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Soweto poetry began appearing
in the mid-1960s mainly in the Johannesburg-based literary magazine The Classic, and has continued to
reflect an increasing post-Sharpeville racial polarization in South
Africa. The work of poets such as Oswald
Mtshali, Mongane Serote, Sipho Sepamla and Mafika Gwala took its impetus
initially from South African student (SASO) Black Consciousness reactions to
apartheid legislation, and subsequently from the 1976 Soweto
disturbances. Theirs is a poetry which has been instrumental not only in
re-establishing a vital tradition of black writing in South
Africa, but also in prompting serious, often
uncomfortable, re-examination by writers and critics alike on the function of,
and the appropriate responses to, literature in a racially turbulent society.
This collection of essays, interviews and reviews defines Soweto
poetry as the single most important socio-literary phenomenon of the seventies
in South Africa,
provides a background against which this poetry may be seen, and traces its
development to date.
The
writing with which this collection is concerned goes by different names. It has
been called Post-Sharpeville poetry, township poetry, the New Black Poetry of
the Seventies, Participatory poetry and People's poetry, as well as Soweto
Poetry. These labels all have a certain fitness. Soweto
poetry, however, does seem the most satisfactory term for a distinct genre
which emerged after the almost total proscription in the sixties of a previous
generation of black South African literature. This earlier writing included the
racy Sophiatown prose of the fifties, as well as the poetry of Mazisi Kunene,
Keorapetse Kgositsile and Dennis Brutus. Soweto poetry, in
the first work of Casey Motsisi, Njabulo Ndebele, Mtshali, Serote and Gwala,
concentrated on the immediacy of day-to-day township life, particularly in Soweto
itself. And Soweto, as a social and
metaphysical entity, has continued to provide the stimulus for a poetry which
has generally adopted a stark English idiom and a ghetto-derived imagery, and
which has eschewed rhyme and closed forms in favour of open or ‘naked' forms.
These stylistic features have proved to be utterly appropriate to the rigours
of contemporary black South African experience.
Soweto
poets do not of course all necessarily live in Soweto
itself. Rather Soweto, especially
since the events of 1976, has like Sharpeville before it gathered certain
symbolic associations. On 21 March 1960
a Pan Africanist Congress anti-pass campaign ended in violence at
Sharpeville township, while on 16 June 1976 in Soweto the immediate issue of
Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in black schools sparked off nation-wide
racial confrontations. Fundamental to the cataclysmic events of both
Sharpeville arid Soweto was the
question of black rights in a repressive, white-ruled society. And the idea of
Blackness is fundamental to Post-Sharpeville or, as it is here called, Soweto
poetry.
Initially,
Soweto poetry was directed in protest at a predominantly
white ‘liberal' readership, with Mtshali's seminal collection, Sounds of a Cowhide Drum (first
published in 1971), selling a record number of copies for a book of
poetry within South Africa.
The following lines from "Always a Suspect" are typical of Mtshali's early
work:
I trudge the city pavements
side by side with ‘madam'
who shifts her handbag
from my side to
the other.
Here the irony obviously depends upon a perceived discrepancy between
commonly accepted notions of human dignity and the peculiar indignities daily
heaped on blacks by the apartheid mentality. The subject matter was new at the
time, but the poetic approach, including the condemnatory use of a white
bourgeois background, was not unfamiliar to Western readers.
By
the mid-seventies, however, the emphasis had shifted with Serote's Black
Consciousness voice (predictably less popular with whites) finding its full
power in an uncompromising poetry of resistance. This is a mobilizing rhetoric
utilizing epic forms (in a highly contemporary, almost Brechtian sense) and
traditional African oral techniques of repetition, parallelism and ideophones.
By these means the poet seeks to impart to a black communal audience, often in
a context of performance, a message of consciousness-raising and race pride:
i am the man you will never defeat
i will be the one to plague you
your children are cursed
if you walk this earth, where i too walk
and you tear my clothes and reach for my flesh
and you tear my flesh to reach my blood
and you spill my blood to reach my bones
and you smash my bones and hope for my soul
.......
i am the man you will never defeat
i will be your shadow, to be with you always
and one day
when the sun rises
the shadows will move.
After Serote's first two collections, Yakhal'inkomo (1972) and Tsetlo (1974), had presented the graphic
horrors of township life, lines like the above from the sixty- page No Baby Must Weep (1975)
signalled the way for such prophetic voices of apocalypse as we encounter in
Gwala's Jol'iinkomoBehold
Mama, Flowers (1978), Ingoapele Madingoane's Africa my Beginning (1979), Christopher van
Wyk's It is Time to Go Home
(1979), Fhazel Johennesse's The Rainmaker
(1979) and, most recently, Mtshali's Fireflames (1980).
(1977), Serote's
Soweto
poetry has, then, during the course of the seventies, more and more presented a
distinctly black-orientated vision; and as the poetry has moved in that
direction, so the poets themselves have tended to revert to their ancestral or
original African names. Oswald Joseph Mtshali ceased using the name Joseph in
favour of Mbuyiseni; Mongane Wally Serote today rarely uses his English middle
name, while Sydney Sipho Sepamla and Mafika Pascal Gwala now sign themselves simply
Sipho Sepamla and Mafika Gwala respectively. Even the writer and critic Ezekiel
Mphahlele has, since his return to South Africa
in 1979, taken to preferring the Ndebele form of his first name, Es'kia.
It
is precisely this emphasis on Blackness that most strikingly distinguishes Soweto
poetry of the seventies from the black South African writing which
immediately preceded it. Broadly speaking, black writers of the fifties and
early sixties, operating in a post-war climate of English-speaking South
African intellectual liberal humanism, offered a liberal-inspired literature
which tended to straddle Western and African philosophical and literary models.
This is true of the romantic-symbolist poetry of writers-in-exile like Brutus
and Arthur Nortje, as well as of Sophiatown writers such as Mphahlele, Lewis
Nkosi and Nat Nakasa.
By
contrast, Soweto poetry has made
its rejection of Western literary and cultural continuities almost a moral and
stylistic imperative. Acutely conscious of new beginnings, those Soweto poets
who have taken the trouble to hunt up fugitive copies of Sophiatown writing, or
of, say, the work of Alex la Guma or Brutus, have felt this work to be somewhat
‘dated' (evidently this applies even to Mazisi Kunene, who markedly explores
African tradition). Ironically, what does seem to ‘date' most black South
African writing prior to Soweto
poetry is its very ability to draw extensively on received English literary and
linguistic conventions. Such verbal resources have almost not survived the kind
of education made available to blacks particularly over the last twenty-five
years. During this time, numbers attending school have admittedly increased
proportionately, but the State has continued to tie expenditure on black
education to the lower incomes of the black community. In addition, private
black schools have definitely been discouraged, while since 1953 there has been
implemented a programme of Bantu Education.
Soweto
poets are in very real ways the products of Bantu Education. This policy, under
Dr H.P. Verwoerd, the then Minister of Native Affairs, introduced so-called
vernacular instruction for Africans up to and including the first year of high
school. The practical effects of Bantu Education have been to make it difficult
for Africans to study subjects in the sciences which have not been adequately
translated into the vernaculars, and to lower the standard of teaching of both
official languages, English and Afrikaans (the latter has in any case been
increasingly rejected by blacks themselves). As Verwoerd stated to the Senate
in 1954: "There is no place for him [the
Bantu] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour."
As
far as the Soweto poet is
concerned, the eloquence of what might be called ‘pre-Bantu-Education' black
writing (an eloquence often nurtured by mission or church schools) is felt to
be a self-consciously ‘artistic' eloquence. The eloquence of Soweto
poetry, on the other hand, is felt to be the eloquence of the streets. The Soweto
poet does not so much regard himself as an individualized poetic consciousness,
but simply as social man: homo sociologicus. To be a Soweto
poet, whether one lives in Soweto
or in any of the other large townships, is to be involved first-hand in a
People's Struggle. And Soweto
itself stands as the metaphor of this new post-Sharpeville mood.
That
Soweto poetry's black assertiveness
has jolted, and continues to jolt, a complacent South African literary scene
is, to say the least, an understatement. Certainly publishers of enterprise and
vision such as Lionel Abrahams had foreseen the direction South African
literature and thought were taking when his Renoster Books published its first
book, Mtshali's Sounds of a Cowhide Drum, in 1971. But when Robert Royston, employed
at the time by a British publishing subsidiary in South Africa, presented to
his own company a collection of ‘new black South African poetry', the
manuscript was rejected as risky and, in any case, not up to standard.
Disappointed by what seemed an all too predictable response, Royston somewhat
diffidently showed his manuscript to the then newly-established Ad. Donker.
Like Abrahams, Donker also immediately saw the potential of a ‘new black
poetry', and in 1973 published the anthology as To Whom It May Concern. This highly influential collection of black
South African poetry has since been reprinted both in South
Africa and abroad, and was in 1982
supplemented by the more comprehensive Voices
from Within: Black Poetry from Southern Africa.
If
many in South Africa were unprepared
for Soweto poetry, this attitude
was fortunately not shared by a number of energetic and newly-founded South
African publishers who, since the early seventies, have continued to promote
South African English literature. It is true that, apart from James Matthews's
Blac Publishing House, these new firms are controlled by whites, and that ideally
one would like to see black writing finding genuine black outlets.
Nevertheless, had it not been for publishers such as Renoster Books, Ad. Donker
and Ravan Press, Soweto poetry
would have been condemned to appearing only in little magazines and newspapers,
if at all.
Such,
in fact, was the fate of many anonymous black
voices of protest which, long before Soweto poetry,
had as early as the 1930s and 40s begun to be heard with some persistence in
black newspapers like Bantu World,
Umteteli Wa
Bantu and Ilanga Lase Natal. These black voices directly
addressed themselves to such current issues as the ‘civilized labour' (white
job reservation) policies of the thirties, the Sophiatown and other squatter
movements of the forties, as well as to black nationalism's rising expectations
of a new dispensation in a period of rapid industrialization after the Second
World War. I have purposely drawn attention here to the existence of this early
and little known black South African protest poetry written in English, for it
seems to me that some understanding of this writing of the thirties and forties
is important to the study of Soweto
poetry. It is said, for instance, that Soweto
poetry is the first specifically black- as opposed to Western-orientated
writing to have emerged in English from black South Africans. But this is not
strictly true. If a politically overt Soweto
poetry owes little to the more liberal-inspired black writing that immediately
preceded it in the fifties, it does have fascinating affinities with a yet
earlier burst of black poetic activity. Despite severely limited publishing
opportunities, it was during the late 1930s that the idea of Blackness first
made itself felt in South African poetry. (For surveys of early black South
African poetry in English see Tim Couzens's "Politics and Black Poetry in South
Africa, 1930-1950" and Michael Chapman's "The Missing Dimension in South
African Literature: Protest Poetry prior to Mtshali." (Both articles are listed
in the bibliography.)
This
poetry of the 1930s and 40s is most significantly represented by two figures:
Peter Abrahams, who is better known as a novelist, and H.I.E. Dhlomo. Abrahams's
only collection of poetry to date, A
Blackman Speaks of Freedom!, appeared in 1940 and Dhlomo's epic Valley of a Thousand Hills in 1941.
While it is doubtful whether many writers today are particularly conversant
with the poetry of either Abrahams or Dhlomo (their books of poetry are
difficult to come by), it is nevertheless tempting to locate in these two
writers the origins of a characteristically Soweto style. This may be sought on
the one hand in Abrahams's use of a tough, Americanized diction, on the other
in Dhlomo's attempts, both in his critical writings and his poetry, to adapt
African traditions to modern South African racial dilemmas. In view of this, it
seemed appropriate to begin the Literary Background section of the present
collection with pieces by both Peter Abrahams and Dhlomo. In the extract here,
Abrahams (1954) recalls how, in seeking a valid idiom of protest, he turned in
the 1930s not to a British humanist literature (as would have been encouraged
by his church-school education at St Peter's), but to the harsh Afro-American
poetry of, amongst others, Langston Hughes. As Abrahams asserts in the poem, "Self":
I
am a shadow
Restless
Roving everywhere
I'm a bum, hungry and lonely
.......
I'm a poet
And
through hunger
And
lust for love and laughter
I
have turned myself into a voice,
Shouting
the pain of the people
And
the sunshine that is to be.
Now it is true
that the occasional American echoes which one encounters today in Soweto poetry
owe little to the Afro-American literary tradition of Abrahams's forebears as
such; nevertheless, a rugged, Americanized diction has been readily absorbed
into a literature shaped by an authentic township milieu of jazz, American B
films and an international Black Power rhetoric.
In
fact, the international recognizability of Soweto poetry's
Black Experience - from
protest to liberating vision -
becomes markedly apparent in the light of Larry Neal's famous
description of the new Afro-American poetry of the 1960s, a movement which,
like Soweto poetry, can be
distinguished by the extent of its attempts to speak directly to black people
about themselves:
They
are not speaking of an art that screams and masturbates before white audiences.
That is the path of Negro literature and civil rights literature. No, they are
not speaking about that kind of thing, even though that is what some Negro
writers of the past have done. Instead, they are speaking of an art that
addresses itself to Black People; an art that speaks to us in terms of our
feelings and ideas about the world; an art that validates the positive aspects
of our life style. Dig: An art that opens us up to the beauty and ugliness
within us; that makes us understand our condition and each other in a more
profound manner; that unites us, exposing us to our painful weaknesses and
strengths; and, finally, an art that posits for us the Vision of a Liberated
Future.
("Any
Day Now", 1969)
The post-colonial poet from black Africa, rid of the colonizer yet maintaining
close links with European formal education systems, has tended to devote a
great deal of his time to expressing personal responses to experience. Both the
black South African poet and his Afro-American counterpart, on the other hand,
continually threatened by the proximity of a white culture, have increasingly
felt the need to vindicate their Blackness. As Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) says: "The Black Artist's role in America is to aid
the destruction of America as he knows it ...
black art/s we make in the black labs of the heart" ("State/Meant",
1965). This kinship between the South African and American black was something
which Abrahams had evidently already sensed in the 1930s.
If
Abrahams anticipated Soweto poetry
in the important respect of presenting
himself, bare of literary adornment, as a people's poet', then Dhlomo can be
seen
as the other formative figure. In articles such as "Zulu Folk Poetry" (1948),
reproduced
here, Dhlomo had already set out many of the aesthetic principles which
Soweto poets, quite independently,
would find conducive. Though his own Valley
of a Thousand Hills never did
fully shed its reliance on an outmoded English
poetic diction,
Here Nkosazana, goddess bright of Light,
Prosperity, Child-birth, and Justice, lived.
'Twas she when tyrant kings with blood reigned harsh,
Rose earthward the afflicted and oppressed
To liberate or soothe and shield from tears,
Dhlomo - like
Abrahams -continued to emphasize, in his critical essays, the need
for the black South African poet to adopt literary forms suited specifically to
black
socio-political circumstances. Reacting against what he saw as an aggressive
white
materialism, as well as against an English-speaking liberal hypocrisy, Dhlomo
embraced a black nationalist ideal and a communal ethic. Seeking inspiration in
traditional African social and literary structures, he eschewed a
Western-inspired
individualism and analytic modes in favour of ‘rhythm', synthesis, which is
central to the African concept of the unity of being: "True tradition is rooted
in the
past, lives and speaks in the present, visualizes and inhales the future." This
sort
of comment had been made by Dhlomo at much the same time as Leopold Senghor
in Paris was presenting ‘rhythm'
and the idea of collective, rather than personal,
experience as the essence of Negritude. Further, Dhlomo's belief that rhythm
and
collectivism are the African's unique contribution to the ideal of a humane
civilization
would apply perfectly to recent Soweto
poems such as Madingoane's
"black trial." As far as Dhlomo was concerned, the black poet's function was
not a
Western-type exploration of the isolated consciousness, but the depiction of
social
oppression and evolution: he was attempting to create an
historically-conditioned
poetry with a social base. As had been the case in traditional African
societies,
poetry was to be seen not so much in
autotelic as in utilitarian terms.
As
"Zulu Folk Poetry" indicates, Dhlomo obviously held strong views on the
crucial question of the validity for the black writer of Western literary
assumptions.
This issue, however, so central to Soweto poetry as well, was one about
which Sophiatown writers such as Mphahlele and Nakasa, who immediately
followed Dhlomo, as well as poets such as Brutus and Nortje, were to remain
curiously ambivalent. In the interview, "The Early Years", for example,
Mphahlele,
in re-creating the flamboyant ambience of Drum
magazine in the fifties, talks
of Sophiatown literature's "proletarian" roots; but, as his remarks imply, it
is a
"proletarian" literature written in highly ‘proficient' English that is
evidently
hankered after. And this would be in keeping with Sophiatown's conception of
life and art: one which attempted to seek value both in the location shebeen
and
the Houghton soiree. Unlike Soweto,
Sophiatown was not so much about a ‘proletarian'
group interest as about a sense of daring individualism, whether of person,
incident or literary style.
Nakasa
in "Writing in South Africa Today" (1963) offers a further perspective on
attitudes to art and society which were prevalent before the demise, around the
time of Sharpeville, of South African post-war liberal ideals. Like many of the
Sophiatown writers, Nakasa obviously experienced genuine difficulties in
attempting
to accommodate both African-directed notions of literature's community
function and liberal notions of art's universalizing powers. Having far closer
links
with white intellectual circles than Soweto
poets were to have, he finally called
for the ideal of a common, as opposed to a specifically black, experience. And
it is
such sentiments which, ten years later in "The Nakasa World" (1973), would
provoke Serote's tart rejoinder with its implications for an uncompromising Soweto
poetry: "[Nat] saw white liberals as perfect." (For further information on
Sophiatown literature see Jane Grant's "Silenced Generation" and Nick Visser's
"The Renaissance that Failed", both of which are also listed in the
bibliography.)
It
is thus the philosophical and literary considerations of a Dhlomo, more so
than of Sophiatown, which have found closest affinities with black South
African
writing of the seventies. In fact, Dhlomo's pronouncements on the task of the
black
artist would not be out of place in recent articles inspired by Soweto poetry,
such
as David Maughan Brown's "Black Criticism and Black Aesthetics" or Mafika
Gwala's "Black Writing Today", both of 1979. In summariziug a heated debate
prompted during the seventies by Soweto poetry and its status as art, Maughan
Brown highlights the fact that Dhlomo was in many respects a voice in a
wilderness,
his plea that poetry reflecting the Black Experience be judged in its own
terms having been ignored by successive generations of South African
commentators,
both black and white. (A notable exception here was Jordan K. Ngubane who,
in the 1940s, had perceived that different criteria might appropriately be
applied
to evaluate protest writing: "what is effective is good style for protest
poetry" -
Ilange Lase Natal, 26 April,
1941.)
Whereas
Dhlomo, in the forties, had at times felt the need to adopt an almost
apologetic tone, quaintly seeking justification in standard British literary
models
for his then ‘revolutionary' views on African aesthetics, Gwala in both "Letter
to
Richard Rive" (1971) and "Black Writing Today" speaks out boldly for ‘black
standards' and for a ‘conscientizing' literature. This later commentator is
able to
draw confidently on a prevailing philosophy of Black Consciousness, a
philosophy
which by the early seventies had won widespread acceptance among South
African urban blacks and particularly among the youth.
The
South African black youth was left without political organizations after the
bannings at the time of Sharpeville, particularly of the African National
Congress
and the Pan Africanist Congress. As a result, there has since been a tendency
to seek
an ideological framework in Afro-American Black Power politics of the sixties
(see
Peter Horn's "When it Rains, it Rains"). Black Consciousness, taking its
impetus
from the Black Power movement and its extension in the Afro-American Black
Arts movement, was tellingly disseminated before their bannings or exile by
student spokesmen such as Steve Biko, Nyameko Pityana and Onkgopotse Tiro.
Further, this New Black Awareness was the motivating force behind a number of
important conferences held during the seventies, such as the SASO Conference on
Creativity and Black Development (1972), the Black Peoples Convention (1972)
and the Edendale Black Theology Conference (1973). Significantly, the
philosophy
of Black Consciousness informs Soweto
poetry in a fundamental way.
Briefly,
Black Consciousness, to quote Allan Boesak's study, A Farewell to
Innocence (1976), is "an
awareness by black people that their humanity is constituted by their blackness
.... It is a
determination to be judged no longer by white values, and it signifies a
re-discovery of their history and culture." These concepts are basic to an
understanding of Soweto poetry
which - like Black
Consciousness - usually
involves a process of self-definition. Increasingly this poetry has begun to
operate not only as a critique on oppressive systems, but - like Black Power - as a weapon of
transformation. Like Black Theology, it seeks value in black community and in
acts of social and psychological liberation. Soweto poets, not belonging to the
sort of pre-Verwoerdian black intellectual elites that previous generations of
black South African writers often belonged to, have made total their rejection
of those petit-bourgeois expectations that have in any case been legislated
further and further beyond their reach. Instead, and in keeping with Black
Theology's social ethic, they have attempted to re-introduce an African
humanism which has particularly made itself felt in a reverence for family and
in the enunciation of principles of communalism. It is worth noting,
incidentally, that the popular socio-literary magazine Staffrider, which more than any other has tapped the energies
released by events in Soweto since 1976, has attempted to adapt both its
editorial and distribution policies to the realities of black community
existence (see in the coming pages, "Staffrider;
An Informal Discussion").
The
motto of Black Consciousness (Blackman, you are on your own) aptly captures the
spirit of Soweto poetry as well.
Moreover, a Black Consciousness insistence that ‘black' applies not solely to
Africans but to all the oppressed of South Africa is demonstrated by the fact
that a Soweto stylistic sensibility is to be found not only in the work of
African writers, but also in that of coloureds such as Matthews, Van Wyk and
Johennesse and in that of the Indian South African, Essop Patel. On the other
hand, the term ‘Soweto Poet' or even ‘black poet', which has almost come to
designate something more than simply skin colour, cannot quite so easily be
applied to the coloured Jennifer Davids or to the Indian, Shabbir Banoobhai.
The poetic range of both these writers, while it certainly incorporates areas
of peculiarly South African Black Experience, constantly extends to most
general themes.
Finally,
in Soweto poetry we encounter what Bennie Khoapa, taking his lead from SASO,
terms ‘The New Black'; "the mind of the new black is liberated from the
patterns of a society built on the alleged aesthetic, moral and intellectual
superiority of the white man" ("The New Black", 1972). Further manifestations
of such a New Black Awareness are to be found in Bob Leshoai's "Traditional
African Poets as Historians" (1979) and in Miriam Tlali's "In Search of Books"
(1980); both of these articles express their authors' dissatisfactions with
Europeanized educational and literary studies. Thami Mnyele in "A New Day"
(1980) offers a parallel New Black perspective on the visual arts. (For New
Black perspectives on the theatre and on fiction see Benjy Francis's "At this
Stage", Mshengu's "After Soweto: People's Theatre and the Political Struggle in
South Africa",
and Mothobi Mutloatse's Introduction to Forced
Landing.)
The
intellectual and literary background to Soweto poetry, then,
emphasizes a radically altered sense of reality in South
Africa since Sharpeville. A failure of
post-war ideals of gradualism, a rejection by blacks of the more patronizing
forms of English-speaking South African liberalism, an acceptance instead of their
group identity, of the importance of power and of the value of a literature of
commitment, the central metaphor of which is change - these are the salient features of a poetry
which, during the 1970s, has vigorously insisted on its own terms of reference.
Of
course, Soweto poets do not,
whether they like it or not, have quite the same problem earlier South African
English writers had of having to confront Eurocentric literary influences which
were often debilitating because unapt under the circumstances. As I have
suggested, this, ironically, is largely because over twenty years of Bantu
Education has virtually robbed the present-day black generation of a facility
in the English language, and as a result in English, including Afro-English,
literary traditions. (In addition, many works by black writers, which might
have offered relevant examples, are currently banned in South
Africa.) Yet, despite this, the creative
imagination - as it
has always done - has
turned obstacles to its own advantage. In the case of Soweto
poetry, it has forged a literary sensibility self-assertively and excitingly
free of any obviously imported models.
Soweto
poetry has not so much created its own dialect, but has in today's world
favoured a colloquial English as a serviceable means of communication, one
which, unlike Afrikaans, cannot so easily be emotively labelled the ‘language
of
the oppressor'. It is an English whose fairly restricted verbal range is
strangely suited to kinds of experience, intense but narrow. Unusual phonological
features include Americanisms, jazz refrains and allusions, as well as a
hyperbolic ‘boasting' imagery and a use of naming such as are found, too, in
traditional praise poetry. There are also some experiments with tsotsi patois,
adaptations of work songs and poems which contain sprinklings of the so-called
vernacular (the latter signifying either a poet's means of remaining acceptable
to ‘the people', or a fugitive attempt to evade censorship).
At
the more elementary level, Soweto poetry's distinctiveness
is to be located in the powerfully direct use of largely unexplored subject
matter, as well as in peculiarly ‘Third World' modes of
perception. The poems generally focus on a bizarre, semi-twilight existence,
whose distorted shapes defiantly shout their condemnation of a racially
neurotic society. The dongas of the ghetto streets are as much psychological as
social scars, while night - a
time of violence and fear - may
with a sort of terrifying logic also be seen as a time of black truth: an inversion
of a white literary and moral stereotype. The new martyrs are Mandela, Sobukwe,
Tiro, Biko and Hector Peterson, while the immediate paraphernalia of oppression
(bulldozers razing shacks, for example, and so dictating mechanical policies of
‘resettlement') are often mythologized into the demon-types of a contemporary
South African landscape. A black child's ‘imaginative kingdom' may
frighteningly present itself as a township of wrecked cars, hovels, scavenging
dogs and siren screams. By contrast, the traditionally Western-romantic
metaphors of river and sea have, particularly in Serote's later poetry, been
adapted to new social ends: symbolizing (as do Pablo Neruda's railway lines)
the linear thrust, man finally breaking free of structures which have hemmed
him in.
As
these few observations suggest, Soweto
poetry does not display a sameness in its treatment of subject matter. And the
Reviews section of this book should further indicate that the most significant
work, while taking its larger unity from a common consciousness of being black
under a system of institutionalized discrimination, has shown considerable
internal variety. Alongside the utter contemporaneity of a poem such as
Mtshali's "The Detribalized", which employs the device of naming in order to
satirize the pretensions of the black nouveux riches, one finds Madingoane's
highly contemporary use, in "black trial", of an African past to survey the
present. Alongside Serote's surrealistic depictions of city life, one finds
that same poet's intensely lyrical paeans to Black Motherhood. Alongside
Sepamla's ironic use of Bantu Administration officialese, one hears his
exploitation of an energetic tsotsi dialect. Gwala is capable of shifting from
Afro-American jazz rhythms to tender insights into family life, while Van Wyk
is equally at home with cumulative revolutionary rhythms as with permuted
Concrete poetry.
Moreover,
not only do Soweto poets make
individual use of a collective material, but (as the Views/Interviews section
shows) these poets' ideological and literary viewpoints are not always
identical in every respect. A poet such as Sepamla, who is somewhat older than
most Soweto poets, would tend to place a greater value on the element of
artistic autonomy than would Gwala, while poets such as Van Wyk and Johennesse
are prepared to sanction a wider range of artistic experimentation than is
someone like Matthews. Yet, even within the single poet, there are at times
interesting contradictions. Matthews, for instance, regards himself as a direct
recorder of the "anguish of the persecuted", all artistic embellishment being a
bourgeois luxury; however, in his Foreword to Patel's collection, They Came at Dawn (1980), he takes
trouble to comment favourably on the latter poet's "art": "But few of those [poets]
... show sensitivity
coupled with creativity and technique to make simple words sound new as Essop
Patel does when he describes the injustices under which the black man lives.
With others, the injustices become clichés that should be strung on a pamphlet
and the writer reveals himself as a pamphleteer and not a poet." What does
emerge persistently from these interviews and statements is not simply a call
for ‘relevance' at the expense of ‘art', as some commentators and indeed some
writers in the heat of the moment have claimed, but for a reversal of an
orthodox Western hierarchy of literary functions -
for a poetry in which the history of ideas will have legitimate
dominance over, but not be exclusive of, a history of literary forms.
The
problem of how to approach Soweto
poetry, and of its status as literature, is also central to the last section of
this book, which takes the form of a critical symposium. In her pioneering
essay, "New Black Poetry in South Africa" (which is conveniently available in The Black
Interpreters), Nadine Gordimer identified a number of recurrent
post-Sharpeville themes, such as the crisis of African and Western values, the
clash of the rural and the urban, and the rejection by blacks of colonial
distortions and stereotypes. She also raised the question of why post-Sharpeville
writers should have turned to poetry rather than to prose. Finally, she
predicted the later, more extreme direction black poetry was to take by already
identifying in Cry Rage! (1972)
Matthews's manifesto of the "black ethos as challenger" rather than as
challenged. These issues are taken up and developed by a number of the
commentators gathered here.
In
the first of these pieces, "Black Experience into English Verse" of 1970,
Lionel Abrahams had, prior to the appearance of Gordimer's "New Black Poetry"
essay, located among poems in The Classic
similarly called for an "art of the unattractive"). But at the same time
Manganyi,
quoting Mphahlele in support of his own views, regrets that Soweto
poets, in
capturing the "agony of the moment", have too often sacrificed resonance, a
mythic dimension and the "historical sense."
what has since come to be thought of as a peculiarly Soweto style. And Kelwyn
Sole in "Changing Literary Activity in Black South Africa, Pre- and
Post-Sharpeville" expands on the attempts by Abrahams to define a distinctive
post-Sharpeville genre. Like Gordimer, Chabani Manganyi in "The Censored
Imagination" directs himself to the reasons for a post-Sharpeville poetry
rather than a prose revival (there have, incidentally, been recent signs of the
latter as well), and observes that poetic and dramatic forms appear to be the
most appropriate media for creative individuals in the grip of an "experiential
overload." This is a remark remiscent of Mtshali's that the black man's life
under apartheid is "endlessly a series of poems of humour, bitterness, hatred,
love, hope, despair and death" ("Black Poetry in Southern Africa:
What It Means"). Examining some of the effects of a censorious system on the
creative imagination, Manganyi concludes that as far as the contemporary South
African writer is concerned, the "unified image" sanctioned by literary
tradition is an unforgivable indulgence (Gwala in "Towards a National Theatre"
(1973) had
While
not always agreeing with Manganyi or Mphahlele that an historical sense
is necessarily a prerequisite for good literature, other critics have from the
beginning
found archetypal resonances in Soweto
poetry. Initially, they have pointed to
poems such as Mtshali's "An Abandoned Bundle" in which the "agony of the
moment" (an infant dumped on a rubbish heap) is bitterly offset against a
traditional
Christian allusion ("Oh! Baby in the Manger / sleep well / on human dung").
More recently, the archetypal resonances have become specifically African in
epics such as Serote's Behold Mama, Flowers and Johennesse's The Rainmaker.
So swift have been developments in Soweto
poetry that Mphahlele himself has,
within a short space of time, had to modify his own views about a lack of
historical
perspective in contemporary black South African writing. And it is interesting
to
compare his remarks on this subject made to Manganyi with those contained in
his review of Mtshali's Fireflames of
1980.
In
fact, Mphahlele's Fireflames review,
taken together with Jean Marquard's
review of Mtshali's Sounds of a Cowhide Drum of 1971 and with
Njabulo Ndebele's
discussion of the same of 1973, provides a useful summary of the broader
shifts of emphasis which have generally informed critical responses to black
poetry of the seventies. Marquard, adopting at the time an orthodox liberal
humanist
stance, identifies as a key strength of Sounds
of a Cowhide Drum its
striking observations of township existence; and behind this assessment lies
the
classic Western assumption that the artist is an ‘interpreter' of a
pre-existent
reality - a
standpoint which has been increasingly rejected by black writers and
critics alike. Ndebele's views in 1973, for instance, were already at variance
with
the generally favourable, some would say adulatory, white reaction to Sounds of a
Cowhide Drum. In "Artistic and Political Mirage" he acknowledges the
graphic
quality of Mtshali's descriptions, but notes as a serious limitation that
poet's
apparent unwillingness to confront the fact of a reality which, far from being
monistic, is definitely alterable by man's social actions.
Likewise,
behind Mphahlele's Fireflames review
lies the assumption that the
responsibility of the black poet in South Africa today is to accept the
implications
of an historically-conditioned rather than an eternal nature, and thus to
prophesy
change. Whereas the early Mtshali may be described in humanist terms as an
‘interpreter', the later Mtshaii (according to Mphahlele) may best be described
as
having assumed a "hard apocalyptic tone." The voice of Fireflames brings the full
weight of African experience (the historical sense) to bear on the present at
the same time as it expresses bravely, without the devious twists of irony, a vision
of a revolutionary future. Whereas early Soweto
poetry had taken as its highest ideal that Western one of justice, the later
poetry, especially that which has appeared since the events of 1976, has
rediscovered the highest of African ideals: heroism. Serote, Mtshali, Gwala, as
well as many poets writing in Staffrider magazine, have begun to focus
not so much backwards on a bare Soweto
existence as forward to a ‘pre-Azanian' phase of South African history, one
wherein the construct of the ‘people', including the participatory ideals of
black community, has increasingly begun to function as an inspirational myth.
As
interesting as this may be from a purely sociological point of view, however,
critics such as Mphahlele have still been determined to see Soweto
poetry primarily as imaginative literature. Similarly, Mandlenkosi Langa, in
his review-article on Serote's No Baby
Must Weep, is concerned not only with the significance of that poem's
"apocalyptic vision", but also with its intrinsic literary qualities, its
lyricism, its evocative powers and its memorable use of language: "Serote is
one of the few black poets of note who has managed to gain prominence ... without riding a
bandwagon screaming Black Power." Langa's enthusiastic response to No Baby Must Weep - a response bold in its
value judgments - is
a particularly striking instance of the black critic's readiness to discard a
Western critical ‘disinterestedness.' And from this point of view his article
provides a fascinating contrast to Colin Gardner's "Mongane Serote's ‘City
Johannesburg'." This latter piece is far less confident of making
pronouncements of value, but rather stands back cautiously testing different
critical approaches to the same poem, from classic practical criticism through
to a ‘materialistic' reading.
Further perspectives on Soweto poetry are offered by
Mbulelo Mzamane ("Literature and Politics among Blacks in South
Africa") and by Peter Horn, whose article,
"When it Rains, it Rains", I have already mentioned. Both of these critics
argue for an almost exclusively ‘sociological' response. A counter is provided
here by Douglas Livingstone who, in "The Poetry of Mtshali, Serote, Sepamla and
Others in English: Notes towards a Critical Evaluation", subjects the work of
these writers to a formalist critique. Tony Emmett, on the other hand, raises
important questions in "Oral, Political and Communal Aspects of Township Poetry
in the Mid-Seventies" about the necessity of our understanding a poem's context
of performance. The concept of poetry turned theatre is here felt to contain
important implications for those modern poets who genuinely desire to reach a
mass audience. (This is what Neal, talking of contemporary Afro-American
poetry, has called the "destruction of the text": the elevation of oral and
musical improvisation above a Western, Platonic sense of Ideal Form.)
Taking
up the question of performance, C.T. Msimang in "Ingoapele Madingoane's ‘black
trial': A Contemporary Black Epic" indicates Madingoane's attempts to synthesize
traditional-oral and contemporary-written forms. In the course of arguing for a
knowledge on the part of the critic of African tradition, Msimang suggests
provocatively that ‘sympathetic' commentators today are often too eager to
justify meagre texts on the grounds of their being meant for oral delivery. He
further maintains that those poets who regard themselves in the first instance
as oral performers have inevitably compromised their positions by agreeing to
appear in print with all its conventions, particularly its tendency to separate
semantic and verbal content from sight and sound.
Finally,
in contrast to a critic such as Livingstone who values the ‘defamlliarizing'
properties of poetry, Gareth Cornwell in "James Matthews' ‘Protest Songs':
The Problem of Evaluation" is prepared to accept that poetry which primarily
seeks to ‘conscientize' a mass audience must, above all, ‘make familiar,'
However, in accepting a one-to-one relationship between protest poetry and
topical events, Cornwell asks the crucial question: what if a poem, while
eloquently rhetorical, nevertheless simplifies the complexities of action and
struggle and issues forth as mere revolutionary romanticism? This is of course
an obvious temptation for the black poet writing in an emotively-charged
contemporary South African situation, And it will probably be by the very quality
of its dialectical exploration, by its fidelity to the full weight and
depth of the Black Experience, that the black community now and in the future
will ultimately judge the value of Soweto poetry. In this regard Stephen
Henderson's comments on criteria appropriate to contemporary Afro-American
poetry are pertinent to Soweto
poetry as well: "For Blacks the celebration of Blackness is an undertaking
which makes value judgments" (Understanding the New Black Poetry, 1973).
In
spite of this justifiable elevation of the ‘sociological' over the ‘literary',
Henderson's remarks do insist that the two are not really separable; that black
poetry is concerned not simply with black truth, but with the impact of that
truth - something
which presupposes the poet's special skill with words. Similarly, whatever we
might hear about the functional immediacy, or even the disposability, of
political verse, it is a measure of Soweto
poetry's disturbingly forceful expressiveness that it has, almost despite
itself, already managed to insist on its significance not only as sociological
utterance, but also as imaginative literature in its own right. It therefore
seemed worth concluding the Symposium here with Clive Wake's "Poetry 0f the
Last Five Years" (1980), which attempts some assessment of the achievement of
Soweto poetry in relation both to contemporary white South African poetry and
to contemporary African poetry in general.
If
Soweto poetry is regarded with some trepidation by the
South African authorities as a potential instrument of social change (witness,
for instance, the bannings of individual collections by Matthews, Sepamla,
Madingoane and Mtshali, of single issues of Staffrider
and of writers groups like Medupe), then Soweto
poetry has no less proved to be a dynamic instrument of literary change. It is
a poetry which over the last ten years has boldly taken a Eurocentric South
African Literary Establishment by the scruff of the neck and dragged it into an
arena robustly and challengingly South African.
The present collection of essays seeks to record and to convey something of
this vitality.
Michael Chapman
1982
McGraw-Hill Book Company
1982
ISBN 0 07 450634 X (series number)
ISBN 0 07 450614 5 (hard cover)
ISBN 0
07 450632 3 (soft cover)
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