Keorapetse Kgositsile

Keorapetse William Kgositsile (19 September 1938 – 3 January 2018), also known by his pen name Bra Willie, was a South African Tswana poet, journalist 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.

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 (unrelated to the right-wing British magazine of the same name), 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.

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 African-American poetry in the United States.

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 (with some difficulty) to find books by Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and was influenced by them as well as by European writers (principally Charles Dickens and D. H. Lawrence), 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."

This work took place while Kgositsile was teaching at Columbia in the earlier 1970s; he left to work briefly at Black Dialogue Magazine.

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.

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.

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."

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.