victor
of this fierce war

(“Morning Samba”)

Notes

1. Karen Press, “Poetry Journals in South Africa, 1994,” New Coin (Grahamstown), 30:2 (1994), p. 58. The recent history of the publication of poetry requires a great deal more attention than can be given here. For informative summaries of trends in the late 1980s and 1990s, see Press's article and also (despite its unfortunate tone) Andries Oliphant, “Forums and Forces: Recent Trends in South African Literary Journals,” in On Shifting Sands: New Art and Literature from South Africa, eds. Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford, Portsmouth (N.H.), Heinemann, 1992.

2. For an overview of trends in South African political poetry in the 1980s, see Peter Horn, “A Radical Rethinking of the Art of Poetry in an Apartheid Society,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature (London), 29:1 (1993).

3. Tatamkhulu Afrika (John Charlton), “Open Letter,” Contrast (Cape Town), 67 (1989), pp. 94-95.

4. Details of Sachs's intervention, and a number of responses, can be found in Spring Is Rebellious: Arguments about Cultural Freedom, eds. Ingrid de Kok and Karen Press, Cape Town, Buchu, 1990, and Exchanges: South African Writing in Transition, eds. D. Brown and B. van Dyk, Pietermaritzburg, University of Natal Press, 1991.

5. “Karen Press: Interview,” New Coin, 29:1 (1993) p. 22.

6. “Rampolokeng is South Africa's resident authentic raging young man poet, now that Mzwakhe Mbuli's symbols of black oppression have become the Afristocracy and he a favoured member of this inner circle” (B. Khumalo, “Cutting Edge of the African Axe,” Weekly Mail & Guardian [Johannesburg], 8-14 July 1994). It is interesting to note the ease with which Mbuli has been transformed, principally via the medium of the music video, from the best-known poet of the liberation struggle to the most anodyne of popular entertainers.

7. “Lesego Rampolokeng: Interview,” New Coin, 29:2 (1993), p. 26.

8. Rampolokeng mentions one occasion when he was “cautioned” for the poetry he read at an ANC official's birthday party. See “Lesego Rampolokeng: Interview,” p. 24.

9. In the first years of the 1990s, for instance, COSAW produced anthologies dedicated to women's and gay writing. See respectively Like a House on Fire, ed. A. Horn et al., Johannesburg, COSAW, 1994, and The Invisible Ghetto, ed. M. Krouse et al., Johannesburg, COSAW, 1992.

10. “Joan Metelerkamp: Interview,” New Coin, 28:2 (1992), p. 24.

Select Bibliography

Afrika, Tatamkhulu. Nine Lives. Cape Town. Carrefour/Hippogriff. 1991.

———. Dark Rider. Cape Town. Snailpress/Mayibuye. 1992.

Metelerkamp, Joan. Towing the Line in Signs: Three Collections of Poetry. Douglas Reid Skinner, ed. Cape Town. Carrefour. 1992.

———. Stone No More. Durban. Gecko. 1995.

Motsapi, Seitlhamo. earthstepper / the ocean is very shallow. Grahamstown. Deep South. 1995.

Press, Karen. bird heart stoning the sea. Cape Town. Buchu. 1990.

Rampolokeng, Lesego. Horns for Hondo. Johannesburg. COSAW. 1990.

———. Talking Rain. Johannesburg. COSAW. 1993.

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