Keorapetse Kgositsile in Our Time: Why We Should Read His Poetry

Keorapetse Kgositsile Memorial Lecture organized by the University of KwaZulu-Natal in

partnership with the University of Johannesburg

Muxe Nkondo
5 October 2023

Having a mind and a sensibility unquestionably of rare distinction, Keorapetse Kgositsile has
deepened our understanding of what it takes to write poetry in the heat of the historic
struggle for agency, freedom, and justice in South Africa, the continent, and the diaspora. His
influence is vast and deep because he was a poet, a teacher, and a revolutionary activist, and
these attributes reinforced each other. It is partly due to him that no serious reader can fail
to realize that poetry, in South Africa certainly, must develop along a similar line. To that
extent, he has helped establish new bearings in South African poetry. An account of his work
is an account of the politics of poetry in the ongoing struggle for fundamental change. To
justify this assertion, it is necessary to make a close analysis and an assessment of his work,
though briefly.

In what ways and to what extent does reading his poetry augment our capability to bring
about fundamental change in social, economic, and political relations in South Africa, to start
with? Does it render the complexities more intelligible? Is the pain more bearable? Are
poverty, unemployment, socioeconomic inequality, and gender-based violence more
manageable as a result? Certainly, the poems portray life, in the grip of egotistic power, as
complex, dynamic, multifaceted, marked by tensions and conflicts of all sorts. They may not
provide direct, practical solutions, but if life is to be more than getting and spending it needs
enhancement by the kind of passionate thinking, sensuous intelligence, and empathic
imagination that are a kind of creative work. One of the models for this kind of integrated
perception, imagining, thinking, and feeling is, of course, Kgositsile’s poetry at its best, which
comprehends and mediates differences across a range of experiences and identities. After
reading his poems, that sensuous thinking and empathic imagining continues for a long time.
That seems to be the beginning of critical wisdom, of experiencing, perceiving, and

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comprehending differences and equivalences in a diverse and complex world. It denies the
illusiveness of abstract, conceptual and analytic thinking, and that way augments our
capability for mutual recognition in a world of differences. It also enables an empathic
disposition, open, flexible, and responsive to complexity.

Given our history of displacement, dispersion, and exclusion, it enhances our capacity for
mutual recognition, solidarity, and regional integration. So in Kgositsile the creative
imagination emerges, at its best, like life itself, from a matrix of complex relations, and makes
them work together so as to manifest a new cognitive and affective power that is difficult to
locate elsewhere, whether in philosophy, ethics, mathematical and social sciences.
Fortunately, it has received considerable attention in aesthetics and emotions science.

But can reading his poetry cure the pain, physical and social, experienced by most of the
people on the ground – hungry, homeless, sick, excluded from the inner circle of power,
wealth, and knowledge? Our reading of Kgositsile confirms that it can enable the mind, the
heart, and the spirit to deal with existential problems more deeply. In this way, the creative
imagination becomes an uncanny power to attach meaning to a range of things in a complex
field, particularly in highly charged moments, and so empower us to ride the storm.

If life is to be more than getting and spending, it needs the enhancement that the creative
imagination brings at its best. A close reaching of his work - This Way I Salute You, If I Could
Sing, Homesoil In My Blood - tells you that it does so through metaphor, which takes the form
of analogy, irony, paradox, ambiguity, and other rhetorical devices, which together are a
virtual orchestra to history's immensity. So extraordinary is the reading experience, it seeps
into our blond and nerves, and elevates us above the daily drama of this or that. Like Hugh
Masekela, Jonas Gwangwa, Mirriam Makeba, Dennis Brutus, E’skia Mphahlele, Billie Holiday,
Gwen Brooks, The Jazz Messengers, David Rubadiri, Frantz Fanon, Art Blackey, Bra Ntemi,
Grand Papa Dlomo, Chinua Achebe, Mongane Serote, and so on - his poetry discovers for us
our common humanity, our shared vulnerability to pain, and, above all, our indomitable will
to mobilize each other and overcome adversity.

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Fortunately, our condition is historical and contingent, not foundational or fundamental, and
that's why nowhere in his writings does he appeal to a power before and beyond language
and cognition. In spite of years of subjective and systemic violence – in prison, underground,
exile, at the margins - we retain, as homo sapiens, the ability to give meaning to things, and
to learn from history. It is a cognitive, affective, and social capability. It is there in the work of
his buddies - Mandla Langa's, The Lost Language of the Soul, Barbara Masekela’s Poli Poli,
and Siphiwo Mahala’s re-enactment of Can Themba’s much anthologized short story, The
Suit.

At the core of Kgositsile’s verse is the meaning and value of origins and place, captured, in so
many ways, in his last collection, Homesoil In My Blood: A Trilogy. What kind of social
relationships is 'homesoil'? Some poems suggest that they have to be face to face, as in
Requiem for my Mother, whilst others allow that they may be geographically dispersed
brought together by a commitment to freedom and justice, as in 'No boundaries'. Whatever
the case, they are part of the same political geography - Africa, United States of America,
Caribbean, all post-colonies, bound by a deep sense of displacement. That political geography
is critical: it involves relationships that are of a certain political, social, psychological, and
ethical quality, evoking feelings of shared vulnerability and solidarity. So 'homesoil' is not a
contested identity. There is no dispute here. It carriers a primary value.

In ‘homesoil’, people share the same memory and values. They recognise each other in each
other as fellow victims of political violence. There are special obligations and responsibilities.
Kgositsile identified with people in this place, as he does in Places and Bloodstains, An Injury
to One is an Inquiry to all, We are all involved, and My Name is Africa. Kgositsile identifies
with people in this place. The moralized political geographical concept requires that the
relationships between members of this political community should mobilize themselves
against colonial power. A tall order.

This is fundamentally different from individualism, the basic principle of liberalism. It has
obvious appeal, particularly for people who have been oppressed and excluded for centuries.
This is different from the need to be recognized by others as an individual. This forms the
international basis of democratic struggles across national, territorial borders. That is why

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Kgositsile ‘salutes’ all the creative writers, organic intellectuals, and revolutionary activists
with a record in resistance and liberation politics, as a reading of his volume of poems, This
Way I Salute You would soon confirm.

This is associated with the Ubuntu-Batho Pele moral philosophy. There are special obligations.
Kgositsile identifies with people in this place. The moralized political concept requires that
the relationships between members of a political community account to each other. This is
fundamentally different from individualism. This has an obvious appeal, particularly for
people that have been oppressed and excluded for centuries. This is different from the need
to be recognized by others, as an individual. This forms the basic of Pan Africanism and
provides the necessary condition for regional integration. The following poem, If I Could Sing,
captures it all:

I want to remain
Wild
Like a young song
Unleashed
Aspiring
To the serenity
Of a Japanese morning
Hour
In which not a single leaf
Stirs above Water stone and tree
If I could sing
Like Neruda I would
Weave a song about
The size of your worldwide heart

Here and throughout in his work, Kgositsile evokes the values and functions of music and
poetry through the force of metaphor, with which he defended himself against forces that
caused so much pain, an uncanny power that wards off colonial dangers from people's lives.
For him, the function of poetry, at its best, was to liberate people and so defend the body,

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the heart, and the mind against colonial violence, defend the self against everything that is
inhuman. In this sense, his poetry is not so much a figure of knowing as it is a figure of feeling,
thinking, becoming, and being. It is enacted through metaphor, a rhetorical device that
mediates tensions and conflicts in a violent world.

So metaphor, in Kgositsile, is a mode of thinking and persuasion. It defends the self against
abuse and violation, and does so by bringing together elements in the world that are often
regarded as oppositional and antagonistic. This, for him, was poetry aspiring to the condition
of music. This is what jazz and blues are about. This is what ‘dance’ is all about in the poem of
that name. For devoting their lives to the creation of harmony, symmetry, design, and
proportion in social, economic, and political relations, he salutes Mandela, Fanon, June 16
Freedom Fighters, Luthuli Detachment, Neruda, Mongane Serote, Brother Malcolm,
Uzbekistan, and other figures of the will to freedom and justice. Their legacy is that they lived
their lives as if they were metaphors in the service of mutual recognition, fellow feeling, and
solidarity in defiance of the colonial egotistic self. This is the bonding spirit that builds under
the most dreadful condition.

So to Kgositsile poetry was not just language and music, not just sound - they were urgings,
affirmations, assertions. So writing and reading poetry, singing and listening, dancing and
watching are arts of mutual recognition and fellow feeling, recognizing each other in each
other in our shared vulnerability to diabolical power. They are invocations of a common
humanity in the world today - 'a dangerous place to live', as he calls it in the poem of that
name. So Kgositsile’s salient quality was his extraordinary capacity for experiencing the pain
of others, and augmenting our capability to regard the pain of others. This brings with it a
‘serenity’ beyond language. Listen to this:

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 Aspiring
To the serenity
Of a Japanese morning
Hour
In which not a single leaf
Stirs above
Waters stone and tree
If I could sing
Like Neruda I would
Weave a song about
The size of your worldwide heart

To him poetry was a mosaic of relationships framed, by the act of singing, voicing, and dancing
elegantly on stage, deepening our sense of being as humans, leading to a condition that elutes
words and narrative. That’s why he aspired to write poems with the genius of music. There is
something in music, a blend of words and melody, that makes it operate with a certain magic
or force beyond grammar and syntax. Its impact eludes analysis. It is an ineluctable symbolic
coil by which so much of social and political relationships is encompassed. So music,
particularly in revolutionary settings, deepens social and political bonds. It protects us from
spinning out of control and reduce ourselves to mere cogs in a wheel. That is why music, at
its most intense, with its multiple instruments and combinations, passes over into the all-too
different business of solidarity in a violent world. There can be no 'liberation movement'
unless there is an intimate relationship between people at all levels.

The assessment of the power of music is not merely a technical and aesthetic process. It is a
powerful tool for fellow feeling and solidarity. It is historical and contingent. Assumed in this
is that the act of mobilizing people for fundamental change requires the evocative and
affective power of the creative imagination as evidenced in music at its best. Although music
cannot be held single-handedly responsible for building a ‘revolutionary movement’, its
impact is indisputable. Feeling, especially physical and social pain, caused by displacement
dispossession, and exclusion, has no voice, but when it at last finds a voice, often in music, it

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begins to tell a story, and the story it tells is about solidarity and reverence for our common
humanity. It enacts the basic principles of Batho Pele and Ubuntu, openness and
responsiveness to the pain of others.

Closely related to music, as indicated earlier, is the power of dance. Kgositsile was fascinated
by dance. Feel the rhythms in the poem Dance:

Siamese twin
Of song
We said a while back
We are music people

In the spell of Tombouctou

We ransack the origin of experience
Stride through the corridors of history and myth
And bounce back to here and now

Madiba Salute Comrade

Thank you for introducing us
To Sankore to Bouctou
Ancient legend vibrant Mali
Meeting point of fact and myth z
Amidst harmattan of flower and sand
Where humanity survives and survives

Strategically, dance is a social space where social and political relations can be mobilized. In
other words, a consensus congress or commons, as it were. Such engagement in kinetic
interactions is critical to participatory and deliberative politics. That way, dance is important
in the public and social domain of social cohesion, nation building and regional solidarity. It is
connected with the values of a common humanity – heightened attentiveness to the next
person. That way ‘dance’ is a language, a form of communication – a capability.

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So Kgositsile’s poetry is about the big questions in the movement for fundamental change:
experience, perception, understanding, communication, solidarity at all levels, linked
organically to each other, his verse is a guide to the most central concerns which makes his
work a must read. A way of saying that more than one course of action is available to
revolutionary poetry and action. Reading poetry and listening to music, and matching dance
movements are processes of searching out and weighing the reasons for and against various
alternatives.

Why did Kgositsile Choose Lyric as his Preferred Art-Form?

It made space for the expression of a state of mind, intense feeling, a mode of expression and
communication without having to obey the logic and sequence of narrative. Hence the
disposition, in almost all his poems, of someone musing in solitude. In This Way I Salute You,
he comes across as someone addressing another - a fellow poet, a friend, a family
Member, or an iconic political figure in specific situations. That is why his lyrics are uttered in
the first person: a long suffering victim of colonial power, a son, a father, a husband, a
comrade in the trenches. Nothing is fictionalized here or invented. It is passionate thought in
here, the processes of experiencing, perception, observation thinking, and remembering are
organized in a variety of ways. In all these cases, he expresses an intense state of mind in an
ordered form. The lyric severely abbreviates the story line, in the process turning feeling into
narrative, as do music and dance.

Why in South Africa it has become a preferred poetic form is a phenomenon much too
complex to be dealt with in a single lecture. In fiction in South Africa, it takes the form of a
short story. The sense of urgency, the anxiety to keep close to the drama of experience in the
concrete was a way, according to E’skia Mphahlele, to cut to the quick of things. No time here
for the epic and the novel. It is a coping mechanism. Apparently, centered is the self, it is
social, political and public. No self-absorbed, egotistic perception here. The self, the
community, the political context are aspects of each other because they are aspects of the
same history, functions of 'homesoil'. So complex is the experience that the creative
imagination aspires to the condition of music.

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 Why Dance?

It has several attributes: it connects experience and the elements of music with the body.
There is a close relation between perception, bodily motion, and mutual understanding. It can
also tell a story through symbolic movements. With music it legitimate patterns of human
interaction that might seem ridiculous or embarrassing otherwise. It does this, engaging
emotional effects as opposed to analytical and explanatory processes. Meaning is
undetermined to the extent that participants are free to develop their own interpretations.

In almost all his poems, he evokes the condition of wholeness, flow, happiness, and wellbeing
through the force of metaphor, in its uncanny power to mediate differences with which he
defended himself against forces that caused so much pain to millions, an uncanny power that
wards off colonial dangers from people's lives. For him, the function of poetry, at its best, was
to liberate people and so defend the body, that heart, and the mind against systemic violence,
defend the self against everything that is inhuman. In this sense, his poetry is not so much a
figure of knowing as it is a figure of thinking, feeling, becoming and being. It is enacted
through metaphor, a rhetorical device that mediates tensions and conflicts in a violent world.

So metaphor. In Kgositsile, is a mode of thinking and persuasion. It defends the self against
abuse and violation. And does so by bringing together elements in the world that are often
regarded as oppositional and antagonistic. This, for him, was poetry aspiring to the condition
of harmony, symmetry, balance, and proportion. This brings in a related dimension: intense
interior experience becomes an exterior aesthetic form. The phenomenon of creating arises
out of the framing intentional relation between feeling, both physical and social on the one
hand and poetic form on the other, a framing relation that as it enters the social take the form
of music and dance at their best. From its privacy and interiority, intense pain becomes a work
of art, which makes it accessible. It becomes available and public. Directed against the privacy
and interiority of pain, here it assumes the sharabilty of experience and knowledge.

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 Lessons for Aspiring Poets

a) To understand the dynamics of poetic composition, aspiring students need to read

closely the work of accomplished poets. It needs discipline.

b) The poetic mind does not follow the logic of narrative, but instead takes metaphoric
shortcuts to more efficiently manage complexity and apparent differences, turning figuration
as the basis upon which the metaphor-making imagination is based.

c) Ideology and theory in the abstract cannot survive evidence, interpretation, decision,
and judgement. Discord and discrepancy soon erupt.

d) Much of the work of metaphor-making involves recognizing complementary

differences and equivalences across a range of things in the world. It involves translating
diversity into clear metaphoric language.

e) We can use accomplished poets to define what it means to construct metaphors and
be creative poets. He himself does this in his volume if poems titled This Way I Salute You

f) The goal of the metaphor-making project is to establish symmetries, balance, design,

and preparation in a world of differences and distances. It is a cognitive, affective, ethical, and
political undertaking. It is essentially a pragmatic conception of the meaning and value of the
creative imagination, without any reference to a power before and beyond cognition and
language. It is a poetry based on a secular universalism, historical and contingent.

g) So becoming a port involves not just knowing the nuts and bolts of grammar and
syntax, but also putting the metaphor-making imagination to instrumental use regularly.

In sum, his concerns are human, his manner utterly his own. Metaphor, pitch, voice, and
rhythm - the whole aesthetic idiom - all are present to the unique creative intelligence and
empathic imagination within. Such translations in the poetry give immediate access to an
essential humanity as it is exhibited in an engaged creative imagination. Today's political

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environment, in South Africa certainly, provides an example of what happens to individuals
and a society that ignores the principles of metaphoric thinking and feeling. The questions
that remain, one that Kgositsile explores in Approaches to Poetry Writing, is how can we
create poets and a society that appreciates metaphoric thinking to human relations.

Kgositsile is a great poet: that is, his concerns are human, his manner utterly his own.
Metaphor, irony, paradox, ambiguity, the tone and pitch of the voice, rhythm, the whole
poetic idiom - all are present to the unique creative intelligence and empathic imagination
within. Such translucency in the poetry gives immediate access to an asserted humanity as it
is exhibited in an engaged genius.

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