tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/keorapetse-kgositsile-48305/articlesKeorapetse Kgositsile – The Conversation2022-05-01T08:28:22Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1811262022-05-01T08:28:22Z2022-05-01T08:28:22ZCan Themba: South Africa’s rebel journalist was a teacher at heart<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/459054/original/file-20220421-60275-4z0ccn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Detail of a photo of Can Themba at Drum magazine.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo Jürgen Schadeberg courtesy Wits University Press</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Siphiwo Mahala is well known as a South African short story writer, novelist, playwright and literary organiser. He is also an academic. In fact, his most recent book is a product of his PhD thesis, titled <a href="https://witspress.co.za/catalogue/can-themba/">Can Themba: The Making and Breaking of the Intellectual Tsotsi</a>. <a href="https://witspress.co.za/catalogue/can-themba/">Can Themba</a> was a journalist and short story writer who challenged the apartheid state by foregrounding the pain and the joy of black life. We asked Mahala to tell us more.</em></p>
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<h2>Who was Can Themba and why does he matter?</h2>
<p>Can Themba was part of a generation of black writers that revolutionised journalism and the South African literary landscape in the 1950s and early 1960s. This was a culturally dynamic and politically volatile period in South Africa. In 1948 <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-apartheid-south-africa">apartheid</a> was introduced by the white minority government, followed by the enactment of draconian laws in the early 1950s, which sought to separate people according to race. This prompted the black oppressed majority to intensify its resistance struggle. Artists, intellectuals and the growing cohort of black journalists were at the forefront of finding platforms to speak against these socio-political ills and challenge the regime. </p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/journalism-of-drums-heyday-remains-cause-for-celebration-70-years-later-142668">Drum</a> was the most widely distributed magazine that foregrounded the voices of urban black people at this time. Themba was associate editor and also wrote for Drum’s sister newspaper, the Golden City Post. He was central in chronicling the black condition. Themba had a penchant for ordinary stories – of the neglected, the marginalised and even the resented – and he wrote them in such a sensational way that they would attract global attention. He was a daring journalist, unafraid to put his body on the line in pursuit of a story.</p>
<p>The kind of stories he covered included the impact on ordinary people of the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/1957-alexandra-bus-boycott-and-its-unsung-heroes-roseinnes-phahle-june-2019">1957 bus boycott</a> and of <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/pass-laws-south-africa-1800-1994">pass laws</a>. One of his most documented stories was Brothers in Christ, where he investigated if white churches would welcome black worshippers in accordance with the Christian doctrine of brotherhood. He was assaulted and charged for trespassing in churches, creating a controversy that solicited international attention. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/459056/original/file-20220421-66106-89g0mg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Black and white photo in which a man looks wryly into camera, a hat on his head and a floral button up shirt on." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/459056/original/file-20220421-66106-89g0mg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/459056/original/file-20220421-66106-89g0mg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459056/original/file-20220421-66106-89g0mg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459056/original/file-20220421-66106-89g0mg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459056/original/file-20220421-66106-89g0mg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459056/original/file-20220421-66106-89g0mg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459056/original/file-20220421-66106-89g0mg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Portrait of Can Themba.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo Jürgen Schadeberg courtesy Wits University Press</span></span>
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<p>His romantic relationship was the subject of police interrogation because he dared to love across the colour line. He was manhandled and arrested for doing journalism. He was banned under the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/suppression-communism-act-no-44-1950-approved-parliament">Suppression of Communism Amendment Act</a> and his writing could neither be published nor referenced in South Africa until 15 years after his death. Clearly the apartheid regime wished to erase him from the face of history. </p>
<p>He went to exile in the early 1960s, was banned shortly after and died in exile. This has made it difficult to trace his life’s journey. Although his works – especially his short story <a href="https://ewn.co.za/2017/02/14/the-suit-why-can-themba-s-1950s-complex-tale-of-love-is-still-a-hit"><em>The Suit</em></a> – have been celebrated for years, his personal story has been sketchy, limited to his period as a Drum journalist. </p>
<h2>How does your study approach him?</h2>
<p>My interest was in his construction. Tracing the factors that contributed to the making of the writer who became known as the winner of Drum’s short story competition in 1953, and the elements that contributed to his deterioration a few years later. I feel privileged to have been the first to <a href="https://www.news24.com/citypress/trending/can-themba-the-man-in-the-suit-20180912">document his life story</a> – more than 50 years after his passing in 1967. In this book, through the voices of people who knew him personally, we get to know Can Themba as a husband, father, a drinking buddy, a teacher, a colleague. As a person and not just the public figure. </p>
<p>More than half the people I interviewed as part of the research have since passed away. The unique insights shared by the late <a href="https://www.news24.com/drum/News/can-thembas-wife-passes-on-20170728">Anne Themba</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/remembering-nadine-gordimer-29224">Nadine Gordimer</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-tribute-to-keorapetse-kgositsile-south-africas-poet-laureate-89700">Keorapetse Kgositsile</a>, <a href="http://new.observer.org.sz/details.php?id=14985">Parks Mangena</a>, <a href="https://www.thepresidency.gov.za/national-orders/recipient/prof-mbulelo-vizikhungo-mzamane-posthumous">Mbulelo Mzamane</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/ahmed-kathrada-a-simple-life-full-of-love-after-26-years-of-incarceration-75361">Ahmed Kathrada</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/lindiwe-mabuza-feminist-icon-who-used-art-to-fight-for-democracy-in-south-africa-173638">Lindiwe Mabuza</a> cannot be replicated and could have been easily lost. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/celebrating-dolly-rathebe-south-africas-original-black-woman-superstar-172532">Celebrating Dolly Rathebe, South Africa's original black woman superstar</a>
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<p>I trace him from an early age, his family background in the racially mixed community Marabastad, relocating to Atteridgeville, a township outside Pretoria. I trace his schooling as well as his years as a student at the University Fort Hare, where he studied towards a BA degree and majored in English which he passed with a distinction. Sharing the university syllabus helps us to understand the foundations of his literary apprenticeship, as it included literary criticism, the history of literature and the study of poetry. The earliest available record of Themba’s publication dates back to 1945, when he was a student at Fort Hare, and the influence of Shakespeare is palpable. </p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GFI6eIgbuG8?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The author interviewed about the new Can Themba book.</span></figcaption>
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<p>This period also gives a glimpse of what he and some of his fellow students would become. Whereas Themba and his fellow literary enthusiast <a href="https://theconversation.com/dennis-brutus-south-african-literary-giant-who-was-reluctant-to-tell-his-life-story-141730">Dennis Brutus</a> contributed mainly poetry and short stories in student journals, political leader <a href="https://theconversation.com/sobukwes-pan-africanist-dream-an-elusive-idea-that-refuses-to-die-52601">Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe</a> was contributing articles in political pamphlets. </p>
<p>I hope readers will take away a more holistic view of Can Themba and understand that he was an abundantly talented individual who was as flawed as the rest of us. He died before his fullest potential could be realised. </p>
<h2>What did you conclude about Themba?</h2>
<p>Much has been <a href="https://ujcontent.uj.ac.za/vital/access/manager/Repository;jsessionid=DB90F6AB0DA8180580F37290A3131738/uj:8643?exact=sm_mimeType%3A%22application%2Fpdf%22&f0=sm_type%3A%22Thesis%22">written</a> about the perceived lack of political commitment in his works, his romanticisation of the township and his excessive drinking. In this book, I reveal some of his sharpest political commentary. I reveal that Themba did not drink until he joined Drum. Former Drum photographer Jurgen Schadeberg states that drinking in the newsroom was encouraged. Schadeberg says Themba initially felt out of place in the newsroom, and kept wearing a tie just like the teacher he was. </p>
<p>Themba died in 1967, supposedly of alcohol related causes, only 14 years after he started drinking. I interrogate a number of personal, social and political factors that contributed to his early demise. As an epigraph to the book, I use a quote from his former protege, veteran journalist <a href="https://sanef.org.za/sanef-mourns-the-death-of-veteran-journalist-writer-and-researcher-harry-mashabela/">Harry Mashabela</a>:</p>
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<p>Can Themba was what he was and not what he could have been because his country is what it is.</p>
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<p>For a writer who believed in freedom of expression, living in a tyrannical society was a constant assault to his soul. </p>
<p>More than anything else, I realised that Can Themba was a teacher at heart. It’s common knowledge that before joining Drum in 1953, he had been working as a teacher, and that he taught at St Joseph’s Catholic School in Swaziland, where he passed away in 1967. It’s not very well known that he lived for teaching even when he was not teaching for a living. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/459052/original/file-20220421-70763-sldjki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A book cover that foregrounds a photograph of a young man in glasses leaning back, a newspaper open in his hands and a typewriter on the desk in front of him." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/459052/original/file-20220421-70763-sldjki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/459052/original/file-20220421-70763-sldjki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459052/original/file-20220421-70763-sldjki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459052/original/file-20220421-70763-sldjki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459052/original/file-20220421-70763-sldjki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459052/original/file-20220421-70763-sldjki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459052/original/file-20220421-70763-sldjki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wits University Press</span></span>
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<p>He was a teacher in his <a href="https://readinglist.click/sub/remember-can-themba-on-the-50th-anniversary-of-his-death-at-the-launch-of-the-house-of-truth-by-siphiwo-mahala/">House of Truth</a>, which he established in his room in Sophiatown as a forum for debate. He taught in the newsroom and in the drinking dens, becoming known as the “shebeen intellectual”. And in every space where he found himself. He did guest lectures at universities. He even offered English lessons to groups and individuals. For me, his greatest legacy is his determination to nurture young minds. </p>
<p><em>Can Themba: The Making and Breaking of the Intellectual Tsotsi is <a href="https://witspress.co.za/catalogue/can-themba/">available from</a> Wits University Press</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/181126/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Siphiwo Mahala is affiliated with the University of Johannesburg as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and a Senior Research Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study.
</span></em></p>Abundantly talented and flawed, apartheid-era writer Can Themba wasn’t afraid to put his body on the line for a story.Siphiwo Mahala, Postdoctoral researcher, University of JohannesburgLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1609492021-05-30T07:57:53Z2021-05-30T07:57:53ZRemembering Medu, the South African art collective that fought apartheid<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403226/original/file-20210527-16-1egupms.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Detail of the poster And the People Vote for Nelson Mandela.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Judy Seidman/Medu Art Ensemble</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/medu-art-ensemble">Medu Art Ensemble</a> was based in Gaborone in Botswana between 1979 and 1985. Medu (meaning “roots” in Sepedi) played a key role in shaping South Africa’s culture of struggle against <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-apartheid-south-africa">apartheid</a>. </p>
<p>The collective was formed by South African cultural activists exiled after the <a href="http://www.ngopulse.org/article/2018/06/13/%E2%80%8B-june-16-soweto-youth-uprising">1976 Soweto uprising</a> and it worked with artists back home, Botswana citizens, and some from other countries. Medu used the creative arts – visual image, theatre, music and literature – to <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2018-01-12-00-beauty-in-struggle/">give voice</a> to South Africa’s liberation struggle. In 1982 Medu brought several thousand cultural activists to Gaborone for a <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/culture-resistance-conference-1982">conference</a> entitled <em>Culture and Resistance</em>, proclaiming that </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Culture is a weapon of Struggle. </p>
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<p>A Pan Africanist and anti-colonial enterprise, Medu engaged with international <a href="https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/protest-art">revolutionary art</a> including the work of German theatre-maker <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Bertolt-Brecht">Bertolt Brecht</a>, Vietnamese resistance <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/144186/the-poetry-of-the-vietnam-war">poetry</a>, the Mexican <a href="https://time.com/5786068/whitney-museum-mexican-muralists/">mural painters</a> and <a href="https://library.harvard.edu/collections/chilean-protest-murals">Chile’s muralists</a> who spoke back to dictatorship.</p>
<p>On 14 June 1985 the South African military targeted Medu members in Botswana in a cross-border raid. They killed 14 people and destroyed the art-making collective. </p>
<h2>Almost lost to history</h2>
<p>Four decades later, post-apartheid South Africa barely recalls Medu’s contributions. All that’s been remembered until now have been Medu’s iconic posters (“Smash Bantu Education”, “You have touched a rock”, “The people shall govern”) and the individual creative work of celebrated Medu writers <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-tribute-to-keorapetse-kgositsile-south-africas-poet-laureate-89700">Keorapetse Kgositsile</a>, <a href="http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/national-orders/recipient/mongane-wally-serote-1944">Mongane Wally Serote</a> and <a href="http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/national-orders/recipient/mandla-langa-1950">Mandla Langa</a>. Of musicians <a href="https://theconversation.com/jonas-gwangwa-embodied-south-africas-struggle-for-a-national-culture-135633">Jonas Gwangwa</a> and <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/shakawe-dennis-mpale">Dennis Mpale</a>. Of visual artist <a href="https://www.zammagazine.com/chronicle/chronicle-37/697-south-africa-the-artist-who-was-not-allowed-to-be">Thamsanqa Mnyele</a>. </p>
<p>But what’s been lacking is a record of the intense debates, contested cultural theory, collective understanding and shared perceptions that infused these works. </p>
<p>In 2019 a breakthrough came when the <a href="https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/9039/the-people-shall-govern-medu-art-ensemble-and-the-anti-apartheid-poster">Art Institute of Chicago</a> <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300254341/people-shall-govern">collected and displayed</a> Medu’s posters. This was followed by a book in the form of a <a href="https://shop.artic.edu/products/285721">catalogue</a> entitled <em>The People Shall Govern: Medu Art Ensemble and the Anti-apartheid Poster 1979-1985</em>.</p>
<p>Here, as an artist who was a member of Medu, I offer a critical perspective on the narrative that emerges from this exhibition and catalogue. </p>
<h2>The Chicago show</h2>
<p>Doubts inevitably arise when African artworks are displayed in art institutions in foreign metropoles, far from the communities and struggles that birthed them. In Medu we believed our work must inspire resistance and envisage future liberation. What do these posters say to viewers when hung on sterile gallery walls in Chicago or London? </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403174/original/file-20210527-15-lbgssl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A poster with the words, 'The people shall govern! Medu Art Ensemble and the anti-apartheid poster 1979-1985' over a black and white illustration of a crowd of people." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403174/original/file-20210527-15-lbgssl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403174/original/file-20210527-15-lbgssl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=821&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403174/original/file-20210527-15-lbgssl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=821&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403174/original/file-20210527-15-lbgssl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=821&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403174/original/file-20210527-15-lbgssl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1031&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403174/original/file-20210527-15-lbgssl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1031&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403174/original/file-20210527-15-lbgssl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1031&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The cover of the Chicago catalogue.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Art Institute of Chicago</span></span>
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<p>The curators of the Medu exhibit were <a href="https://arthistory.northwestern.edu/people/faculty/antawan-byrd.html">Antawan Byrd</a> and <a href="https://agyu.art/project/felicia-mings/">Felicia Mings</a>, who previously researched Pan Africanist cultural struggles and took these challenges seriously. </p>
<p>As no broad narrative or comprehensive collection of Medu’s work exists, they contacted surviving Medu members, unearthed hidden histories and sought out post-apartheid cultural discourse. They wrote texts for the gallery walls and displayed paraphernalia that included magazines like <a href="http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/st"><em>Staffrider</em></a> and <em><a href="https://disa.ukzn.ac.za/ac">The African Communist</a></em>, political buttons, T-shirts, music and film clips. They organised public lectures and discussions.</p>
<h2>The catalogue</h2>
<p>The catalogue was published a year after the exhibition closed. Without the show’s objects and framing activities, the text weaves a narrative about Medu through seven essays, juxtaposed with poster images.</p>
<p>The catalogue arranges posters by theme: political resistance, music, women’s struggles, June 16th 1976, workers, and struggle heroes. This foregrounds imagery and slogans over creative interpretation and vision. Clenched fists read as cliché or symbol, rather than lived experience of the struggle. Posters for murdered comrades become “heroic depictions of activists and freedom fighters”, not cherished memories of real people.</p>
<p>In the text, a brief overview of Medu’s history is followed by South African poet laureate Mongane Serote’s own experience of shaping Medu as a cultural project of the exiled ANC. While this story forms a core part of Medu’s history, it skips over other contributions to Medu’s dynamic mix. Like vibrant debates with <a href="https://oxfordre.com/africanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277734-e-83">Black Consciousness</a>-aligned cultural activists in Gaborone, Medu members’ underground work with the ANC’s military wing, and cross-fertilisation with groups creating struggle art inside South Africa.</p>
<p>Ming and Byrd discuss the aesthetics of Medu graphics, finding similarities with early Soviet art. But Medu consciously traced its aesthetic roots to Pan Africanist and African diasporic cultural theory and practice. We looked to social philosopher Frantz Fanon and African writers <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1986/soyinka/biographical/">Wole Soyinka</a> and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ngugi-wa-Thiongo">Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o</a>. To pre-colonial and anti-colonial African art. To the art of Mozambique’s <a href="https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/9169/malangatana-mozambique-modern">Malangatana Ngwenya</a> and South Africa’s <a href="http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/national-orders/recipient/dumile-feni-1939-1991">Dumile Feni</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403190/original/file-20210527-18-1wm9thx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="An illustration of a woman raising a hand that has a broken shackle around the wrist and the words, 'Now you have touched the women you have struck a rock; you have dislodged a boulder; you will be crushed'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403190/original/file-20210527-18-1wm9thx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403190/original/file-20210527-18-1wm9thx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=873&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403190/original/file-20210527-18-1wm9thx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=873&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403190/original/file-20210527-18-1wm9thx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=873&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403190/original/file-20210527-18-1wm9thx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1097&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403190/original/file-20210527-18-1wm9thx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1097&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403190/original/file-20210527-18-1wm9thx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1097&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Medu’s women’s movement poster.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Judy Seidman/Medu Art Ensemble</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A chapter from South African curator <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2018-03-02-00-the-custodian-khwezi-gule/">Khwezi Gule</a> views Medu through the cultural gaze of post-1990 South Africa. Gule maintains that Medu’s slogan, “art is a weapon of struggle”, has been “reduced to a blunt tool for propaganda”. He argues that “weaponising art degenerates into crass sloganeering” as artistic vision buckled under ANC compromises, white privilege and the commercial art market. Gule concludes today’s generation must fashion their own, different, rebellious culture.</p>
<p>By contrast, South African author and scholar <a href="https://www.viad.co.za/ashraf-jamal">Ashraf Jamal</a> holds that Medu’s democratic discourse and praxis bred hope and belief, emerging from and inspiring Southern Africa’s liberation struggle. He concludes that “Medu’s struggle cannot be solely framed through its historical placement in the 1970s and 1980s. The idea and spirit that inform it also predate and exceed it.”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/art-as-a-weapon-in-south-africas-liberation-struggle-128657">Art as a weapon in South Africa's liberation struggle</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The final essay, <em>Collecting the Posters</em>, by South African collector and gallerist <a href="https://artafricamagazine.org/warren-siebrits-popular-culture-today-antique-tomorrow-art-collecting/">Warren Siebrits</a>, gives yet another perspective. Siebrits was conscripted into the apartheid army in 1988 and deployed to military intelligence: “One of our unit’s main tasks was to destroy ‘subversive enemy propaganda posters’.” After 1994, he hunted these now rare posters to place them into today’s art world “by purchase from private collections and book dealers and while travelling to Botswana”. He does not explain that these posters were personal copies saved by Medu member <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/1999/feb/11/guardianobituaries1">Marius Schoon</a>, whose wife Jeannette Curtis Schoon and 6-year-old daughter Katryn were <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/jeanette-eva-schoon-nee-curtis">killed</a> by a 1984 letter bomb in Angola. Siebrits bought the posters from their surviving son, exhibiting them in his Johannesburg gallery before donating them to the Art Institute of Chicago. This traumatic history of the posters speaks sharply to Medu’s meaning then and now.</p>
<p>The catalogue and the exhibition aim to provide and prompt “new scholarship on Medu’s courageous and consequential work”. The first steps towards reclaiming Medu’s legacy have been taken.</p>
<p>There is still a long road ahead.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/160949/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Judy Seidman was a member of Medu Art Ensemble from 1980 to 1985; she worked on numerous posters produced by Medu. She worked for South African Historical Archives as poster curator (2005 - 2009). She recieved a grant administered through Wits History Workshop in 2018 to hold a retrospective of artworks, including posters made for Medu Art Ensemble. She currently is a research associate of Wits History Workshop, working with Wits Historical papers and SAHA to put Medu’s history on-line. Currently she does not recieve any funding from this. While the Medu history-on-line project may be funded in future, Seidman's work for the project is expected to remain voluntary and unpaid.</span></em></p>Four decades later, post-apartheid South Africa barely recalls the Medu Art Ensemble’s contributions to the liberation struggle. But that could be changing.Judy Seidman, Research associate, History Workshop, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1356332021-01-23T15:12:43Z2021-01-23T15:12:43ZJonas Gwangwa embodied South Africa’s struggle for a national culture<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326055/original/file-20200407-96658-th1gf7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Moeletsi Mabe/The Times/Gallo Images/Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Music is not a zero sum game with only one ‘best’. But if you seek to name one musician whose life embodies the South African people’s struggle for a national culture, it must be trombonist, composer and cultural activist <a href="https://theconversation.com/jonas-gwangwas-music-and-life-embody-the-resistance-against-apartheid-118792">Jonas Mosa Gwangwa</a>, who was born on 19 October 1937 in Orlando East, Johannesburg, and died on 23 January 2021 in Johannesburg aged 83.</p>
<p>Through 65 years on stage, Gwangwa’s playing <a href="https://theconversation.com/an-appreciation-of-south-africas-jazz-stalwart-jonas-gwangwa-91670">contributed</a> to every genre of South African jazz. Overseas, he was hailed as player, producer and composer. Yet he chose to step away from mainstream success for ten years, leading the <a href="http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/national-orders/recipient/amandla-cultural-ensemble-1978?page=2#!slider">Amandla Cultural Ensemble</a> of the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/african-national-congress-anc">African National Congress</a> (ANC) to win hearts for the anti-apartheid <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272460272_Jonas_Gwangwa_Musician_And_Cultural_Activist">struggle</a> everywhere and present a vision of what post-apartheid national culture could be. </p>
<p>He battled painful injury (accidents shattered the same femur three times), was hunted for his life by the regime’s forces and experienced both the heyday of South African liberation culture and the far more ambivalent times since. </p>
<p>Throughout, he cherished a half-century-plus, love affair with his wife Violet, and brought his family – scattered across half the globe – home intact to a free South Africa. Violet’s death, only a few short weeks before his, had left him and the rest of the family devastated. </p>
<h2>The little bebopper</h2>
<p>Gwangwa started his career in the 1950s in the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/father-trevor-huddleston">Father Huddleston</a> Band at St Peter’s College in Johannesburg. When instruments were allocated he hoped for a clarinet, but was shy to object to the offered trombone. </p>
<p>There was music in the family, lessons at school, and from American jazzmen on the bioscope screen at the Odin Cinema in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/11/story-cities-19-johannesburg-south-africa-apartheid-purge-sophiatown">Sophiatown</a>. From <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Dizzy-Gillespie">Dizzy Gillespie</a>, the schoolboy Gwangwa borrowed his lifetime trademark: a jaunty black beret. He became, in his own words “this little bebopper”.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326501/original/file-20200408-118674-140prm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326501/original/file-20200408-118674-140prm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326501/original/file-20200408-118674-140prm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326501/original/file-20200408-118674-140prm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326501/original/file-20200408-118674-140prm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326501/original/file-20200408-118674-140prm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326501/original/file-20200408-118674-140prm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326501/original/file-20200408-118674-140prm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jonas Gwangwa on stage in Johannesburg in 2017.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Veli Nhlapo/Sowetan/Gallo Images/Getty Images</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Politics shaped Gwangwa too. The 1954 <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/bantu-education-and-racist-compartmentalizing-education">Bantu Education</a> Act ended Father Huddleston’s St Peters, but not before the band had played at the <a href="http://scnc.ukzn.ac.za/doc/HIST/freedomchart/freedomch.html">adoption</a> of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-legacy-of-south-africas-freedom-charter-60-years-later-43647">Freedom Charter</a> in Kliptown. He said </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Everybody shared a perspective – you didn’t even classify it as ‘being political’ … nobody separated the music from the politics.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Because <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/22/arts/music-an-essential-element-in-the-voice-of-jazz.html">trombone</a> was a scarce sound in African jazz bands, Gwangwa’s tricky <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/bebop">bebop</a> chops caught the ears of the elite <a href="http://samap.ukzn.ac.za/audio-people/jazz-dazzlers">Jazz</a> <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/benni-gwigwi-mrwebi">Dazzlers</a>. His vision expanded with the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2017/04/26/525696698/the-legacy-of-the-jazz-epistles-south-africas-short-lived-but-historic-group">Jazz Epistles</a>, whose <em><a href="https://www.discogs.com/The-Jazz-Epistles-Jazz-Epistle-Verse-1/release/1934732">Jazz Epistles: Verse One</a></em> became the first modern jazz album from a black South African <a href="https://www.wbgo.org/post/jazz-epistles-holy-moment-revisited-abdullah-ibrahim-checkout#stream/0">band</a>.</p>
<p>That was the first of several firsts. Gwangwa was co-copyist for the first all-black South African stage musical, <em><a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/king-kong-musical-1959-1961">King Kong</a></em>, travelling with the show to London and starting a lifelong love affair with the stage musical format: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Words, action, and music! I became fascinated with just how you … put all those pieces together.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Seven curtain calls</h2>
<p>London contacts helped Gwangwa secure a place at the Manhattan School of Music in New York. There, sharing a flat with <a href="https://theconversation.com/remembering-hugh-masekela-the-horn-player-with-a-shrewd-ear-for-music-of-the-day-86414">Hugh Masekela</a>, his meagre allowance went as often on gig tickets as food, as he imbibed mainstream classics and the new ‘<a href="https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-free-jazz">free jazz</a>’. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326566/original/file-20200408-152974-6rzbrz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326566/original/file-20200408-152974-6rzbrz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326566/original/file-20200408-152974-6rzbrz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326566/original/file-20200408-152974-6rzbrz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326566/original/file-20200408-152974-6rzbrz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326566/original/file-20200408-152974-6rzbrz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326566/original/file-20200408-152974-6rzbrz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Continental Records</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Equally active in politics, he helped organise South African students in America, and served as first eye on the text drafted by old schoolfriend, poet <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-tribute-to-keorapetse-kgositsile-south-africas-poet-laureate-89700">Keorapetse Kgositsile</a>, of Miriam Makeba’s 1963 anti-apartheid <a href="https://www.pri.org/stories/2008-11-10/miriam-makebas-historic-speech-remembered">address</a> to the UN.</p>
<p>He worked with <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/nov/11/miriam-makeba-obituary">Makeba</a> and <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/harry-belafonte-and-the-social-power-of-song">Harry Belafonte</a>, most famously as arranger, adapter and conductor for the 1965 Grammy-winning Best Folk Album <em><a href="http://www.miriammakeba.co.za/releases/An-Evening-With-Belafonte-Makeba-1965">An Evening with Harry Belafonte and Miriam Makeba</a></em>: another first. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326564/original/file-20200408-16182-jlrgyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326564/original/file-20200408-16182-jlrgyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326564/original/file-20200408-16182-jlrgyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326564/original/file-20200408-16182-jlrgyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326564/original/file-20200408-16182-jlrgyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326564/original/file-20200408-16182-jlrgyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326564/original/file-20200408-16182-jlrgyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326564/original/file-20200408-16182-jlrgyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">RCA Victor</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Then came residencies, film scores, multiple recordings across genres, musical direction, and tours; with the Union of South Africa, and with <a href="http://www.herbalpert.com">Herb Alpert</a>, when the trombonist won seven curtain calls for a barnstorming solo on his own <em>Foreign Natives</em>. Despite its painful interruption midstream by the reckless driver who first crushed his leg, Gwangwa’s American jazz star was rising.</p>
<p>But he had loyalties bigger than the stage. </p>
<h2>This is a liberation movement!</h2>
<p>In 1980, Gwangwa answered the call from ANC President <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/oliver-reginald-kaizana-tambo">OR Tambo</a> to scour the <a href="http://ukzn-dspace.ukzn.ac.za/handle/10413/4828">military camps of Angola</a> for young talent to establish the campaigning Amandla Cultural Ensemble. The call was too politically important to ignore, and the opportunity to create an entire stage show excited Gwangwa so much that “sometimes … I couldn’t sleep”.</p>
<p>He spent most of the next decade between Amandla (rehearsing in Angola and touring the world) and Botswana (with his family and <a href="https://learnandteachmagazine.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/the-jonas-gwangwa-story/">contributing</a> to the local cultural scene with the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/medu-art-ensemble">Medu Arts Ensemble</a>). In both settings he was an innovator. Botswana musicians say he helped build their professionalism and shifted their focus towards indigenous inspirations. In Amandla, he consciously re-visioned traditions, casting female performers in previously all-male traditional dance roles: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Why not? … this is a liberation movement! </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Some cynical analysts suggest Amandla’s winning musical arrangements and dramatic stage interludes simply prettied-up struggle culture for overseas audiences; they miss the point. Gwangwa’s love for the struggle was genuine and deep, never cosmetic – and he couldn’t have written an unattractive tune if he tried.</p>
<p>Gwangwa believed that political theatre deserved exactly the same high aesthetic standards as any other stage performance, and according to the memories of other Amandla performers, he enforced these relentlessly at rehearsal. Audiences everywhere responded to that combination of passion and professionalism. </p>
<p>Amandla’s impact put the Gwangwa family home on the SADF hit list for the <a href="http://sabctrc.saha.org.za/glossary/gaborone_raid.htm?tab=report">1985 raid on Botswana</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326582/original/file-20200408-179754-ld65lv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326582/original/file-20200408-179754-ld65lv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326582/original/file-20200408-179754-ld65lv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=645&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326582/original/file-20200408-179754-ld65lv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=645&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326582/original/file-20200408-179754-ld65lv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=645&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326582/original/file-20200408-179754-ld65lv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=811&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326582/original/file-20200408-179754-ld65lv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=811&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326582/original/file-20200408-179754-ld65lv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=811&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">MCA Records</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It was razed (fortunately the occupants were elsewhere) and the regime’s hunt did not cease. Roots were pulled up again, for London, then America. During that uneasy, unsettled time, Gwangwa scored another first: an Oscar nomination (and more) for his <em><a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/cry-freedom-1987">Cry Freedom</a></em> film score, co-composed with George Fenton.</p>
<h2>For the people</h2>
<p>Finally <a href="https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/lifestyle/2011-09-17-what-ive-learnt-jonas-gwangwa/">home again</a> in 1991, some recognition arrived: <a href="http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/national-orders/order-ikhamanga-0?page=14#!slider">Orders of Ikhamanga</a> for both him and Amandla; commissions for various official and pan-African causes; honorary degrees and more. </p>
<p>Yet he still constantly struggled to earn from tours, shows and recordings, encountered record label problems over material deemed “political” – and ‘state composer’ was not who he wanted to be. Although he was committed to the new South Africa and happy to contribute, he really “wanted to be on the ground with the guys,” he told me in 2019 from his sickbed, “doing something important”. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/jonas-gwangwas-music-and-life-embody-the-resistance-against-apartheid-118792">Jonas Gwangwa's music and life embody the resistance against apartheid</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>He was saddened by globalised, commoditised official perspectives on the arts, and by the sidelining of everything Amandla had tried to build. His music had always explicitly been his weapon, and </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We are still within an era of struggle.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326504/original/file-20200408-98792-kxfdht.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326504/original/file-20200408-98792-kxfdht.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326504/original/file-20200408-98792-kxfdht.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326504/original/file-20200408-98792-kxfdht.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326504/original/file-20200408-98792-kxfdht.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326504/original/file-20200408-98792-kxfdht.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326504/original/file-20200408-98792-kxfdht.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326504/original/file-20200408-98792-kxfdht.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gwangwa in 2007 in Johannesburg.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lefty Shivambu/Gallo Images</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In June 2019, Gwangwa was struck by a serious illness that left him bedridden. He struggled valiantly towards recovery and was never bitter. </p>
<p>Interviewing him for his forthcoming biography, I asked him what he was proudest of. “Amandla. Because it involved all the things in music that excited me the most, and gave me the opportunity to bring them together … for the most important reason possible: it was for the people.” <em>Hamba Kahle umkhonto</em> (spear). </p>
<p><em>Ansell is the editor of a planned authorised biography of Jonas Gwanga.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/135633/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gwen Ansell has been assisting the Gwangwa family in editing a biography of Jonas Gwangwa which has not yet been finalised for publication.</span></em></p>The revered trombonist, composer and cultural activist never wished to be ‘the state composer’ but remained political until the end, in service of the people.Gwen Ansell, Associate of the Gordon Institute for Business Science, University of PretoriaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1372652020-06-25T17:15:22Z2020-06-25T17:15:22ZHow women’s untold histories shaped South Africa’s national poet<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/330681/original/file-20200427-145560-3f1wmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Keorapetse Kgositsile with US author Alice Walker, 1996.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Anacleto Rapping/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://theconversation.com/a-tribute-to-keorapetse-kgositsile-south-africas-poet-laureate-89700">Keorapetse Kgositsile</a>, the South African-born poet who passed away in 2018, lived in exile in the US from 1962 to 1975 and was at the centre of the country’s 1960s and ’70s <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/148936/an-introduction-to-the-black-arts-movement">Black Arts Movement</a>. Informed by his South African and <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/tswana">Tswana</a> background, the poet makes a case for multiple inflections of voices, geographies, and histories in the making of transnational black modernity.</p>
<p>Analysing his work offers ways in which African poetry can disrupt dominant thinking on <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/b/black-atlantic">Black Atlantic</a> studies, particularly <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/arts/paul-gilroy-holberg-prize.html">Paul Gilroy’s</a>
1993 text <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674076068">The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness</a>. The Atlantic world referred to by Gilroy tells the histories of Europe, Africa and the Americas, two hemispheres joined by the Atlantic ocean and exchanging influence. Kgositsile’s poetry can be read as challenging the direction of influence from north to south.</p>
<p>Uhuru Phalafala <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369801X.2020.1718539">considers</a> the rich oral traditions passed on from Kgositsile’s grandmother and mother as a key system of knowledge that informed and shaped his black radical imagination. Aretha Phiri interviewed her.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Aretha Phiri:</strong> Your <a href="https://stias.ac.za/events/revising-the-black-atlantic-african-diaspora-perspectives/">colloquium paper</a> situates the celebrated poet-in-exile at the centre of and as uniquely influential to the Black Arts Movement?</p>
<p><strong>Uhuru Phalafala:</strong> It was a time when African Americans were seeking to define their identities, with Africa as key metaphor. Kgositsile happened to not only come from that continent, but also used his mother tongue, Setswana, spiritual practices, and music from southern Africa in his work. By interweaving Tswana vernacular with the black diaspora parlance, he affirmed African America’s legitimate affiliation to the continent, as seen in the example of his influence on “the grandfather of rap music”, <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/last-poets-1968/">The Last Poets</a>. </p>
<p>He also came from a <a href="https://www.anc1912.org.za/brief-history-anc">mass liberation movement</a> that was experienced in politics of armed confrontation, generated solidarities with other liberation organisations, and adept in decolonial politics. His work became a resource for his contemporaries. Today, when we look at, for example, Kendrick Lamar’s influential album, <em>To Pimp A Butterfly</em>, and the number of <a href="https://medium.com/cuepoint/the-oral-history-of-kendrick-lamar-s-to-pimp-a-butterfly-622f725c3fde">references</a> to South Africa in it, we must understand it as grounding itself in the foundation that people such as Kgositsile laid in the sixties and seventies. South Africa will always have an enduring place in the African American imagination. </p>
<p>This is diaspora consciousness. He also admired Nina Simone’s sound, which he called “future memory” to signal that it is not new or emergent, but reminiscent of the protest tradition of South Africa.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344086/original/file-20200625-33546-1a7woun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344086/original/file-20200625-33546-1a7woun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344086/original/file-20200625-33546-1a7woun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344086/original/file-20200625-33546-1a7woun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344086/original/file-20200625-33546-1a7woun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344086/original/file-20200625-33546-1a7woun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344086/original/file-20200625-33546-1a7woun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), 1975, best known member of the Black Arts Movement that embraced Kgositsile.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bettmann/Getty Images</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong>Aretha Phiri:</strong> In focusing on the oral traditions inherited from his female lineage, you make a case for the specific use in his poetry of a “matriarchal archive”? </p>
<p><strong>Uhuru Phalafala:</strong> The colonised come from different conceptions of time (temporalities). Colonial temporality is not only racialised but also gendered. The arrogant coloniser inaugurated the beginning of history in his assumption that we did not have a history before he arrived. “History” began with the arrival of the coloniser, and marched forward in a linear fashion. With time, black men accessed modernity’s time – through missionary education and working in the mines – at a different period than women. </p>
<p>We now know that when anti-colonial wars were fought they were primarily and solely about the emergence of the black race from subjugation. When women and queer people attempted to bring the particularities of their oppression to the agenda they were told to wait. When independence was achieved those doubly and triply marginalised did not attain their independence at the same time with their countries because they continued to fight against black patriarchy. </p>
<p>If we backtrack we can then make certain observations. A type of double location of time was constructed when the colonisers’ history was instituted: theirs and ours. Because of lack of contact with missionary education and industrialisation, loosely speaking – of course there were women who accessed modernity – women occupied a different temporality. One of continuity from precolonial to colonial time, with its attendant way of life, philosophies, worldview, oratory practices, etcetera. </p>
<p><strong>Aretha Phiri:</strong> In describing this archive, how do you guard against potential accusations of advancing a gendered essentialist claim? </p>
<p><strong>Uhuru Phalafala</strong> I do not wish to rehash gendered essentialist claims. This is just historical process. My grandmother never set foot in a classroom but has a world of knowledge, so to say. Men who were later ferried to missionary schools, or those who went to work in the mines en masse, existed in a double location of time. The flow from precolonial to colonial time was interrupted by modernity’s time, fashioning a coexistence of the two. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/black-and-queer-women-invite-the-black-atlantic-into-the-21st-century-131057">Black and queer women invite the Black Atlantic into the 21st century</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>These men came face to face with the colonial alienation and “first exile” from their home cultures which were denigrated by colonial assumptions of superior culture. This is how temporality is also gendered. The women who suffered the blows of this history, mostly in the rural countryside, continued to live life on their own terms, without their men. They continued to practise their indigenous ways of knowing – which are not an event but an ongoing process. </p>
<p>These knowledges evolved with time and did not freeze in some dark past. They progress, transform, and evolve as humans do. Today when we call for decolonisation we are actually wanting to retrieve this knowledge that was silenced and erased by the multiheaded hydra of colonialism. Where can we find it if not from those who had little contact with this hydra? In my view black women, in the context of southern Africa, are that “matriarchive”. </p>
<p><em>The book Black Radical Traditions From The South: Keorapetse Kgositsile and the Black Arts Movement by Uhuru Phalafala will be published shortly.</em> </p>
<p><em>This article is part of a <a href="https://theconversation.com/africa/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%23BlackAtlanticsSeries">series</a> called Decolonising the Black Atlantic in which black and queer women literary academics rethink and disrupt traditional Black Atlantic studies. The series is based on papers delivered at the <a href="https://stias.ac.za/events/revising-the-black-atlantic-african-diaspora-perspectives/">Revising the Black Atlantic: African Diaspora Perspectives</a> colloquium at the <a href="https://stias.ac.za">Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/137265/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aretha Phiri is an NRF rated researcher and has been a fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS).</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Uhuru Portia Phalafala's research is supported in part by the National Research Foundation of South Africa.</span></em></p>A study of the late Keorapetse Kgositsile shows how the poet influenced black American culture. It also shows how his mother and his grandmother’s oral traditions in turn influenced him.Aretha Phiri, Senior lecturer, Department of Literary Studies in English, Rhodes UniversityUhuru Portia Phalafala, Lecturer, Stellenbosch UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1310572020-05-27T14:00:11Z2020-05-27T14:00:11ZBlack and queer women invite the Black Atlantic into the 21st century<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/317382/original/file-20200226-24668-pax2tg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1993 British academic <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/arts/paul-gilroy-holberg-prize.html">Paul Gilroy</a> published <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674076068">The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness</a>. It has become a very important text in global blackness studies.</p>
<p>Gilroy’s book provided the inspiration for a colloquium I organised at the <a href="https://stias.ac.za/">Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study</a>. Called <a href="https://stias.ac.za/events/revising-the-black-atlantic-african-diaspora-perspectives/">Revising the Black Atlantic: African Diaspora Perspectives</a>, it was part of my ongoing efforts to re-imagine the current thinking around African decolonisation. It set out to listen to and foreground women and queer feminist academics.</p>
<p>The Atlantic world referred to by Gilroy tells the histories of Europe, Africa and the Americas, two hemispheres joined by the Atlantic ocean. The diaspora is the spread of people – in the case of our studies, black people – across continents. The <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/b/black-atlantic">Black Atlantic</a> is a term typically credited to Gilroy. </p>
<p>It tells a history, shaped by the brutality of the slave trade, that leads to the development of black consciousness in other parts of the Atlantic world. These histories then interact with one another in creative and useful ways.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/317381/original/file-20200226-24685-quvgsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/317381/original/file-20200226-24685-quvgsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=951&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317381/original/file-20200226-24685-quvgsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=951&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317381/original/file-20200226-24685-quvgsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=951&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317381/original/file-20200226-24685-quvgsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1195&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317381/original/file-20200226-24685-quvgsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1195&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317381/original/file-20200226-24685-quvgsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1195&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Paul Gilroy at home.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mjgw at English Wikipedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Gilroy’s text has helped to highlight the influential role and place of the black diaspora within global race studies. But it remains largely shaped by the West. In its focus on disproving the racist assumptions of Western thinking, it downplays the place of Africa and its peoples in contributing to the modern world. </p>
<p>The Black Atlantic also, unfortunately, does not acknowledge the contributions of women and queer people. A similarly narrow and unimaginative approach affects traditional and current thinking about decolonisation. It is focused largely on tackling and contradicting philosophy and thought that is centred on Western, European culture and history. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/317390/original/file-20200226-24668-3eo65e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/317390/original/file-20200226-24668-3eo65e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/317390/original/file-20200226-24668-3eo65e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317390/original/file-20200226-24668-3eo65e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317390/original/file-20200226-24668-3eo65e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317390/original/file-20200226-24668-3eo65e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1198&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317390/original/file-20200226-24668-3eo65e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1198&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317390/original/file-20200226-24668-3eo65e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1198&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Paul Gilroy’s seminal text.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Verso</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Resistance to Western dominance over knowledge is understandable and necessary, considering the continent’s lingering, violent colonial past. But there’s a risk of our decolonising efforts becoming prescriptive. </p>
<p>In South African academic life, a racialised and gendered decolonising narrative is also in danger of playing into the kind of exclusionary thinking that it opposes. </p>
<p>Various commentators have highlighted the threat posed by feminism to institutionalised norms. Author <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/17/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-extract-we-should-all-be-feminists">Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie</a> observes </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Gender is not an easy conversation to have … Because thinking of changing the status quo is always uncomfortable. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Academic Jennifer C. Nash has <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-1-4780-0059-4_601.pdf">argued</a> that black women in particular are not normally associated with analysis. Their intellectual production, therefore, is viewed as threatening to existing social structures. </p>
<p>Our colloquium aimed to probe the limits and possibilities of both the Black Atlantic and current thinking around African decolonisation. We wanted to offer new interpretations from the perspectives of today’s African diaspora. </p>
<h2>The papers</h2>
<p>An interdisciplinary approach encouraged comparative, transnational readings from the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/humanities">humanities</a> and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/social-science">social sciences</a>. We also wanted to realign contemporary African beliefs and lived experiences.</p>
<p>Only women and queer feminist scholars were invited to present papers. </p>
<p>Michelle Wright’s paper <em>Black in Time: Diaspora, Diversity and Identity</em> challenged linear ideas of the Black Atlantic which mimic Western assumptions about history. These result in a simplified reading of race and racial belonging. She argued for tangible versions of history that allow for more inclusive and complex Black diaspora. </p>
<p>Sam Naidu’s paper <em>That Ever-Blurry Line Between us and the Criminal: Re-visioning Justice in African Noir</em> looked at the classic, Western genre of crime fiction. And then reconsidered it from the perspective of <a href="https://kweiquartey.com/african-crime-fiction/">African crime fiction</a>. She showed how this evolving genre could reflect issues of sociopolitical justice and philosophical dilemmas that affect Africans.</p>
<p>Some topics explicitly challenged the racial and gendered shortcomings of Gilroy’s text. Marzia Milazzo delivered a paper titled, <em>The Black Atlantic, the ‘New Racism,’ and the Politics of Hybridity</em>. It took to task Gilroy’s colourblind understanding of racism and his uncritical interpretation of the mixing of cultures to shape his theory of the Black Atlantic.</p>
<p>Rocío Cobo-Piñero’s paper was called <em>Queering the Black Atlantic: Transgender Spaces in Akwaeke Emezi’s <a href="https://www.akwaeke.com/freshwater">Freshwater</a> (2018)</em>. It used Emezi’s novel of Ada, a child born with a troubled and troubling spirit, to offer ways in which emerging African queer literature could disrupt traditional, heterosexist readings of <em>The Black Atlantic</em>.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/nigerias-queer-literature-offers-a-new-way-of-looking-at-blackness-133649">Nigeria's queer literature offers a new way of looking at blackness</a>
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</em>
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<p>Other topics explored the possibility of embodied research and teaching methods. This is about the physical ways we know and teach. For example, Danai Mupotsa’s paper <em>Knowing From Loss</em> referenced the <a href="https://theconversation.com/feesmustfall-the-poster-child-for-new-forms-of-struggle-in-south-africa-68773">#FeesMustFall</a> movement. Her aim was to highlight (marginalised) experiences and contexts in students’ ongoing calls for a decolonised, transformed higher education. </p>
<p>Uhuru Phalafala’s paper <em>Encountering the M(other) in black radical traditions</em> focused on celebrated South African poet <a href="https://africasacountry.com/2018/03/keorapetse-kgositsile-was-a-feminist">Keorapetse Kgositsile</a>. It examined the unacknowledged influence of the oral Setswana maternal lineage on his transnational black radical poetry and politics.</p>
<p>Our discussions were rigorous and robust and we weren’t necessarily always in agreement. But all the participants were committed to one thing: rethinking the dominant thinking around decolonisation and the Black Atlantic.</p>
<p>The colloquium demonstrated the crucial significance of nonconformist, disruptive research and teaching methods. And while I am excited about the prospects for queer African feminist scholarship, gender equity is an aspiration yet to be realised. </p>
<p><em>This article is part of a <a href="https://theconversation.com/africa/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%23BlackAtlanticsSeries">series</a> called Decolonising the Black Atlantic in which black and queer women literary academics rethink and disrupt traditional Black Atlantic studies. The series is based on papers delivered at the <a href="https://stias.ac.za/events/revising-the-black-atlantic-african-diaspora-perspectives/">Revising the Black Atlantic: African Diaspora Perspectives</a> colloquium at the <a href="https://stias.ac.za">Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/131057/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aretha Phiri is an NRF rated researcher. She is affiliated with the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study.</span></em></p>A group of leading black, queer and feminist academics held a colloquium to reconsider a seminal blackness studies text – offering new ways of thinking about the decolonial project.Aretha Phiri, Senior lecturer, Department of Literary Studies in English, Rhodes UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1108022019-02-03T09:17:47Z2019-02-03T09:17:47ZThe story of an alliance between two poets – one Cuban, one South African<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256564/original/file-20190131-109820-z11yq3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Keorapetse Kgositsile</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Oupa Nkosi/Mail & Guardian</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s a little more than a year since the death of <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/keorapetse-william-kgositsile">Keorapetse Kgositsile</a>, South Africa’s first post-apartheid poet laureate. Kgositsile, born in Johannesburg in 1938, became a prominent and vocal activist for the African National Congress (ANC). In 1961, at the behest of the ANC, he went into exile, initially to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, and subsequently to the US where he became involved in the Black Arts Movement.</p>
<p>In 1990 he returned to South Africa and in 2006 was appointed <a href="https://johannesburgreviewofbooks.com/2018/01/03/keorapetse-bra-willie-kgositsile-south-africas-national-poet-laureate-rip/">Poet Laureate</a>. In the many volumes published during his exile and after his return, Kgositsile repeatedly and fearlessly addressed the crimes both of apartheid and of global racism, advocating a revolutionary politics of resistance. </p>
<p>Kgositsile’s death in January 2018 was mourned across South Africa and indeed across the globe.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-tribute-to-keorapetse-kgositsile-south-africas-poet-laureate-89700">A tribute to Keorapetse Kgositsile, South Africa's poet laureate</a>
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<p>In a moving tribute in the introduction to Kgositsile’s final volume <em>Homesoil in My Blood</em> the poet, novelist and activist, renowned South African writer Mandla Langa <a href="https://johannesburgreviewofbooks.com/2018/03/05/spending-time-with-bra-willie-is-the-closest-thing-to-being-in-touch-with-the-soul-of-this-country-read-mandla-langas-introduction-to-keorapetse-kgositsiles-homesoil-in-my-blood/">draws attention</a> to Kgositsile’s poetic skill and to his unwavering conviction,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“that art to mean anything must be involved in social activism.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In a short aside Langa notes Kgositsile’s fertile association with prominent activists and writers across the globe like <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1971/neruda/biographical/">Pablo Neruda</a> from Chile, and Cubans <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/18/obituaries/nicolas-guillen-87-national-poet-of-cuba.html">Nicolás Guillén</a> and <a href="https://www.smith.edu/poetrycenter/wp/morejon/">Nancy Morejón</a>. The brief mention of Morejón belies the importance of the relationship between two activist poets, one which has rarely been addressed.</p>
<p>A consideration of Morejón’s engagement with Kgositsile as a fellow poet – and her visit to South Africa – shed new light on her poetic practice. It allows too, a reaffirmation of Kgositsile’s uniquely South African voice and to highlight the reach and impact of his transnational status.</p>
<h2>Revolutionary writers</h2>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256398/original/file-20190130-75085-10ietc0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256398/original/file-20190130-75085-10ietc0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=795&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256398/original/file-20190130-75085-10ietc0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=795&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256398/original/file-20190130-75085-10ietc0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=795&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256398/original/file-20190130-75085-10ietc0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=999&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256398/original/file-20190130-75085-10ietc0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=999&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256398/original/file-20190130-75085-10ietc0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=999&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Nancy Morejón.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nmorejn5jul04.JPG">Potosino/WikiMedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Morejón, born in 1944, is, with Guillén, among Cuba’s most important revolutionary writers: internationally renowned for her work as a poet, critic and essayist, she has been widely translated. In 2001, Morejón was awarded Cuba’s National Prize in literature. Issues of race and gender are central to her oeuvre. Through her poetry she acknowledges the centrality and complexity of her Afro-Cuban identity from both pan-Caribbean and pan-African perspectives.</p>
<p>Morejón addresses the origins of her relationship with Kgositsile in a telling anecdote in her essay, “Viaje a Suráfrica” (Voyage to South Africa). In 1987 she attended the International Conference of Writers held in Congo, together with the Cuban poet and translator of African poetry, <a href="http://www.afrocubaweb.com/fure/fure.htm">Rogelio Martínez Furé</a>. She wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We went to drink coffee with one of the writers who had intervened very boldly. He was a small, petite man, with broad and thick lips, with a physical fragility that contrasted with the strength of his word and his overwhelming sympathy. </p>
<p>Furé … decided to ply this new friend with questions. The last question was filled with anguish since we both expected a tragic response: ‘Do you know the whereabouts of the poet Keorapetse Kgositsile from Johannesburg? The only thing we know is that he is one of the poets who has been the longest time in exile and we have not heard from him for so long … Many fear for his life…’ </p>
<p>With a smile full of mischief, our interlocutor, impassively, replied: ‘Keorapetse Kgositsile… that is me.’ At that moment my personal history with South Africa was born. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>(Translation: Cynthia Gabbay)</p>
<p>The anecdote conveys Kgositsile’s frequently noted playfulness and the affection he commanded. It equally suggests the high regard in which he was held amongst the global community of writer–activists.</p>
<p>The importance of Africa, and of South Africa in particular, as a focus of Morejón’s poetics of resistance, and the extent of her identification with the struggle is evident in her 1989 volume, <em>Baladas para un sueño</em> (Ballads for a dream). In the poem “Silent Lullaby for South African Children” , Morejón addresses the iniquities of South Africa’s pass laws:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Mommy had no pass</p>
<p>and there was no bread.</p>
<p>Daddy had no pass </p>
<p>and he was punished.</p>
<p>Mommy had no pass </p>
<p>and there was no bread.</p>
<p>Daddy had no pass</p>
<p>and he died, slaughtered.</p>
<p>Mommy had no pass</p>
<p>and there was no bread.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>(Translation: Cynthia Gabbay and Karin Berkman)</p>
<p>The poem makes clear the impossibility of any peaceful sleep for the child who voices the lament. Its evocation of the simple vocabulary of a child and its spare, plaintive refrains serve to accentuate its concern with the poverty and violence that are the legacies of apartheid.</p>
<h2>Travelling across South Africa</h2>
<p>In June 1992, in the dying throes of the apartheid regime, Morejón was invited to deliver the keynote address at the annual conference of the Congress of South African Writers. After the conference she travelled across South Africa, giving workshops and lectures. She was accompanied throughout by Kgositsile, whom she terms her “cicerone” (guide). </p>
<p>In her essay on this journey, Morejón expresses her wonder at the beauty of the South African landscape, and her pleasure at the fraternity she develops with the poet and with her new South African friends. At the same time, her confrontation with the terrifying realities of apartheid induce in her a profound, almost unbearable sense of estrangement. With Kgositsile as her guide, she visited Crossroads, the shantytown near Cape Town. </p>
<p>She describes an intense loss of bearings, a “sensation of living in Hitler’s dream”: the public toilets at the edge of the camp are indefinable, part sarcophagi, part public amenities. The location loses its specificity, at once a dumping ground and a cemetery, the evidence of apartheid as “a diabolical aberration”. </p>
<p>Morejón closes her essay with a tribute to the people she encounters: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>South Africa pulses in my memory for the same story that runs through my own veins, for its art and literature, for the friends of the Congress of South African Writers, for the travelling musicians, the muleteers, the stevedores, the sangomas, the maids who told me their griefs experienced under apartheid, their hopes of making it disappear even after its theoretical death.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>(Translation: Cynthia Gabbay)</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/110802/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Cynthia Gabbay receives funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013) / European Research Council grant agreement 615564.
</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Karin Berkman receives funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013) / European Research Council grant agreement 615564. </span></em></p>A consideration of Cuban poet Nancy Morejón’s engagement with Keorapetse Kgositsile and her visits to South Africa – shed new light on her poetic practice.Cynthia Gabbay, Alexander von Humboldt Fellow and former Research Associate at ERC Project "Apartheid Stops" (at Hebrew University), Freie Universität BerlinKarin Berkman, Post-doctoral researcher, Hebrew University of JerusalemLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1000462018-07-17T10:12:54Z2018-07-17T10:12:54ZCentenary of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela’s birth: a tribute in poems<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227842/original/file-20180716-44103-1robmra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Nelson Mandela's legacy in poetry can re-familiarise us with the values he embodied.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Stringer</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The centenary of the birth of <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/page/biography">Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela</a> offers a rich
opportunity to reflect on the life of South Africa’s extraordinary political leader and on the legacies of the struggle against apartheid that he and his cohort of fellow activists shaped. Mandela’s life-writing offers a great deal of inspiration for such reflection across a range of themes, including as scholars have pointed out, the question of Madiba’s own <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2013-04-05-00-the-mortality-of-nelson-mandela">mortality</a>. </p>
<p>Poetry is an under-explored source of additional reflection. Across the arc of Mandela’s defiant resistance to apartheid, through his incarceration, release and presidential term, his life became poetry. The scope of this corpus is enormous, spanning decades and continents alike. </p>
<p>One major anthology, <a href="http://www.apartheidmuseum.org/halala-madiba-nelson-mandela-poetry">Halala Madiba: Nelson Mandela in Poetry</a>, contains 96 poems from 25 countries. Published in 2005, it includes work by two Nobel laureates, <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1986/soyinka-bio.html">Wole Soyinka</a> and <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1995/heaney-bio.html">Seamus Heaney</a>. In addition, it features the work of the black revolutionary Cuban poet <a href="https://www.smith.edu/poetrycenter/wp/morejon/">Nancy Morejón</a>, the Jamaican dub-poet <a href="https://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/linton-kwesi-johnson">Linton Kwesi Johnson</a>, the Barbadian poet <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/kamau-brathwaite">Kamau Brathwaite</a>, rapper <a href="https://2pac.com/us">Tupac Amaru Shakur</a>, and <a href="https://mg.co.za/tag/zindzi-mandela">Zindzi Mandela</a> — Nelson Mandela and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s daughter. </p>
<p>South African poets, including the late poet laureate <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/keorapetse-william-kgositsile">Keorapetse Kgositsile</a>, also contribute searing local perspectives. Their texts derive from established traditions of oral poetry, protest poetry and prison poetry in South Africa.</p>
<h2>The Island</h2>
<p>During the apartheid years, many of the poems in which Mandela appears, imagine or remember him on <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/916">Robben Island</a>. The island, about 9km west of Cape Town, was used between the 17th and 20th centuries as a prison. Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years behind bars imprisoned on it.</p>
<p>For poets detained as a result of their political activism, the place of incarceration is also the place of writing. Poets imprisoned on Robben Island alongside Mandela, like <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/frank-anthony">Frank Anthony</a> and <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/dennis-brutus">Dennis Brutus</a>, take the Island as their subject. </p>
<p>Dennis Brutus (1924-2009), the coloured (mixed race) political activist pivotal to promoting the ban on South Africa’s participation in the Olympics, was arrested and imprisoned on Robben Island between 1963 and 1965 where he occupied the cell next to Mandela. Brutus invokes Mandela directly as both fellow prisoner and figurehead of the struggle. In the poem “Robben Island” written from exile in 1980, the Island becomes a potent site of memory. The poem begins with a slowly unfolding recollection as details of the past move into focus like a replayed, unspooling film. </p>
<p>Brutus initially evokes the deep intimacy of labouring men bent over the stones in the quarry. The speaker is “anonymous”, while the prisoners recalled are initially “faceless”. Their names and faces only materialise gradually: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I see the men beside me </p>
<p>Peake and Alexander </p>
<p>Mandela and Sisulu </p>
</blockquote>
<p>As the memory sharpens and gains momentum, so too does the speaker’s apprehension of the historic role of the men he names: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The will to freedom steadily grows </p>
<p>The force, the power, the strength </p>
<p>steadily grows. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In Brutus’s poem, Mandela is not differentiated from the other prisoners and is only one of the “marvellous men” whom the poem celebrates. </p>
<p>Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian poet, playwright and Nobel Prize laureate who was himself a political prisoner in Nigeria, addresses the figure of Mandela on Robben Island in the 1988 volume <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/822368.Mandela_s_Earth_And_Other_Poems">Mandela’s Earth</a>. In his poem “No! He Said”, Mandela assumes mythic status. </p>
<p>The Island is both a geographic location and an imagined space of resistance. In this poem, Mandela is Atlas shouldering the universe, part Colossus, part Prometheus, part Christ.</p>
<p>The poem takes as its starting point Mandela’s <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/president-p-w-botha-offers-nelson-mandela-conditional-release-prison">refusal</a> in 1985 to accept release from jail in exchange for renunciation of the legitimacy of the armed struggle against apartheid. In Mandela’s obdurateness and unwillingness to break faith with the struggle, he becomes an emanation of the granite fixedness of the island itself. </p>
<p>The poem rejects any sense that the Island has subdued Mandela, as these lines suggest: “<em>No!</em> I am no prisoner of this rock, this island,/ No ash spew on Milky Ways to conquests old or new./ I am this rock, this island.” </p>
<h2>Outpouring of poetic celebration</h2>
<p>Mandela’s release in 1990 was met by an outpouring of poetic celebration both within South Africa and globally. The Irish poet Seamus Heaney recorded his fierce opposition to the apartheid regime as early as the 1960s. In 1990, he published his play <em>The Cure at Troy</em> – a reworking of Sophocles’ <a href="http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199672783.001.0001/acprof-9780199672783-chapter-3"><em>Philoctetes</em></a>. The concern in the play with injury, betrayal, suffering and reconciliation was widely seen to mirror the conflict in Ireland. </p>
<p>Inspired by Mandela’s release, Heaney later added a chorus to the play, dedicating it to Mandela. In an <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/seamus-heaney-hope-is-something-that-is-there-to-be-worked-for-141727.html">interview</a> with South African journalist Shaun Johnson in 2002, he makes Mandela’s relevance explicit: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It seemed to me to mesh beautifully with Mandela’s return. The act of betrayal, and then the generosity of his coming back and helping with the city – helping the polis to get together again.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Although Mandela’s name is not directly mentioned, he is evoked in the now well-known lines: “History says, <em>Don’t hope/ _On this side of the grave.</em>/ But then, once in a lifetime/ The longed-for tidal wave/ Of justice can rise up,/ And hope and history rhyme.”</p>
<p>The chorus celebrates Mandela’s release but it does so through the lens of political extremity in Ireland. Mandela’s example is held out as one of miraculous possibility attesting to the possibility of conciliation and reparation.</p>
<p>Mandela is no longer with us. Routine invocations of his miraculous or even quasi-messianic status that became part of public discourse following his release have themselves dimmed and lost their usefulness. But, attending to Mandela’s legacy in poetry can help to re-familiarise us with the values he embodied, renewing engagement with the ongoing imperative to oppose racism in the name of political equality, constitutional democracy and economic justice in South Africa.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/100046/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Louise Bethlehem receives funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013) / European Research Council grant agreement 615564. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Karin Berkman receives funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013) / European Research Council grant agreement 615564. </span></em></p>Nelson Mandela’s release in 1990 was met by an outpouring of poetic celebration both within South Africa and globally.Louise Bethlehem, Associate professor in Cultural Studies and English, Hebrew University of JerusalemKarin Berkman, Post-doctoral researcher, Hebrew University of JerusalemLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/916702018-04-09T14:54:29Z2018-04-09T14:54:29ZAn appreciation of South Africa’s jazz stalwart Jonas Gwangwa<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212255/original/file-20180327-109175-tz2jim.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C338%2C1985%2C1730&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Jonas Gwangwa performing in Germany in 2010.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Music galore marked the passing early in 2018 of two South African titans of culture, Poet Laureate <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-tribute-to-keorapetse-kgositsile-south-africas-poet-laureate-89700">Keorapetse Kgositsile</a> and trumpeter <a href="https://theconversation.com/remembering-hugh-masekela-the-horn-player-with-a-shrewd-ear-for-music-of-the-day-86414">Hugh Masekela</a>. Notable at their memorial events were powerfully moving tributes by two veterans still living: <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/biography-caiphus-semenya">Caiphus Semenya</a> and <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/jonas-mosa-gwangwa">Jonas Gwangwa</a>. They have shared stages and the perils of exile with both. </p>
<p>Semenya and Gwangwa’s histories raise a persistent question – why, given the scale of their achievements, are they not more famous? The answer may be rooted in the prominence of live performance over composition: everybody remembers the man or woman on stage. Fewer enquire about who wrote – let alone arranged – the song.</p>
<p>So the 80-year-old Jonas Mosa Gwangwa can command instant warmth and recognition on stage, singing or playing trombone. That music has won him friends and fans around the world. The democratic South African government acknowledged his role in, as they termed it, “singing down apartheid” with the Order of Ikhamanga (Gold) in 2010. But even the <a href="http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/national-orders/recipient/jonas-gwangwa">citation</a> for that award omitted much about the scope of his work as composer, arranger and director of stage shows.</p>
<p>Gwangwa was born in Orlando East, outside Johannesburg in 1937. As a student, he became a founder-member of the influential Huddleston Jazz Band alongside Masekela. And, like his contemporary, he also moonlighted wherever there was band work – for example, in trumpeter Elijah Nwanyane’s Rhythm Kings. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Jonas Gwangwa often performed in Elijah’s Rhythm Kings.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When American pianist <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1984/04/05/obituaries/john-mehegan-jazz-pianist-wrote-4-volume-textbook.html">John Mehegan</a> visited South Africa in the late 1950s, Gwangwa was one of the improvisers with whom he chose to work.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Jonas Gwangwa performed with John Mehegan.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Those and other collaborations led, in turn, to the 1960 release of the <a href="http://revive-music.com/2011/06/21/the-jazz-epistles-jazz-epistle-verse-1/">“Jazz Epistles, Verse One”</a>. It was the first LP released by black modern jazz players in South Africa. It also featured <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/kippie-jeremiah-moeketsi">Kippie Moeketsi</a>, Masekela, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/abdullah-ibrahim">Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim)</a> and more. As Gwangwa told me in my book <em><a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/soweto-blues-9780826416629/">Soweto Blues</a></em> (2004):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Kippie got interested in both Hugh and I because we were attempting all those Charlie Parker things, and Kippie said: ‘Oh, so you like this music? Come here, let me teach you…’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It was during the making of the Jazz Epistles album that Gwangwa began to compose: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I sat at the piano, messing around until I came up with this tune <em>Carol’s Drive</em>… a style was being formulated, of course, only I was not aware of this… I was thinking that I could improvise so why can’t I compose?</p>
</blockquote>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The Jazz Epistles with the Gwangwa composition, ‘Carol’s Drive’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>His music writing skills grew when he was engaged as a copyist and pit player for the famous musical <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/king-kong-musical-1959-1961">“King Kong”</a>. When the production toured abroad in 1961, Gwangwa was one of many cast members who chose not to return to apartheid South Africa after the show’s run concluded. He ended up with Masekela at the Manhattan School of Music in New York. </p>
<p>Gwangwa played a pivotal role in selling South African music to initially uninterested US audiences. He was arranger and orchestra director on Harry Belafonte and Miriam Makeba’s 1965 Grammy winning album <a href="https://www.allmusic.com/album/an-evening-with-belafonte-makeba-mw0000453025">“An Evening with Makeba and Belafonte”</a>.</p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Train Song’ from ‘An Evening with Makeba and Belafonte’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Over the following decade, he also had his own projects, touring with Masekela and Semenya in the band, Union of South Africa, alongside American jazz band, <a href="https://www.allmusic.com/artist/the-crusaders-mn0000136075">The Crusaders</a>.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Union of South Africa.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Gwangwa also released infectious Afro-pop with his band African Explosion.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Gwangwa’s band African Explosion.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Politically meaningful</h2>
<p>But, increasingly, the necessity to do something more politically meaningful with his music was becoming. As Gwangwa told me:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I figured that before I became an Americanised African, I have to go home and… grab a little kryptonite.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the early 1980s he was summoned by the president of the then banned <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/organisations/african-national-congress-anc">African National Congress (ANC)</a>, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/oliver-reginald-kaizana-tambo">Oliver Tambo</a> to assist with a group of young musicians in the ANC training camps in Angola who wanted to perform. The result was a musical, called <em>Amandla!</em>. With its slick, disciplined stagecraft, varied programming, comedy, dance routines and original as well as traditional and struggle songs,<a href="http://www.peripherycenter.org/music/music-anti-apartheid-south-africa"> <em>Amandla!</em></a> was light years away from simplistic agit-prop.</p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The track ‘Sasol’ from the original musical ‘Amandla!’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The script-line was kept sharply up to date:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I always added or changed something to tally with whatever’s happening inside the country.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Between tours, Gwangwa spent as much time as he could in the ANC’s military camps, rehearsing, scouting new talent and sharing the risks. After a vehicle accident in Angola shattered his leg, he spent more time in Botswana, working with the Gaborone-based Medu Arts Ensemble. It was there that much of his best loved <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/pure-sounds-of-africa/987954418">material</a> was developed.</p>
<p>The physical perils of exile manifested tragically on 14 June 1985 when the South African Defence Force <a href="http://sabctrc.saha.org.za/glossary/gaborone_raid.htm?tab=report">raided Gaborone</a>, killing more than a dozen people, many connected with Medu. For weeks afterwards, unmarked vehicles with South African number plates spied on Gaborone. One hunted Gwangwa through the streets until he evaded it in the narrow alleys of an informal settlement.</p>
<h2>Shortlisted for an Oscar</h2>
<p>In 1987, Gwangwa worked with UK composer George Fenton on the soundtrack for the movie <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092804/">“Cry Freedom”</a>, based on the friendship between newspaper editor Donald Woods and civil rights activist, Steve Biko. The <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cry-Freedom-Original-Picture-Soundtrack/dp/B000002O5E">music</a> was shortlisted for an Oscar and multiple other international awards, winning both an Ivor Novello and a Black Emmy award. </p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The title track from the soundtrack of ‘Cry Freedom’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Although Gwangwa continued to perform – he played at both the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/british-anti-apartheid-movement-hosts-concert-mandela">1988 Nelson Mandela Birthday Concert</a> and the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01b78f7">1990 Mandela release concerts in London</a> – that exposure opened additional doors to composing opportunities. Back home, by the mid-1990s his name was both a regular feature on music festival programmes, and a regular pop-up on film in composers’ credits. Since his return home, he has released eight albums.</p>
<p>Although composing now dominates his time, Gwangwa is still a powerfully compelling live artist. It may be a cliché, but one that is sometimes true: Gwangwa’s music at two memorial services for Kgositsile earlier this year – reprising songs that Medu veterans remember well from Botswana – really did not leave a dry eye in the house.</p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Gwangwa at a memorial service for Keorapetse Kgositsile.</span></figcaption>
</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/91670/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gwen Ansell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>South African jazz veteran Jonas Gwangwa has been getting recognition for the pivotal role he played in ‘singing down apartheid.’Gwen Ansell, Associate of the Gordon Institute for Business Science, University of PretoriaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/897002018-01-05T10:10:05Z2018-01-05T10:10:05ZA tribute to Keorapetse Kgositsile, South Africa’s poet laureate<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200901/original/file-20180105-26169-13x45ru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=63%2C196%2C3474%2C2004&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Renowned South African poet and liberation struggle hero Keorapetse Kgositsile.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sunday World/ Tshepo Kekana</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Memories of <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/keorapetse-william-kgositsile">Keorapetse Kgositsile</a> (1938-2017), or Bra Willie, as he was affectionately known, are of a poet who always had a smile on his face, who exuded gentleness, and was soft-spoken. He died on Wednesday.</p>
<p>In his schooldays Bra Willie (78) managed to get access to African American poets <a href="https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/langston-hughes">Langston Hughes’</a> and <a href="http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/r_wright/wright_life.htm">Richard Wright’s</a> poems. This was no mean feat in apartheid South Africa when schools for African children either didn’t have libraries or they were poorly-stocked, and African students were denied access to literature deemed to be “seditious”. Even my “whites only” school library had no books with African-American poems, still less the apartheid English setwork books. </p>
<p>His first job was working for a 1950s left newspaper, the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-new-age-newspaper">New Age</a>, which had strong links to the African National Congress. The apartheid regime banned it in 1962.</p>
<p>In 1962 Kgositsile went into exile in the US. His career flourished in Harlem; he gave numerous readings at African-American jazz clubs, and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University.</p>
<p>Kgositsile published ten collections of poetry. The first was <a href="http://www.aaregistry.org/poetry/view/spirits-unchained-keorapetse-kgositsile">Spirits Unchained</a> (1969). Perhaps the most influential were <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6480761-my-name-is-afrika">My Name is Africa</a> (1971), <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books/about/The_Present_is_a_Dangerous_Place_to_Live.html?id=01MhAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">The Present is a Dangerous Place to Live</a> (1975) and <a href="https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/when-clouds-clear/author/keorapetse-kgositsile/">When the Clouds Clear </a> (1990). </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200906/original/file-20180105-26154-1w2jgn0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200906/original/file-20180105-26154-1w2jgn0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=838&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200906/original/file-20180105-26154-1w2jgn0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=838&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200906/original/file-20180105-26154-1w2jgn0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=838&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200906/original/file-20180105-26154-1w2jgn0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1053&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200906/original/file-20180105-26154-1w2jgn0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1053&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200906/original/file-20180105-26154-1w2jgn0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1053&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
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</figure>
<p>In 1975 Kgositsile sacrificed his flourishing career to return to Africa to work for the ANC in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. In 1977 he founded the ANC’s Department of Education in exile, and in 1983 its <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/organisations/amandla-cultural-ensemble">Department of Arts and Culture </a> in 1983.</p>
<p>He continued to produce poetry and music, melding African and diasporic poetry influenced by jazz.</p>
<p>Kgositsile’s impact on a generation of South African left literary activists during the 1970s and 1980s was immense. Tattered photostats of his work passed from hand to hand were the samizdat of the oppressed under apartheid, which is how we learnt of his poems. </p>
<p>As soon as apartheid censorship ended in 1990, the <a href="http://www.saha.org.za/collections/the_congress_of_south_african_writers_cosaw_collection.htm">Congress of South African Writers</a> brought out a selection of his poems When the Clouds Clear. Willie returned to South Africa from exile, and was elected vice-president of the organisation.</p>
<p>Kgositsile wrote of the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/june-16-soweto-youth-uprising">1976 Soweto generation</a> who revolted against apartheid, following the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In our land fear is dead</p>
<p>The young are no longer young …</p>
</blockquote>
<p>South Africa’s youth reciprocated this admiration: again and again a youthful poet would recite from memory a Kgositsile poem, mimicking his voice to perfection. They enjoyed doing this to his face as much as in his absence. </p>
<p>In today’s literary establishment, none of the country’s literati command this sort of respect.</p>
<p>He was <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/keorapetse-william-kgositsile">honoured</a> with the South African Poet Laureate Prize in 2006.</p>
<p>Kgositsile won several literary awards including the Harlem Cultural Council Poetry Award and in South Africa the Herman Charles Bosman Prize, and in 2008 the <a href="http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/national-orders/order-ikhamanga-0">Order of Ikhamanga</a> (Silver) for </p>
<blockquote>
<p>excellent achievements in the field of literature and using these exceptional talents to expose the evils of the <a href="https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2018-01-03-parliament-pays-tribute-to-late-poet-and-political-activist-keorapetse-kgositsile/">system of apartheid</a>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He was married four times. His wives included <a href="https://www.parliament.gov.za/person-details-fancy/668">Baleka Mbete</a>, a <a href="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2015-02-17-baleka-mbete-in-the-centre-of-the-maelstrom/#.Wk89o1WWbIU">fellow poet</a> and currently Speaker of the National Assembly. He is survived by his fourth wife, Baby Dorcas Kgositsile, as well as seven <a href="https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/sunday-times/20180107/281543701314882">children and grandchildren</a>.</p>
<p><em>The author is a <a href="http://badilishapoetry.com/keith-gottschalk/">published poet</a></em>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/89700/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Keith Gottschalk is a member of the African National Congress. </span></em></p>Keorapetse Kgositsile was made South Africa’s national poet laureate in 2006, the only person to have been given the honour.Keith Gottschalk, Political Scientist, University of the Western CapeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.