A song of constant beginnings
The poet’s biographer on how he brought together the African and diasporic traditions of resistance and art
On January 3 2018 — the year in which he would have reached the milestone of his 80th birthday — the sagacious doyen of African and black diasporic letters, poet laureate Keorapetse William Kgositsile transitioned into the realm of his ancestors.
On this occasion of his departure, after spending the past five years working with him as a research subject for my doctoral thesis, as well as in my capacity as his biographer, I feel compelled to pay tribute to this literary giant.
As much as he is a celebrated figure in South Africa and the United States, there are fragmentary biographical sketches of his life that are not widely documented. I will focus on his years in South Africa before exile to illuminate a lesser-known stage of his life, then chronicle his exilic movements and homecoming.
Kgositsile was born on September 19 1938. Articles and websites unwittingly document his birthplace as Johannesburg — a result of the political conditions in which he was born and the foresight of his fierce grandmother, Madikeledi, who defied them. He was born in Dithakong, a village in Mahikeng, but Madikeledi drilled into young Keorapetse’s mind Johannesburg as his birthplace, in case the security police chanced upon him. This safeguarded him, to an extent, from the jaws of the Groups Areas Act and the pass laws.
Two women, his grandmother and his mother, Galekgobe, are the concrete foundation of his life: “Practically everything I write is tied up with some kind of wisdom I got from them in that hostile environment.”
Madikeledi was a pivotal figure in his development. Her political savvy recognised British colonial education as “very dangerous” and the English language as responsible for “the death of our ancestors”. She forbade English in her household, and nourished in Kgositsile a love for Setswana and literature. This love makes Kgositsile’s oeuvre an impressive bridge between black South Africa and black America. In his towering tribute to Madikeledi, Kgositsile draws parallels between her wisdom and that of Amiri Baraka, Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon and Patrice Lumumba. This historical arch bridges black intellectual production in these two geographical loci, and Kgositsile emphasises it for pan-African solidarity.
In Kgositsile’s work Madikeledi represents a matri-archive from which he was able to draw the principal values of community, custom and culture on which his formidable oeuvre rests. He is praised by his African-American peers for being of two worlds but not divided, possessing a powerful harmony within himself — a universal blackness. His distinct radical, collectivist and material approach to politics and culture places him in the tradition of his literary predecessor, ANC cofounder Solomon Plaatje.
Tragedy befell the family when Madikeledi died in 1949, a moment he would reflect on in an experimentation with form in exile, in his short story Grandma’s Favourite Son, published in Negro Digest (later Black World) of November 1972. The timing of this story is synchronous with his discovery of his mother’s death in 1968, three years after the fact.
Both these occasions launched Kgositsile into inconsolable alienation that later drove major transformations in his life and work.
The first death resulted in young Kgositsile relocating to Lomanyaneng in Mahikeng, to live with his Uncle Tholo, a teacher at Tshidi Barolong Secondary School, where Kgositsile enrolled. Bra Tholo’s house was known for blaring the latest jazz records on the weekend and hosting distinguished jazz-loving friends. In the late 1940s, Bra Tholo discovered bebop through Sam Tshabanga, a township jazz trumpeter and friend who had come into contact with American jazz pianist Horace Silver while playing for the African Jazz Pioneers. Silver would send Tshabanga new records from Blue Notes Records upon their release.
Living in a house filled with jazz would shape Kgositsile’s relationship to the art form, and today his work cannot be read outside the frame of black music. He would later understand its development in black America, and its development in South Africa from marabi, to be the most advanced cultural or artistic affirmation of black people’s determination to live in spite of the conditions they were faced with. Setswana and jazz worked in tandem as political building blocks to counter colonial and other alienations.
Kgositsile moved to Johannesburg in 1952, into the cauldron of deep cultural, political and economic tectonic shifts, to continue his high school studies in what was then Western Native Township’s Madibane High School. This move followed a short stint at the Ohlange Institute in Durban, from which he was expelled because of his involvement in detonative student politics during the height of student strikes against the newly formed apartheid regime.
Ohlange was the brainchild of ANC co-founder John Langalibalele Dube, who modelled it on Booker T Washington’s Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, where Dube completed his studies in 1899. Ohlange turned Kgositsile’s mind into fertile ground for political activity and prepared him for the pace of urban sociopolitical life.
At Madibane High, his love for Setswana was deepened by Daniel Phillip Semakaleng Monyaise, the canonised Tswana author who taught language and literatures there. If Madikeledi sowed the oral component of the Setswana language, then Monyaise tended the seedling and made it possible for Kgositsile to start thinking about the written component of that language.
Until his death, Kgositsile nourished a deep desire, born out of a sense of atonement, to translate Monyaise’s work into English.
Even before completing high school in 1954, Kgositsile was aware of the currents of a black literary renaissance underway in the 1950s — the fabulous decade of Drum and Sophiatown — so that by the time he finished his studies he was resolute in his decision to be a writer.
He vowed never to work for a white man and, more importantly, never to sound or write like one. He started interacting with writers such as Can Themba, Casey Motsisi and Stan Motjuwadi, who, in his reckoning, did not express themselves like carbon-copy English writers.
Themba was most appealing to Kgositsile; his writing made Kgositsile realise that his poetic references were not English, in spite of the language he used, which inspired Kgositsile’s life’s mission to make English native to South Africa.
The supreme intellectual tsotsi of them all, as Lewis Nkosi deems Themba, fought against apartheid’s attempts to retribalise the natives, thus fashioning an urban literature on terms that were deemed unacceptable. Themba’s rejection of the country and its indigenous languages, and his writing in a new lingo of the townships, became an act of protest against apartheid’s retribalising project. Nourished by the Setswana matri-archive, Kgositsile also rejected the government and its tribalism, but committed himself to a unique project of finding continuity between the cultural imperative, his emerging urban identity and his later diasporic identity. This commitment is principal to appraising him as a bridge between black South Africa and black America.
In 1955 Kgositsile pursued and found tutelage with journalist Alex la Guma, then based in Cape Town, whose work in the communist weekly paper The New Age deeply moved him. The following year Kgositsile established himself as a journalist. His work appeared for the first time in print in The New Age (known as The Guardian before the Treason Trial), under the editorship of Ruth First. To contextualise the newspaper, all its editors — First in Johannesburg, Brian Bunting in Cape Town, Govan Mbeki in the Eastern Cape, MP Naicker in Durban — were part of the Treason Trial. They were not just journalists but also political activists. It was through this cultural and political matrix that Kgositsile joined the ANC.
His life mirrors that of Plaatje in reconstituting the ANC as an organised political expression of a cultural alternative to the culture of colonialism and apartheid.
Kgositsile was soon entrusted with the responsibility of being the messenger between the ANC leadership and Alfred Nzo, the chairperson of the ANC’s Alexandra branch, who was detained at the Modderbee Prison for not carrying a residence permit. As Kgositsile recalled, he always outsmarted the prison guards, who were not the brightest crop and who believed all natives looked alike. This put Kgositsile on the radar of the ANC leadership.
Politically, things reached fever pitch. In 1959, the Africanists opposed to multiracialism broke away from the ANC to form the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), demanding the government of Africans by Africans for Africans and promising militant action to achieve it.
The PAC announced a campaign of mass protest against the hated pass law system. On March 21 1960 in Sharpeville, the PAC, led by Robert Sobukwe, waged an anti-pass protest. They were met by police officers who opened unrestrained fire on protesters, killing 69 and wounding 186. The massacre became a symbol of the brutality of apartheid. Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd ordered a crackdown. Using emergency powers, the government banned the ANC and the PAC and detained thousands of anti-apartheid dissidents.
The ANC responded by ordering some of its members, including Kgositsile, to leave the country.
In a meeting with Walter Sisulu,
Duma Nokwe and Joe Slovo, Kgositsile was instructed to leave with a Tanganyikan journalist for Dar es Salaam. What followed was a harrowing passage to exile, and his attempts to write of it in the piece I Know My Name draws parallels between his crossing of the crocodile-infested Limpopo River and the middle passage of the Atlantic slave trade. In his summation, he lost the first of his nine lives, but was reborn with new purpose.
In Dar es Salaam, Kgositsile lived in the ANC camps and wrote for the communist journal Spearhead, edited and published by ANC member and lawyer Frene Ginwala. She assisted many exiled members of the ANC and helped to establish the ANC in exile. Spearhead, a monthly journal, was conceived as a tool to bring continental attention to the atrocities of the apartheid government, to put pressure on that regime. The title is a reference to ANC’s armed wing, uMkhonto weSizwe — “the spear of the nation” — which was already sprouting underground.
Also finding root in neighbouring Uganda was a new crop of African authors of English expression, as shown by the June 1962 Makerere conference on African literature in the English language. Kgositsile’s Spearhead colleague, journalist Joe Louw, attended the conference and returned with new novels out of West and East Africa. Kgositsile, as an aspiring writer with a project to tame the English language, found this a treasure box of African contemporaries, and it cemented his ethos. His field of influences grew.
It was in Dar es Salaam that he started toying with the idea of writing fiction. During this time the ANC offices, through diplomatic relations, received scholarship offers for African students to enter a programme administered by the Africa-America Institute, funded by the US government. The scholarship sent African students to Lincoln University, a historically black institution. Kgositsile received the scholarship and left Tanzania for the US. He arrived in New York in December 1962. Jonas Gwangwa, who shared an apartment. The building was in Harlem, a predominantly black political and cultural hub of civil rights movements, which was often under the eyes of the FBI. Kgositsile’s name made it on to their list shortly after his arrival in the US.
It would seem the scholarship that enabled him and others, such as Louw, Peter Davidson and Harold Head (writer Bessie Head’s husband) to reside in the US also gave the FBI a list of insurgent PAC and ANC students to watch. It was the CIA’s plan to bring young political students from Southern Africa under its watch and, in effect, tame them into noble savages with American education. That was a crude oversight on their part.
A congregation of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid Southern African activists in a historically black university, robustly engaged with their African-American counterparts, led mounting resistance and gained attention from influential civil rights leaders such as Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael (president of the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee and, later, Miriam Makeba’s husband), Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu (one of the leaders of the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution) and Abdullah Abdur-Razzaq (Malcolm X’s right hand), who visited Lincoln University to mobilise students and staff.
The grounds of Lincoln swelled with political activity, attracting even the notice of the Ku Klux Klan. Kgositsile soon absconded from Lincoln to join the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee, which was staging protests in the form of sit-ins, and mobilising people, particularly in the South. Kgositsile was soon travelling to, notably, Mississippi, as part of the Freedom Summer campaign, to stoke the fires of Southern civil rights.
In New York Kgositsile had already established a base. He, Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal were inseparable, and, alongside writers David Henderson, Ishmael Reed, Askia Toure, Jayne Cortez and Quincy Troupe, became the cultural mouthpiece of the Black Power Movement, known in retrospect as the Black Arts Movement. Kgositsile’s thrust was now cultural and political. The pan-African articulations in his work soon injected the Black Power and Black Arts movements with a consciousness of Africa and its diaspora. The scope of the African-American struggle extended to alliances with anticolonial movements on the African continent, in Latin America and the Caribbean.
With an identity they deemed fraught by doubleness and hyphenated by blood, African-Americans began gravitating towards Africa in defining themselves. LeRoi Jones became Amiri Baraka, Ronald Snelling became Askia Touré, Stokely Carmichael became Kwame Touré, Don Lee became Haki Madhubuti, Paulette Williams became Ntozakhe Shange and Gloria House became Aneb Kgositsile.
Africa became a prime metaphor through which African-Americans sought to self-define, and Kgositsile represented the materiality of the continent.
His astute decolonial politics inspired Black Power and Black Arts, and he was embraced and celebrated by black publishers, jazz musicians, writers, politicians and painters. Among the most significant of the influences Kgositsile had in the black diaspora was his artistic relationship with saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, which resulted in Kgositsile writing liner notes for Sanders’s 1971 album Thembi.
Kgositsile’s decolonial vision and sense of community, as eloquently expressed in the poem Towards a Walk in the Sun, inspired the revolutionary poetic outfit and purported grandfathers of rap, The Last Poets. They responded to Kgositsile’s call for the “end of poetry” and the beginning of armed struggle by declaring that “therefore we are the last poets of the world”.
The Setswana language and literature, which by now instructed Kgositsile’s pen, moulded Towards a Walk in the Sun’s keen sense of collective action, its powerful poetics, rhythms and overtures.
Writer-activist Tom Dent wrote of Kgositsile in the preface of his Magnolia Street: “Kgositsile is a powerful poet whose voice contains an innate, almost divine authority, as if he is participant in a privileged conversation about the nature of life. Always struggling in his life and work to come to terms with a home he was and is exiled from, he encouraged me to better understand mine.”
This is the collectivist virtue and ethos that has come to define Kgositsile. Giving himself without losing himself is why he was a powerful geopolitical bridge, and I believe these qualities have strong roots in his matriarchal upbringing, and the generative and transformative matriarchive it imparted.
He had published widely by the end of the 1960s, winning the second Conrad Kent Rivers Memorial Award ahead of the release of his debut collection, Spirits Unchained, in 1969. That collection earned him the Harlem Cultural Council Poetry Award and the National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Award. His second collection, For Melba (1970), is a homage to his first wife and their daughter, Ipeleng Aneb Kgositsile.
This monumental collection’s sensitivities complicate the rampant masculinity that is often the thorn in the Black Power and Black Arts legacy. In the introduction to the collection, Kgositsile laments the disrespect for women and the elderly in his immediate community, and renounces it as alien.
Kgositsile’s third collection, My Name Is Afrika (1971) — his magnum opus — was initially submitted to Columbia University as part of the requirements for the fulfilment of a master’s degree in the arts. He had by then completed his unfinished Lincoln degree at the New School in New York.
In 1972, Kgositsile put a call out to African writers to submit poems for The Word Is Here (1973), which he edited. The Present Is a Dangerous Place to Live (1974), his fourth full-length collection, symbolically marked his imminent departure from the US and expressed his depression after learning of his mother’s death.
Places and Bloodstains, his fifth offering, demonstrates a shift in consciousness.
His earlier four volumes were largely dedicated to diasporic political figures and movements. Places and Bloodstains, introduced by Chinua Achebe, is dedicated to Southern African political movements and figures. By now a towering figure in the worlds of politics, culture and academia, Kgositsile’s official ruminations on art were solicited by Gwendolyn Brooks and Haki Madhubuti (founder of Third World Press, which published The Present Is a Dangerous Place to Live), and he collaborated with them on A Capsule Course in Black Poetry Writing, published in 1975. (I use this publication in my poetry course at Stellenbosch University.)
The conditions surrounding Kgositsile’s decision to leave the US had to do with his frustrations with being away from his site of struggle, despite his internationalist outlook, and notwithstanding his new family, Melba and Ipeleng Kgositsile. He travelled to London to speak to ANC president Oliver Tambo, discussing ways to get him back to Africa.
In London he also reunited with Duma Nokwe, recently appointed deputy secretary general of the ANC, and its director of international affairs. Kgositsile’s time with Nokwe,