Mongane Wally Serote is a South African poet and writer. He became involved in political resistance to the apartheid government by joining the African National Congress and in 1969 was arrested and detained for several months without trial. He subsequently spent years in exile, working in Botswana, and later London, England, for the ANC in their Arts and Culture Department, before eventually returning to South Africa in 1990. He was inaugurated as South Africa's National Poet Laureate in 2018.
Biography
Serote was born in Sophiatown, Johannesburg, South Africa, and went to school in Alexandra, Lesotho, and Soweto. He first became involved in the Black Consciousness Movement when he was finishing high school in Soweto. His presence in that town linked him to a group known as the "township" or "Soweto" poets, and his poems often expressed themes of political activism, the development of black identity, and violent images of revolt and resistance. He was arrested by the apartheid government under the Terrorism Act in June 1969 and spent nine months in solitary confinement, before being released without charge. He went to study in New York City, obtaining a Fine Arts degree at Columbia University. After contributing poems to various journals, in 1972 he published his first collection, Yakhal'Inkomo. It won the Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize in 1973. He was a Fulbright Scholar and received a fine arts degree from Columbia University in 1979. He was not able to return to South Africa and he began a life in exile, living in Gaborone, Botswana, where he was involved in the Medu Art Ensemble, and in London, where he relocated in 1986 and worked for the ANC's Department of Arts and Culture. He returned to South Africa in 1990, after the ANC was unbanned. In 1993, he won the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa. In 2004, he received the Pablo Neruda award from the Chilean government. He has served as chair of the parliamentary select committee for arts and culture, and was also the CEO of Freedom Park, a national heritage site in Pretoria opened in 2007. He has founded a few NGOs, iIKSSA Trust where he is the Chairperson, IARI which he is also the CEO. He sits on a few advisory boards in the country dealing with Arts, Culture, Indigenous Knowledge and African Renaissance issues. In 2018, Serote was announced as the National Poet Laureate of South Africa, following the death of Keorapetse Kgositsile.
Awards
1973 - Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize for the best debut collection in English
2003 - The English Academy of Southern Africa Medal for contribution to the English language
2004 - Pablo Neruda Medal for Writing
2007 - The Order of Ikhamanga in Silver, awarded for "Excellent contribution to literature, with emphasis on poetry and for putting his artistic talents at the service of democracy in South Africa"
2008 - Third World Express selected for Africa Book Centre’s 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century
