Decolonization and popular poetics: from Soweto poetry to diasporic solidarity

Abstract

This article reads Soweto poetry in terms of Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness thought. I argue that Soweto poetry develops dialectically. It uses popular cultural theorizations of shared daily experience to formulate black solidarity, while remaining attuned to historical change as the Soweto uprising and the murders of Onkgopotse Tiro and Steve Biko unfold. The implication of Biko’s dialectic is that we need to consider Soweto poetry’s volumes not as settled texts in themselves, but as texts in history whose modes and values are constantly re-formed by the very environment of historical impermanence and political contestation from which they emerge. In line with Biko’s dialectic, I argue that Soweto poetry’s affinity with the wider black diaspora is in keeping with its project of developing a fuller humanity after Apartheid, and that its lasting influence on South African artists and poets is but one sign of its sublation. Biko’s dialectic, I argue, offers South African literary history a way of thinking a genuinely multiracial, transnational canon via a national experience of political conflict and contested cultural value. Moreover, I suggest, the presence of a suppressed women’s poetic tradition after Soweto 1976 means that we ought to complicate Biko’s thought by contemplating the South African literary canon via polythetic, intersecting dialectics.

Keywords: Steve Biko, Black Consciousness, dialectic, literary canon, Soweto poetry, Mongane Wally Serote, Oswald Mtshali, Mafika Gwala, Sipho Sepamla