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| 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.
