Cover of If I Could Sing (2002).

Keorapetse William Kgositsile (b. September 19, 1938) is a South African poet and political activist, and was an influential member of the African National Congress in the 1960s and 1970s. He lived in exile in the United States from 1962 until 1975, the peak of his literary career. Kgositsile made extensive study of African-American literature and culture, becoming particularly interested in jazz. During the 1970s he was a central figure among African-American poets, encouraging interest in Africa as well as the practice of poetry as a performance art; Kgositsile was known for his readings in New York City jazz clubs. He was one of the first to bridge the gap between African poetry and Black poetry in the United States, and thus one of the first and most significant poets in the Pan-African movement. September 19 is the 262nd day of the year (263rd in leap years). ... 1938 (MCMXXXVIII) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ... The African National Congress (ANC) is a centre-left political party, and has been South Africas governing party (in a coalition) since the establishment of majority rule in May 1994. ... An African American (also Afro-American, Black American, or simply black), is a member of an ethnic group in the United States whose ancestors, usually in predominant part, were indigenous to Africa. ... Jazz master Louis Armstrong remains one of the most loved and best known of all jazz musicians. ... New York City portal The Empire State Building (right) and the Chrysler Building (left) are easily recognized symbols of New York City to the world. ... Pan-African people are all people with African physical features. ...

Early life

Kgositsile was born in Johannesburg, and grew up in a small shack in back of a house in a white neighborhood.^[1] His first experience of apartheid, other than having to go to school outside of his neighborhood for reasons he did not then understand, was a conflict with a local white family after he fought a white friend of his who hesistated when other friends refused to join a boxing club that denied Kgositsile membership.^[2] The experience was a formative one, and joined with other experiences of exclusion that increased throughout his teenage years. For Kgositsile, adulthood—being a "grown up nigger"—meant an entrance into apartheid.^[3] City motto: Unity in Development Province Gauteng Mayor Amos Masondo Area  - % water 1,644 km² 0. ... A segregated beach in South Africa, 1982. ...

Kgositsile attended Matibane High School in Johannesburg, as well as others in other parts of the country. During that time he was able (with some difficulty) to find books by Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and influenced by them as well as by European writers (principally Charles Dickens and D. H. Lawrence), he began writing stories, though not yet with any intention of doing so professionally.^[4] After working a series of odd jobs after high school, he took to writing more seriously, and got a job for the politically charged newspaper New Age. He contributed both reporting and poetry to the newspaper. These early poems, anticipating a lifetime of Kgositsile's work, combine lyricism with an unmuted call to arms, as in these lines from "Dawn": Langston Hughes, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1936 Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, novelist, playwright, and newspaper columnist. ... Richard Wright, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1939 Richard Nathaniel Wright (September 4, 1908 - November 28, 1960) was an African-American author of novels and short stories. ... Dickens was a prolific writer who was almost always working on a new instalment for a story and rarely missed a deadline. ... D. H. Lawrence David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) was one of the most important, prolific and controversial English writers of the 20th century, whose output spans novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism and personal letters. ... Lyric poetry is a form of poetry that does not attempt to tell a story, as do epic poetry and dramatic poetry, but is of a more personal nature instead. ...

Remember in baton boot and bullet ritual
The bloodhounds of Monster Vorster wrote
SOWETO over the belly of my land
with the indelible blood of infants
So the young are no longer young
Not that they demand a hasty death^[5]

Any early interest in fiction was replaced by the sheer urgency of communication Kgositsile felt. As he said later, "In a situation of oppression, there are no choices beyond didactic writing: either you are a tool of oppression or an instrument of liberation."^[6] B. J. Vorster Balthazar Johannes Vorster (December 13, 1915 - September 10, 1983), better known as John Vorster, was Prime Minister of South Africa from 1966 to 1978, and President from 1978 to 1979. ... Johannesburg, including Soweto, from the International Space Station Soweto is an urban area in Johannesburg, in Gauteng province South Africa whose northern boundary begins about 15km south-west of central Johannesburg. ...

The years of exile

In 1961, under considerable pressure both for himself and as part of a government effort to shut down New Age, Kgositile was urged by the African National Congress, of which he was a vocal member, to leave the country. He went initially to Dar es Salaam to write for Spearhead magazine (unrelated to the right-wing British magazine of the same name), ^[7] but the following year emigrated to the United States. He studied at a series of universities beginning with Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he "spent a lot of time in the library trying to read as much black literature as I could lay my hands on."^[8] Dar es Salaam (دار السلام), formerly Mzizima, is the largest city (pop. ... Spearhead is a British far right-wing magazine edited by John Tyndall. ... Lincoln University is the name of a university in New Zealand and several in the United States: Lincoln University (California) Lincoln University (Missouri) Lincoln University (New Zealand) Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) See also: University of Lincoln This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise... Official language(s) None Capital Harrisburg Largest city Philadelphia Area  - Total  - Width  - Length  - % water  - Latitude  - Longitude Ranked 33rd 119,283 km² 255 km 455 km 2. ...

After studying at the University of New Hampshire and The New School for Social Research, Kgostisile entered the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing at Columbia University. At the same time, he published his first collection of poems, Spirits Unchained. The collection was well received, and Kgositsile was given a Harlem Cultural Council Poetry Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Award.^[9] He graduated from Columbia in 1971, and remained in New York, teaching and giving his characteristically dynamic readings in downtown clubs and as part of the Uptown Black Arts Movement^[10]. Kgositsile's most influential collection, "My Name is Afrika," was published in this year. The response, including an introduction to the book by Gwendolyn Brooks, established Kgositsile as a leading African-American poet. The Last Poets, a group of revolutionary African-American poets, took their name from one of his poems. The University of New Hampshire (UNH) is a public university in the University System of New Hampshire. ... The New School for Social Research is the name of the graduate division of The New School. ... Alternate uses: see MFA (disambiguation) Master of Fine Arts (MFA) is a graduate degree in an area of applied or performing arts typically requiring two to three years of study beyond the Bachelors level. ... Columbia University is a private university in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. ... The National Endowment for the Arts is a United States federally funded program that offers support and funding for projects that exhibit artistic excellence. ... Gwendolyn Brooks Gwendolyn Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was an award-winning African American woman poet. ... The Last Poets are a group of poet and musicians, arising from the late 1960s African American civil rights movement. ...

Jazz was particularly important to Kgositsile's sense of black American culture and his own place in it. He saw John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, B. B. King, and many others in the jazz clubs of New York, and wrote to them and of them in his poems. Jazz was crucial to Kgositsile's most influential idea: his sense of a worldwide African diaspora united by an ear for a certain quintessentially black sound. He wrote of the black aesthetic he pursued and celebrated: John Coltrane John William Coltrane (September 23, 1926 – July 17, 1967) was an American jazz saxophonist and composer. ... Dr. Nina Simone Eunice Kathleen Waymon, better known as Dr. Nina Simone (February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003), was a singer, songwriter and pianist. ... Billie Holiday For the Canadian broadcaster, see Billie Holiday (broadcaster). ... B. B. King Riley B. King aka B. B. King (born September 16, 1925) is a well known American blues guitarist and songwriter. ...

There is nothing like art—in the oppressor's sense of art. There is only movement. Force. Creative power. The walk of Sophiatown totsi or my Harlem brother on Lenox Avenue. Field Hollers. The Blues. A Trane riff. Marvin Gaye or mbaqanga. Anguished happiness. Creative power, in whatever form it is released, moves like the dancer's muscles.^[11]

Freedom from a constricting white aesthetic sensability and the discovery of the rhythmic experience common to black people of all the world were, for Kgositsile's, two sides of the same struggle. Sophiatown was a lively, mostly-black suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa. ... Marvin Gaye on the cover of his classic 1971 album Whats Going On Marvin Gaye (born Marvin Pentz Gay, Jr. ... Mbaqanga is a style of South African music that is usually sung by people from rural areas. ...

Kgositsile also became active in theater while in New York, founding the Black Arts Theatre in Harlem. He saw black theater as a fundamentally revolutionary activity, whose ambition must be the destruction of the ingrained habits of thought responsible for perceptions of black people both by white people and by themselves. He wrote: It has been suggested that Revolutionary be merged into this article or section. ...

We will be destroying the symbols which have facilitated our captivity. We will be creating and establishing symbols to facilitate our necessary and constant beginning.^[12]

The Black Arts Theatre was part of a larger project aimed at the creation of literary black voice unafraid to be militant. Kgositsile argued persistently against the idea of Negritude, a purely aesthetic conception of black culture, on the grounds that it was dependent on white aesthetic models of perception, a process Kgositsile called "fornicating with the white eye."^[13] Négritude, a concept developed in the 1930s by a group that included future Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor and Francophone poet Aimé Césaire, is the belief that one should identify ones blackness without reference to ones homeland, native language, religion or spatial/geographical location. ...

In 1975, Kgositsile decided to return to Africa despite his blossoming career in the United States, and took up a teaching position at the University of Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania. In 1978, he married another ANC exile, Baleka Mbete, who was also living in Tanzania. Still from exile, he renewed his activities with the ANC, founding its Department of Education in 1977 and its Department of Arts and Culture in 1983; he became Deputy Secretary in 1987. ^[14] Kgositsile taught at several schools in different parts of Africa, including Kenya, Botswana, and Zambia. Throughout this period he was banned in South Africa, but in 1990, the Congress of South African Writers, with which he was already associated, decided to attempt a publication within the country. The successful result was When the Clouds Clear, a collection of poems from other volumes, which was Kgositsile's first book to be available in his native country. The University of Dar es Salaam is a university in the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam. ...

After Mandela

Kgositsile's most recent poems are more conversational and perhaps less lyrical than his earlier work, and, compared to his once-fiery nationalism, they are muted, and even skeptical. They speak of doubt rather than certainty, a doubt often reinforced by rhythmical understatment, as in the short, uneven lines of "Recollections":

Though you remain
Convinced
To be alive
You must have somewhere
To go
Your destination remains
Elusive.

Baleka Mbete-Kgositsile is a leading member of the ANC and a Member of Parliament; his daughter Ipeleng (from his previous marriage to the late Melba Johnson Kgositsile) is a journalist and fiction writer who has written for Vibe and Essence magazines. Keorapetse Kgositsile has returned to the United States several times, including a visiting professorship at the New School. He was a member of the editorial board of This Day newspaper in Johannesburg, and remains one of the dean of contemporary South African literature. The Parliament of South Africa, has undergone many transformations, as a result of the countrys tumultuous history. ... Janet Jackson on the cover of Vibe in 1998. ... Essence Magazine is an American fashion and lifestyle magazine. ...

Books

Poetry collections

• Spirits Unchained. Detroit: Broadside, 1969.
• For Melba. Chicago: Third World, 1970.
• My Name is Afrika. New York: Doubleday, 1971.
• Places and Bloodstains: Notes for Ipeleng. Oakland, California: Achebe Publications, 1975.
• The Present is a Dangerous Place to Live. Chicago: Third World, 1975. 2nd ed. 1993.
• When the Clouds Clear. Johannesburg: Congress of South African Writers, 1990.
• To the Bitter End. Chicago: Third World, 1995.
• If I Could Sing: Selected Poems. Roggebaai, South Africa: Kwela and Plumstead, South Africa: Snailpress, 2002.
• This Way I Salute You. Cape Town: Kwela and Snailpress, 2004.

Other books

• The Word Is Here: Poetry from Modern Africa. New York: Anchor, 1973.
• Approaches to Poetry Writing. Chicago: Third World, 1994.

References

1. ^ Rowell, Charles H. "'With Bloodstains to Testify': An Interview with Keorapetse Kgositsile" (Callaloo No. 2 [1978], 23-42), 23.
2. ^ Rowell 23.
3. ^ Rowell 24
4. ^ Rowell 27.
5. ^ "Dawn" (New Age Vol. 9 No. 2, 15 <http://disa.nu.ac.za/articledisplaypage.asp?articletitle=New+Age&filename=Dav9n285>).
6. ^ Quoted in Bethlehem, Louise, "“A Primary Need as Strong as Hunger”: The Rhetoric of Urgency in South African Literary Culture under Apartheid" (Poetics Today Vol. 22 No.2 [2001] 365-389), 367.
7. ^ "Kgositsile, Keorapetse" Encyclopædia Britannica, 2006 (Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 25 Jan. 2006 <http://search.eb.com/eb/article-9045234>).
8. ^ Rowell 28.
9. ^ Snyder, Greg, "Life's Truth Aesthetically Interpreted: Greg Synder Talks With Keorapetse Kgositsile" (New School for Social Research, Bulletin # 21 Vol. 6 no. 2 [1995] <http://www.newschool.edu/tcds/twenone.htm>).
10. ^ Snyder.
11. ^ Quoted in Ro, Sigmund, "'Desercrators' and 'Necromancers': Black American Writers and Critics in the Nineteen-Sixties and the Third World Perspective" (Callaloo, No. 25 [1985], 563-576), 560.
12. ^ "Towards our Theatre: A Definitive Act," quoted in Brown, Lloyd W., "The Cultural Revolution in Black Theatre" (Negro American Literature Forum, Vol. 8, No. 1. [1974], 159-165), 161.
13. ^ "Paths to the Future," quoted in Arnold, A. James, "Cesaire at Seventy" (Callaloo, No. 17 [1983], 111-119), 118.
14. ^ Snyder.