“…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
Keorapetse Kgositsile & The Black Arts Movement by Uhuru Portia Phalafala (Wits University Press, 2024)
Phalafala on "the foundational influence of Kgositsile's mother and grandmother on his craft and ... the importance of the oral/aural traditions, indigenous knowledge systems, and cosmologies he carried with him into and after exile ... Using the original concept of 'elsewhere', the author maps the sources of Kgositsile's transformative verse, which in turn generated 'poetics of possibility' for his contemporaries in the Black Arts and Black Power Movements and beyond - among them Maya Angelou, Larry Neal, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tom Dent, members of The Last Poets, Otabenga Jones & Associates, and rapper Earl Sweatshirt - who all looked to his work to model their identities, cultural movements and radical traditions."
South African Tswana poet, journalist and political activist Keorapetse Kgositsile (1938-2018), also known by his pen name Bra Willie, was an influential member of the African National Congress in the 1960s and 1970s. He was inaugurated as South Africa's National Poet Laureate in 2006.
Uhuru Portia Phalafala is a Senior Lecturer at Stellenbosch University, author of the poetry collection Mine Mine Mine (2023), and co-editor of Keorapetse Kgositsile: Collected poems 1969-2018 (2023).
