P Jordan: Inauguration of KW Kgositsile as Poet Laureate

8 December 2006

The poet whom we are honouring tonight is among a generation of African
writers, poets and scholars who came into their own in exile. Though he
regularly boasts about his age, we consider each other contemporaries. Our
generation had the good fortune to have experienced our adolescence during a
decade when the crisis of colonialism in Africa and Asia was fast maturing.

In both our own country and in the rest of the colonised world the oppressed
peoples were asserting themselves through mass struggles of an unprecedented
scale. In a number of instances these culminated in wars of liberation in
Malaya, in Vietnam, in Kenya and in Algeria.

South Africa was no exception to this trend. Over a 10-year period
commencing with the adoption of the programme of action by the African National
Congress (ANC) in 1949, the liberation movement mounted successive waves of
mass struggles, the Defiance Campaign of 1952, the Congress of the People in
1955, the stay at home strikes that came virtually every year, the bus boycotts
in Evaton and Alexandra, the women's anti-pass campaign, the pound a day strike
and others with a lower profile.

The leavening of this upsurge was the growing self-confidence of the
oppressed peoples, "the wretched of the earth" as Franz Fanon termed us, were
visibly casting off the subservience of ages and taking their destiny into
their own hands. No intelligent young person worth his/her salt could stay
aloof from such momentous events. Willie joined the ANC Youth League (ANCYL)
during these stirring years.

On leaving high school he found employment as a journalist with "New Age," a
weekly that had been serially banned by the racist regime. It had first been
known as "The Guardian" until it was banned in 1952. It re-appeared as "The
Clarion," retained that title till 1953 when it was banned only to re-emerge as
"Advance" which was published until mid 1955 giving way to "New Age" when it
was again banned.

Under a superb editorial team that included Brian Bunting, Ruth First, Govan
Mbeki and MP Naicker, working alongside names that would become legendary, Joe
Gqabi and Robert Resha and rubbing shoulders with the likes of Can Themba,
Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi and other emergent African writers, Willie
Kgositsile was initiated into the craft of journalism in Johannesburg. I have
no doubt that it was that rigorous apprenticeship that moulded him into the
gifted wordsmith he matured into in later years.

Kgositsile left South Africa in 1961 travelling through Botswana to what was
then Tanganyika where he was drawn into the external mission of the ANC under
Oliver Tambo. In Dar-es-Salaam he was among the fortunate few who were able to
find employment, working as a journalist for the newsletter, "Spearhead" edited
by Frene Ginwala. It is testimony to the prescience and foresight of the editor
and her team that many of the issues of an African Renaissance, African
economic independence and political unity that appear on the continent's
current agenda were flagged in "Spearhead" as early as 1962 and 1963.

From Dar-es-Salaam Kgositsile travelled to the United States of America
(USA) on a scholarship. That is where I first encountered him.

As I recall it was a Saturday afternoon during the Easter vacation in 1964.
I had driven from Madison, Wisconsin where I was studying to New York. The
focal point for virtually all South African students in the USA was a basement
flat which may one day deserve a blue plaque as some sort of heritage site, 310
West 87th Street, in Manhattan. I rang the bell and out came am elfin figure
with a wisp of a beard:

"So, who are you?" he enquired.

Recognising him immediately as a South African I responded, "Heyt daar
brikeid, ek soek ou Gwangwa."

And thus began a relationship which has endured more than four decades.

We still have to record those decades we spent in exile in various parts of
the world. The chapters covering the United States (US) could well be amongst
the most colourful. The contingent, who arrived in the US as students during
the early to mid-60s, was probably the first large group of South Africans to
arrive in the US. And there is no doubt about it we took the US by storm!
Scattered among a number of universities and colleges most of them clustered
along the east coast wherever we were the South Africans left an indelible
impression. Assertive, some would even say pushy, politically engaged and with
a fierce sense of identity we inserted ourselves into various facets of the US
cultural and political scene with the primary purpose of mobilising solidarity
with the struggle at home.

I am not about to divulge any of the truths that will emerge when we finally
write the definitive account of the exile years. Suffice it to say that Willie
Kgositsile what he said, wrote and did during those years in the US will
feature very prominently both for the mirth it occasioned and as a record of
the growth of one of South Africa's leading poets.

The 1960s in the US and in other parts of the world were years of political
ferment. The struggle of the African-Americans for their basic human rights was
reaching a crescendo; the struggle for world peace had become particularly
acute following the Cuban Missile crisis and in the midst of the American war
of aggression in South East Asia. The universities we were attending were the
sites of much of this activity. These movements in turn stimulated
complimentary cultural movements, affecting music, theatre and especially
literature. It was the sort of fecund environment that encouraged budding
talent to blossom.

Kgositsile found a niche among a throng of African-American literary and
cultural figures who were wrestling with the strategic and aesthetic dilemmas
thrown up by the struggles raging all around us in the Americas and the third
world. Among them were figures such as the poet and critic, Leroy Jones, who
later took the name Amira Baraka; the cultural activist, Norman Kelley; the
writer, Lawrence Neal; the jazz aficionado and historian, AB Spellman and many
others. It was in that literary milieu that the poet who had been struggling to
come out first showed his head. In poetry readings, literature workshops and
the interminable discussions so loved by young intellectuals, he honed his
skills and produced his first anthology, "Afrika is my Name" in the late
1960s.

From then on the ever active and open mind of Kgositsile was regularly
visited by the muse, inspiring a stream of poetic eloquence that has earned him
laurels not only in the USA but in Africa, Asia, Latin America, as well as
Europe.

But Willie Kgositsile was not only a poet. He was also a political activist
of long standing. To say that his poetry was always highly political is not to
suggest that he sacrificed aesthetics for politics. All too often the quest to
express oneself politically has tempted writers and musicians to descend to the
level of the political propagandist. Kgositsile sarcastically dismissed a few
such efforts of the late seventies as "MK, AK bullshit!" He could afford to say
so because after his return to Afrika after 1976, he was probably one of the
best examples of a truly engaged poet who like Mao Zhedong and Pablo Neruda had
mastered the art of producing politically inspired poetry that did not
compromise poetics to make a political statement.

Willie's return to the continent coincided with the rising tide of mass
mobilisation here at home. He arrived in Dar-es-Salaam shortly after the Soweto
uprising which produced a stream of young people in search of education and or
the political and military skills required to overthrow the apartheid regime.
He was immediately drawn into the nascent Department of Arts and Culture of the
ANC. It was that Department working in close co-operation with the internal
reconstruction unit of the Politico-Military Commission (PMC), that later had
him posted to Botswana having secured him a post at the university there.

It was in the latter location that Willie was able to creatively combine his
varied talents, as political activist, poet, professor of literature and
under-ground organiser. He was central to both the trend setting Gaborone and
Culture in Another South Africa (CASA) conferences that the ANC organised in
1982 and 1987, respectively. We shall be marking the 20th anniversary of the
latter CASA conference in Amsterdam next year.

The title "poet laureate" has an ancient lineage in African society. This is
a title its recipient earned not solely by poetic excellence but also by
his/her public spirited contribution to society at large. I have regularly had
occasion to wince when hearing reference by the uninformed to 'praise poets,'
the incorrect and culturally charged mistranslation of the term "Imbongi." I
find this particularly disturbing when committed by Africans themselves who
seldom weigh the hidden meanings in such mistranslated terms. The traditional
"Imbongi" was anything but a praise-singer. True, poets would heap praises and
laurels on the historic figures whose actions they thought praise worthy. But
an imbongi could be more scathing and denigratory than even the sharpest modern
political cartoonist! The examples of this are legion and for the life of me I
cannot understand why African literary critics appear to have missed it. An
imbongi had the unquestioned licence to employ every known literary and poetic
device to mock, jeer, castigate and criticise anyone in his community from the
king down to the lowliest subject. Pre-colonial African societies accepted this
as one of numerous checks on the power of rulers.

An imbongi who shirked that responsibility would be regarded as either weak
or lacking in public spirit.

Willie Kgositsile has more than earned the title we bestow on him today.
Like the traditional bard he has been unsparingly and rigorously critical when
it was necessary about the performance of Africa's leadership and statesmen.
Thanks to that sharp tongue he has often been characterised as an "unguided
missile." But he is at the same time one of the most enthusiastic advocates and
defenders of political tolerance, rooted in an appreciation that truth is
elusive and that it can only be sought in an environment of untrammelled
contestation and debate among differing opinions. Like any sensible 20th
century intellectual he is also a secularist who nonetheless values pluralism
for its intrinsic value.

Speaking at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, two years ago, amongst other
things I remarked that, "Many modern African writers have portrayed the dilemma
posed by modernity as tragic. But the most far sighted among the generation of
writers, artists, poets and playwrights who came into their own immediately
before and after the Second World War demonstrated how to resolve this
contemporary riddle of the sphinx. Rather than wallowing in their alienation or
seeking refuge in the past, they reintegrated themselves with the common people
by active engagement in political and social struggles for freedom,
independence and progress."

As we march into the third millennium that is the object lesson that African
intellectuals must derive from our 20th century experience.

Keorapatse Willie Kgositsile is firmly rooted in that tradition. He has
dedicated himself to the struggle for freedom and his poetry to the creation of
a better world. Such a man deserves the title Poet Laureate.

Issued by: Department of Arts and Culture
8 December 2006