“…The struggle of black people inevitably appear in an intensely cultural form because the social formation in which their distinct political traditions are now manifest has constructed the arena of politics on ground overshadowed by centuries of metropolitan capitalist development, thereby denying them recognition as legitimate politics. Blacks conduct a class struggle in and through race. The BC of race and class cannot be empirically separated, the class character of black struggles is not a result of the fact that blacks are predominantly proletarian, thought this is true…”- (Frank Talk Staff Writers in ‘Azania Salutes Tosh’ – circa 1981)
front cover:
Tosh by Steve Gordon
back cover:
Kippie by Basil Breakey
Head On Fire by Lesego Rampolokeng (Deep South, 2012)
This is Lesego Rampolokeng's first book of poems to be published in South Africa since The Bavino Sermons (1999). Head on Fire includes the complete text of The Second Chapter, originally published by Pantolea Press in Berlin in 2003.
One measure of a poet is the range of his concerns, and Lesego Rampolokeng takes on religion, war, street violence, global economics, obscenity, history, wordplay, sexual perversion, and, not least, his own contradictions.
If he spatters the reader with blood and body fluids, it is not to shock or repel but to "engage with my world in all its manifestations...I want to see all the spluttered blood and gore. So I'm attempting to embrace its beauty.
Hopefully." Few South African writers are as prepared as Rampolokeng to acknowledge that we all are the authors of our own chaos. "It is necessary for us to strip right down to the bone and see exactly how ugly we are as a people." Or, more aphoristically: Not the barbarian at the door - but the savage at the core.