Obituary: Mafika Pascal Gwala's poetry 'a powerful force'

Katlego Mkhwanazi, Mail & Guardian

 

Kwela-Ride

 

Dompas!

I looked back

Dompas!

I went through my pockets

Not there.

 

They bit into my flesh (handcuffs).

 

Came the kwela-kwela

We crawled in.

The young men sang.

In that dark moment

 

It all became familiar.

– Mafika Pascal Gwala

Poets are Hurting: Lesego Rampolokeng in Conversation with Mafika Gwala

Chimurenga Chronic

Mafika Gwala emerged as a significant writer in the 1970s during his association with the black South African Student Organisation and the Black Community Programmes in Durban. In 1973 he edited Black Review, and his short stories, essays and poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies. His poetry collections include Jol’iinkomo (1977) and No More Lullabies (1982). He also worked with Liz Gunner and co-edited Musho! Zulu Popular Praises (1991), a literary commentary on Zulu poetry which includes two of his praise poems. A prominent activist and an advocate of Black Consciousness, his poetry rose out of poverty, oppression, physical and mental pain to reclaim dignity and beauty. Writing in the spirit and rhythm of jazz, he creates living music, finding the perfect low tone of oppression and the highs of liberation. 

No easy stroll to freedom for SA poetry's restless howler

Miles Keylock, Mail & Guardian

Lesego Rampolokeng

‘Knock & lock-down phoney miracle politic-crony-oracles/ *most beloved for ‘suicide on the rail tracks’/ trains run through the flesh here/ travel not far for head-slices and skin-pieces,” writes Lesego Rampolokeng at the start of his anthology Head on Fire: Rants/Notes/Poems 2001 to 2011. Lines like this have earned the Soweto-born poet a reputation for being difficult and abstruse, “a tough chew” as Kwanele Sosibo wrote in his 2012 review of the anthology.

Yet to read Rampolokeng’s “ideological militancy” and disillusionment with the contemporary “rainbow fable” as simply “unrelenting desolation” (Sosibo again) is to overlook that deep humanity, self-reflexive irony and wicked humour that has characterised his poetry since his first “ranthology”, 1990’s Horns for Hondo.

Lesego Rampolokeng: Head on Fire

Writing the Ungovernable

Lesego Rampolokeng

Lesego Rampolokeng, Public Lecture, Faculty of Humanities, Rhodes University, 12 June 2012

Artaud: ‘That trick you have of always turning your back on questions will not prevent the heavens from opening up on the appointed day and establishing a new language in the midst of your imbecile tracts. We mean the tracts of your ideas.’

Fanon: ‘My final prayer : oh my body, make of me, always, a man who questions.’

Pasolini: ‘The real Marxist must not be a good Marxist. his function is to put orthodoxy and codified certainties into crisis. His duty is to break the rules.’

'Dropped Against the Rocks of Promise'

by Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

More than half of our young people are unemployed. For many of these people there is no formal route through which they can develop their energies and creativity and have them rewarded with a passage into autonomy and adulthood. Time becomes circular rather than linear and as life moves in descending and tightening spirals rather than up and forward. Pain and panic set into the bones.

Lesego Rampolokeng: The Bavino Sermons

Bavino is ghetto-talk for everyman. In these new poems, Rampolokeng looks through the destruction caused by those intoxicated with their own power, who put vanity before humanity. The hailstorm of rhyme echoes the random gunfire the insomniac poet hears every night in Soweto.

Nevertheless, in these uncomfortable sermons, not all is bleak: my love lives/I hope survives the hatred that is sacred.

Lesego Rampolokeng: The Fela Sermon

Lesego Rampolokeng: 'Treason' & 'End Beginnings' (with the Kalahari Surfers)