Keorapetse Kgositsile


Keorapetse William Kgositsile, also known by his pen name Bra Willie, was a South African Tswana poet and political activist. 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. Kgositsile lived in exile in the United States from 1962 until 1975, the peak of his literary career. He made an extensive study of African-American literature and culture, becoming particularly interested in jazz. During the 1970s he was a central figure among African-American poets, encouraging interest in Africa as well as the practice of poetry as a performance art; he was well known for his readings in New York City jazz clubs. Kgositsile was one of the first to bridge the gap between African poetry and Black poetry in the United States.

Early life

Kgositsile was born in a mostly white section of Johannesburg, and grew up in a small shack at the back of a house in a white neighborhood that was rented by his mother. His first experience of apartheid, other than having to go to school outside of his neighborhood for reasons he did not then understand, was a conflict with a local white family after he fought a white friend of his who hesitated when other friends refused to join a boxing club that denied Kgositsile membership. The experience was a formative one, and joined with other experiences of exclusion that increased throughout his teenage years. For Kgositsile, adulthood meant an entrance into apartheid.
Kgositsile attended Madibane High School in Johannesburg, as well as schools in other parts of the country. During that time he was able to find books by Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and influenced by them as well as by European writers, he began writing stories, though not yet with any intention of doing so professionally. After working at a series of odd jobs after high school, he took to writing more seriously, getting a job with the politically charged newspaper New Age. He contributed both reporting and poetry to the newspaper. These early poems, anticipating a lifetime of Kgositsile's work, combine lyricism with an unmuted call to arms, as in these lines from "Dawn":
Any early interest in fiction was replaced by the sheer urgency of communication that Kgositsile felt. As he said later, "In a situation of oppression, there are no choices beyond didactic writing: either you are a tool of oppression or an instrument of liberation."

The years of exile

In 1961, under considerable pressure both for himself and as part of a government effort to shut down New Age, Kgositile was urged by the African National Congress, of which he was a vocal member, to leave the country. He went initially to Dar es Salaam to write for Spearhead magazine, but the following year emigrated to the United States. He studied at a series of universities, beginning with Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he "spent a lot of time in the library trying to read as much black literature as I could lay my hands on."
After studying at the University of New Hampshire and The New School for Social Research, Kgositsile entered the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing at Columbia University. At the same time, he published his first collection of poems, Spirits Unchained. The collection was well received, and he was given a Harlem Cultural Council Poetry Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Award. He graduated from Columbia in 1971, and remained in New York, teaching and giving his characteristically dynamic readings in downtown clubs and as part of the Uptown Black Arts Movement. Kgositsile's most influential collection, My Name is Afrika, was published in that year. The response, including an introduction to the book by Gwendolyn Brooks, established Kgositsile as a leading African-American poet. The Last Poets, a group of revolutionary African-American poets, took their name from one of his poems.

Influence of jazz and the black aesthetic

Jazz was particularly important to Kgositsile's sense of black American culture and his own place in it. He saw John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, B. B. King, and many others in the jazz clubs of New York, and wrote to them and of them in his poems. Jazz was crucial to Kgositsile's most influential idea: his sense of a worldwide African diaspora united by an ear for a certain quintessentially black sound. He wrote of the black aesthetic he pursued and celebrated:
Freedom from a constricting white aesthetic sensibility and the discovery of the rhythmic experience common to black people of all the world were, for Kgositsile, two sides of the same struggle.

Black theatre

Kgositsile also became active in theater while in New York, founding the Black Arts Theatre in Harlem. He saw black theater as a fundamentally revolutionary activity, whose ambition must be the destruction of the ingrained habits of thought responsible for perceptions of black people both by white people and by themselves. He wrote:
The Black Arts Theatre was part of a larger project aimed at the creation of literary black voice unafraid to be militant. Kgositsile argued persistently against the idea of Négritude, a purely aesthetic conception of black culture, on the grounds that it was dependent on white aesthetic models of perception, a process he called "fornicating with the white eye." This work took place while Kgositsile was teaching at Columbia in the earlier 1970s; he left to work briefly at Black Dialogue Magazine.

Return to Africa

In 1975, Kgositsile decided to return to Africa, despite his blossoming career in the United States, and took up a teaching position at the University of Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania. In 1978, he married another ANC exile, Baleka Mbete, who was also living in Tanzania. Still from exile, he renewed his activities with the ANC, founding its Department of Education in 1977 and its Department of Arts and Culture in 1983; he became Deputy Secretary in 1987. Kgositsile taught at several schools in different parts of Africa, including Kenya, Botswana, and Zambia. Throughout this period he was banned in South Africa, but in 1990 the Congress of South African Writers, with which he was already associated, decided to attempt a publication within the country. The successful result was When the Clouds Clear, a collection of poems from other volumes, which was Kgositsile's first book to be available in his native country.

"Your destination remains / Elusive"

In July 1990, after 29 years in exile, Kgositsile returned to South Africa. He arrived in a country wholly different from the one he had left, transformed by the beginning of the end of apartheid and the release and later the political triumph of Nelson Mandela. In 1990, however, it was still a place of great confusion, particularly for the many exiled black writers, artists, and intellectuals pouring into the country. In a 1991 essay, "Crossing Borders Without Leaving", Kgostitsile describes his first trip back to Johannesburg, where he was sponsored by COSAW: "Here are my colleagues and hosts. Can you deal with that? Hosts! In my own country." But it is not his country anymore: "there are no memories here. The streets of Johannesburg cannot claim me. I cannot claim them either." Still, he returned to the country as a kind of hero to young black writers and activists:
Despite that sense of distance from the country, he dove immediately back into politics and cultural activism, and was quick to say that less had changed than should have: "there is the reality," he said in a 1992 interview, "that the South Africa that alienated black people to a very large extent still exists." Kgositsile was quick to criticize black leaders as well as white for this status quo, accusing the ANC of "being criminally backward when it comes to questions of culture and its place in society or struggle." In the early 1990s he served as vice president of COSAW, fostering the careers of young writers while continuing his steady critique of South African politics.
Kgositsile's most recent poems are more conversational and perhaps less lyrical than his earlier work, and, compared to his once-fiery nationalism, they are muted, and even skeptical. They speak of doubt rather than certainty, a doubt often reinforced by rhythmical understatement, as in the short, uneven lines of "Recollections":
In 2009 Bra Willie was part of the Beyond Words UK tour that also featured South African poets Don Mattera, Lesego Rampolokeng, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers and Lebo Mashile.
In 2013 he was elected as Director of Culture Department and one of the first Executive Committee Members of SA-China People's Friendship Association.
Kgositsile returned to the United States several times, including for a visiting professorship at the New School. He was a member of the editorial board of This Day newspaper in Johannesburg, and remained at the forefront of contemporary South African literature.

Personal life

His former wife, Baleka Mbete, is the former Deputy President of South Africa; Speaker of the National Assembly of South Africa since 21 May 2014 and chairperson of the African National Congress. His daughter Ipeleng is a journalist and fiction writer who has written for Vibe and Essence magazines. He had his first son, Thebe Neruda Kgositsile, with Cheryl Harris, a law professor at University of California, Los Angeles. Thebe is better known as a hip hop artist under the stage name Earl Sweatshirt. Kgositsile was posthumously featured, alongside Harris, on the song "Playing Possum" from Earl Sweatshirt's 2018 album Some Rap Songs.

Death

After a short illness, Kgositsile died aged 79 on 3 January 2018 at Johannesburg's Milpark Hospital.

Awards

The many literary awards he received include the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Harlem Cultural Council Poetry Award, the Conrad Kent Rivers Memorial Poetry Award, the Herman Charles Bosman Prize.
In 2008, Kgositsile was awarded the national Order of Ikhamanga Silver "For excellent achievements in the field of literature and using these exceptional talents to expose the evils of the system of apartheid to the world."

Poetry collections