Phalafala WorldsBlackRed 2019

Of Worlds Black and Red: South Africa's Poet Laureates and Their World-Making
Networks
Author(s): Uhuru Portia Phalafala
Source: Research in African Literatures , Vol. 50, No. 3, African Literary History and
the Cold War (Fall 2019), pp. 116-135
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/reseafrilite.50.3.09
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Of Worlds Black and Red: South Africa’s
Poet Laureates and Their World-Making
Networks
Uhuru Portia Phalafala
Stellenbosch University
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
Concentrating on the first two national poet laureates of democratic South

Africa, Mazisi Kunene and Keorapetse Kgositsile, this article investigates
the readings that may be elicited in putting them in conversation with their
exilic interlocutors in the context of the Cold War. Bringing their literary
historiography into focus reveals the political and aesthetic networks
they created in the black diaspora and in their relationship with Eastern
Europe. Central to this study are the black and red periodical cultures,
publication avenues, and understudied cultural venues that produce a
generative reading of how black radical traditions and particular histories
of nationalism intersect with those of socialist internationalism, pan-Afri-
canism, and Soviet modernity. They demonstrate a rich production and
dissemination of South African literature through anticolonial and anti-
imperialist networks of exchange, collaboration, and translation. Through
the scrutiny of these materials and relationships, it is possible to establish
a triangulating model that eschews a “counterculture to modernity” born
in the northern Atlantic, thus rebutting a vertical North-to-South influence
that is common in transnational readings. By decentering the northern
metropoles, I contend that Euromodernity has blinded itself to other forms
of modernity and that has overdetermined its influence as universal. Thus,
the universal can be claimed from any cultural position, but can never
be owned. Upon close inspection of the South-to-South transcontinental
and transracial networks detailed in this study, it is possible to delineate
new literary histories of the Global South to demonstrate how we may
“provincialize Europe.”
Research in African Literatures, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Fall 2019), doi: 10.2979/reseafrilite.50.3.09

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UHURU PORTIA PHALAFALA 117
INTRODUCTION
Keorapetse Kgositsile, democratic South Africa’s second national poet laureate,
crossed over to the realm of ancestors on the 3rd of January 2018. Two weeks later,
on the 23rd of January, his friend from exile days, legendary jazz maestro Hugh
Masekela, also passed on. This article takes the form of a project of recovery, an
act of convalesce and retrieval, written in the immediate aftermath of Kgositsile’s
and Masekela’s passing. It investigates the readings that may be elicited by putting
the writings of Kgositsile and South Africa’s first national poet laureate Mazisi
Kunene into conversation with the work of fellow exiles—Masekela, Dumile Feni,
and Aime Cèsaire. The literary historiography of these exiles is detailed in order to
explore the political and aesthetic networks they created within pan-Africanism,
socialist internationalism, and Global South solidarities. Especially important in
this discussion is the exploration of black and red periodical cultures, publication
avenues, and underexplored cultural venues created during the Cold War. The
analysis here privileges the Eastern Bloc’s role in the production and circula-
tion of South African literature and culture, and it takes up Isabel Hofmeyer’s
assertion that book cultures offer us “an ideal site from which to explore themes
of transnationalism” (“Indian Ocean Pages” 107). Thus, I delineate new literary
histories of the Global South to demonstrate how we may “provincialize Europe”
(Chakrabarty) in analyses of past materiality.
Hofmeyer invites us, in “The Black Atlantic Meets the Indian Ocean: Forging
New Paradigms of Transnationalism for the Global South-Literary and Cultural
Perspectives,” to start thinking of the “Indian Ocean as the site par excellence of
‘alternative modernities,’ those formations of modernity that have taken shape
in an archive of deep and layered existing social and intellectual traditions” (13).
Drawing on Hofmeyer’s suggestion, the following analysis focuses on the alterna-
tive modernities that are legible in the work produced by Kunene, Feni, Cèsaire,
Masekela, and Kgositsile. It also elaborates how instances and overlappings of
Afromodernity (Comaroff and Comaroff), Afro-American modernity (Gilroy), and
Arabmodernity (Halim) feature in their oeuvres to demonstrate how modernity
is not a project solely produced by Anglo-America and the West. Such alterna-
tive modernities, I suggest, decenter the West and illustrate the myopic nature of
Euromodernity and its provincializing potentialities. Rather, Euromodernity is a
vernacular of modernity that, in its self-aggrandizing and hegemonic posturing,
has narrowed its view and overdetermined its influence as universal (Gaonkar),
blinding itself to other vernaculars of modernity that expose its limitations. Thus,
the universal can be claimed from any cultural position, but it can never be owned.
There is a compellingly rich production and dissemination of South African
literature revealed through anticolonial and anti-imperialist networks of exchange,
collaboration, circuitries, and translation. By inserting South African cultural
figures into the narratives of Afro-America and the Soviet Union, a triangulating
model can be established—one that eschews a “counterculture to modernity”
(Gilroy) born in the northern Atlantic, thus rebutting a vertical North-to-South
influence that is common in transnational readings. This reading aims to enrich
the project of “minor transnationalisms” (Lionnet and Shih), which criticizes
binary models of postcolonial approaches that overlook the “creative interven-
tions that networks of minoritized cultures produce within and across national

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118 Research in African Liter atures Volume 50 Number 3
boundaries” (7). It also discloses how the pan-African energies of South African
literature and art produced by artists and poets in exile impacted Afro-America,
Afro-Asia, and Afro-Arabia, thus reconstructing and reconfiguring “theories from
the south” (1). By uncovering the place of Afro-American and Soviet bloc histories
in the Global South, I tease out connections between lesser known cultures and
languages, thereby bringing attention to relations hitherto unattended.
EXILE AND RESISTANCE

When I heard of the passing of Masekela and Kgositsile, my first thought was of
the poem “For Hugh Masekela” from Kgositsile’s fourth 1974 collection, The Present
Is a Dangerous Place to Live. The writer had given the musician—with whom he had
shared an apartment and built a life-long friendship—the poem earlier, upon its
first scribbling. The poem concludes with the line “home is where the music is,”
which was later to be the title of Masekela’s London-recorded 1972 album. The
album, an ode to exile, features—besides scintillating bluesy jazz derived from
Masekela’s African jazz heritage—wonderful cover art by South African abstract
expressionist and African National Congress (ANC) member Dumile Feni. Feni’s
art being on the album cover was reportedly met with glee by the owner of the
record company, who exclaimed, “the cover will be more expensive than the
record” (Manganyi 102). Such was the brilliance of Feni’s sculptures and draw-
ings at the time.2
Feni and Masekela met when Masekela traveled to London to record his
album, seeking to collaborate with South African exiled musicians such as Dudu
Pukwane and Makhaya Ntshoko. Feni lived in London at the time and enjoyed
jazz as much as he enjoyed reading. He had evidently read Kgositsile’s poetry;
his drawing was published in the ANC’s Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR)-funded official organ Sechaba [Second Quarter] (1976) and featured lines
from Kgositsile’s poetry, rendered in Feni’s handwriting. At the end of that decade,
Feni’s drawings could be seen adorning the cover of Kgositsile’s sixth collection of
poetry, Heartprints (1980), to which I will return shortly.
In 1971, the Afro-American poet-musician Gil Scott Heron released the track
“Home Is Where the Hatred Is” on his second album, Pieces of a Man. Heron was
a contemporary of The Last Poets, who were bequeathed the name by Kgositsile’s
poem “Towards a Walk in the Sun.” The Last Poets and Heron are attributed with
bridging the black radical tradition of the Black Arts Movement with the genre of
rap. With “Home Is Where the Music Is,” both the poem and album are evidently
in conversation with Heron’s song and lyrics and thus constitute what Tsitsi Jaji
calls “stereomodernism”—an articulation of pan-African solidarity through music.
Heron’s heartfelt rendering of “Home is where the hatred is // Home is
filled with pain and it // Might not be such a bad idea if I never, never went home
again” would undoubtedly have struck a proverbial chord in these uprooted South
Africans, who related to the struggle of their brother in the black world, exiled from
home by state-sanctioned violence and brutal apartheid legislations. This solidar-
ity culminates in Heron’s 1975 album, From South Africa to South Carolina, whose
title points to a geography of studying intersecting transnational black struggle.
This circuitry of influence and reciprocation is productive in imagining an ecology
of exchange built on deep feelings of alienation and subsequent solidarity.

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Kgositsile’s collection Heartprints, his first to be published after leaving the US

in 1975, is a body of work that is particularly generative for mapping networks of
exchange, collaboration, and dissemination between Cèsaire, Kunene, Kgositsile,
Feni, and Masekela. It was translated into German by Hans Bestian as Herzspuren:
Gedichte or Heartprints: Poems and was published in Munich, Germany, in 1980.
(Kgositsile had by then returned to the continent after fourteen years in exile and
was residing in Tanzania, closer to the ANC external mission in Morogoro.) The
collection consists of poems previously published, along with two new ones. These
were all dedicated to women after Kgositsile had heard of the eminent closure of
the ANC Women’s League quarterly magazine Voices of Women (VOW) and served
as a means to raise funds to keep the magazine in production. In the opening pages
of Heartprints, Kgositsile offers this anecdote:
1979: My old friend Tony and his wife Aziza arrive in Dar [es Salaam]. We put
our heads together and get back to how to ensure the survival of VOW. I tell Tony
I thought a small collection of poems for women could be of help. Excellent, he
says with much enthusiasm. Put it together, brother, he says; I want to leave this
place with the typescript in my hand. (6)
And thus the manuscript made the journey to Germany. Tony Seedat was the
ambassador of the ANC Mission for the Federal Republic of Germany and for
Austria. Tony’s wife, Dr. Aziza Seedat, joined him there, and her work as a doctor
and writer became central to the mission. She was the one who collaborated with
the German poet and publisher Rodja Weigand of Schwiftinger Galerie-Verlag to
publish Kgositsile’s book of poetry. Seedat also arranged for it to be illustrated by
Dumile Feni. Kgositsile’s poetry appeared in both English and German therein.
The preface dedicates the collection “to all our women—our grandmothers, moth-
ers, aunts, sisters, wives, daughters and cousins in our struggle for national libera-
tion and especially to the Women’s Section of the African National Congress” (6).
The bundle sold out, and all proceeds went to saving VOW.
One of the new poems in the collection reveals Kgositsile’s extensive travel
to Moscow as a central part of the external movement of the South African
Communist Party (SACP). He had just married the editor of VOW, South African
activist and ANC member Baleka Mbete, in 1978, and their commitment to the
movement had meant that their marriage endured many absences due to travel. In
“Baleka,” a poem dedicated to her, Kgositsile writes, “As I miss you now // Without
complaint or despair // My heart defies every inch of air // Between Dar es Salaam
and Mayakovsky Square” (50). Rodja Weigand’s Schwiftinger Galerie-Verlag was
a decisively socialist organization that supported communist writers. Heartprints
was produced as part of their Schwiftinger Poetry Series, which published two vol-
umes of contemporary women’s poetry, with illustrations in the likeness, in both
adaptation and cover styling, of Feni’s drawings on the cover of Kgositsile’s collec-
tion. Kgositsile’s focus on poetry dedicated to women in Heartprints would have
been a perfect addition to the series, as would his communist politics at the time.
Kgositsile joined poets Paul Ѐluard, Jannis Ritsos, Franziska Sellwig, and
Elfriede Jelinek in the series. Ѐluard was a left-wing French poet and one of the
founders of the surrealist movement. He later eulogized Joseph Stalin in his politi-
cal writing. Ritsos was a communist Greek poet. He was nominated for the Nobel

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Prize twice and won the Lenin Peace Prize, the former Soviet Union’s highest
literary honor. During the period of national socialism, Sellwig’s father was taken
to Esterwegen concentration camp. She began to write after he committed suicide
and published the collection of poetry I Am a White Negress, among many others.
She was Rodja Weigand’s life partner. Jelinek is a reputed feminist writer affiliated
with the Austrian Communist Party; she writes about Austria’s fascist past and the
systematic oppression of women in a capitalist-patriarchal society. Jelinek won the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004.
These poets’ projects are listed on the back sleeve of Kgositsile’s book in
German: Ѐluard’s Victory of Guernica (with seven illustrations), Ritsos’s Diary of Exile
(with five drawings), Sellwig’s I Am a White Negress (with five illustrations), and
Jelinek’s The End (with five drawings). Placing Heartprints (with eight illustrations)
in this series thus positioned Kgositsile within Cold War-era cultural production; it
also showcases how the dissemination of his work was enabled by the Eastern Bloc.
Heartprints features a poem entitled “Places and Bloodstains: Notes for
Ipeleng,” first seen in the pages of the black periodical Black World (previously
Negro Digest) in January of 1975, where it appeared firstly in English, then in its
original Setswana as “Mafelo Le Dilabe Tsa Madi: ya ga Ipeleng,” on the next page.
Kgositsile’s “Notes for Ipeleng” is inspired by Aime Cèsaire’s Notebook of a Return to
the Native Land (originally published in French as Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal in
1939, with the English edition published in 1947). In an earlier 1969 poem dedicated
to Cèsaire, Kgositsile proclaimed, “we revere you Cèsaire” (19). With this rever-
ence as impetus, Kgositsile reimagined and interpreted Cèsaire’s seminal work
in Setswana as he began thinking of returning to his native land. His daughter
Ipeleng, born to him and his first wife Melba, was just two years old at the time.
Cèsaire’s Notebook bridged the third world with the African diaspora and vice
versa. A third world classic and great influence among other poets in the African
diaspora, it is credited with sharpening diasporic consciousness in the black world
(Hale 163). It was most exemplary in achieving what Kgositsile himself intended to
do in his epic, “Notes for Ipeleng,” explicated at the end of Heartprints: “Ipe[leng] is
between two and three years old. Living in North America, citadel of imperialism,
it seems imperative to put down some guidelines for all the Ipelengs all over this
planet” (70). The “Notes,” then, are for the wretched, who shall know each other
by the bloodstains of colonialism, slavery, apartheid, and Western capitalism. At
four pages long, it is the only one of Kgositsile’s poems that makes an attempt at
mimicking the form of Cèsaire’s epic. In it, Kgositsile employs Notes’ leitmotifs of
blood and memory in his exploration of journeying from self-determination to
liberation movements and eventual decolonization.
It is helpful to pause here and reflect on the acts of translation that these texts
have undergone through their global travels. Cèsaire’s Notebook, for instance, was
translated from French into English, later productively interpreted by Kgositsile
from English into Setswana, and then back into English from Setswana in Black
World and Heartprints. Thereafter, it was translated from English to German by
Hans Bestian. In this way, the black world was carried across to the red world
through the act of translation. Kgositsile’s poetry found production and circuitry
in the black world through pan-African solidarity and its subsequent reproduction
and dissemination in the Soviet bloc through red internationalism and triconti-
nental communism.3

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The disarticulations caused by the differences of these worlds are produc-

tively confronted by Kgositsile. In the black world, jazz and black music were his
“language,” as much as was his adaptation of the Afro-American parlance in his
poetry. His relationships with Heron, The Last Poets, and Pharoah Sanders, to
name but a few, comprised a quest to find a common language in the black world
in which he had become a citizen. The illustration of Heartprints by Feni followed
the house style of Schwiftinger Galerie-Verlag, whose collections all bore signa-
ture illustrations, mostly carried out by publisher Rodja Weigand’s wife Ingeborg
Weigand (alias Franziska Sellwig). By routing Feni to the red world, Kgositsile
necessarily brought that world into cognizance of, and in locution with, South
African black consciousness and other radical traditions. When two disparate
cultures interact in collaboration, even in a benefactor-recipient relationship, each
party is impacted.
This becomes all the more significant in light of the fact that the 1969 reproduc-
tion of Cèsaire’s Notebook by Penguin Books contains an elaborate twenty-six-page
introduction by South African poet-in-exile Mazisi Kunene. In the introduction,
which Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has dubbed “the finest essay ever written on [Cèsaire],”
Kunene writes that “surrealism was for [Cèsaire] a logical instrument with which
to smash the restrictive forms of a language which sanctified rationalized bour-
geois values. The breaking up of language patterns coincided with his own desire
to smash colonialism and all oppressive forms” (23). This break from restrictive
forms of colonial language was a preoccupation of African writing in the second
half of the twentieth century.4 Kunene was buoyed by this desire to smash the
English language, having himself written in isiZulu first, then translating his work
to English while in exile. His 1970 debut poetry collection, Zulu Poems, published
in New York, attests to this.
In his 1973 introduction to the anthology, The Word Is Here: Poetry from Modern
Africa, which he edited, Kgositsile extols the power of the word:
What you do with words is a very precise indicator of where you are, where you
want to be. Although many African writers have been damaged by the violence
with which European values were imposed on us, and they have ended up
imitating Western literary styles and forms, some have survived the assault.
Kunene, for instance, makes his poetry in Zulu, and he is very conscious of the
tradition out of which he works, the tradition in whose fertile soil his poetry is
deeply rooted. (xvii)
Kgositsile’s appraisal of Kunene’s approach to language mirrors Kunene’s

observations of Cèsaire’s use of restrictive forms of language. In turn, Kgositsile
strives to do this in his work, which emerges from the Setswana tradition.
Where Cèsaire’s poetic break is interceded by surrealism, Kgositsile’s is medi-
ated by jazz and the Setswana language. The lines from Kgositsile’s poetry
that appear on Feni’s drawings are expressive of what Feni articulated with
his abstract drawings, in a similar manner to which Masekela uses Kgositsile’s
turn of phrase as a unifying principle of his 1972 album. These aesthetics and
forms of resistance in exile all constitute a larger polyglot internationalism
(Edwards, Practices of Diaspora) that is productive when studied through the
lens of translation.

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“REDDENING THE BLACKEST FOLDS”

After publishing three renowned collections of poetry in the US, Kgositsile under-
took editing the aforementioned anthology. Published by Doubleday in 1973 as
The Word Is Here, it is “dedicated to the memory of Magolwane [Jiyane], Langston
Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Chris Okigbo & Can Themba—dream keepers &
weaverbirds all” (Dedication page). The act of weaving an anthology of African
poetry while in exile in the black diaspora can thus be thought of as Kgositsile’s
way of incorporating himself into the tapestry that Jiyane—the “greatest Zulu
poet,” along with Hughes, Hurston, Okigbo, and Themba—had woven over deep
time and disparate histories. Kgositsile seeks to further their project by putting
their work in relation to each other, giving it a pan-African articulation to bridge
spatial divides.
The image of the weaverbird is a capacious one, generative of many meanings
and resonances. It refers, firstly, to Christopher Okigbo’s peculiar social situation
in Nigeria: Okigbo died on the war front fighting on the Biafran side. He had
close associations with “Nigerians of differing ethnic derivations; the dear and
lasting friendships he made with non-Ibos at the University of Ibadan; his virtual
membership of certain well-known Yoruba families in Lagos and Ibadan; and his
marriage to the daughter of a Northern Nigerian Emir” (Nwoga 289). His complex
social (im)position in Nigeria inspired J. P. Clark’s poem “Death of a Weaverbird,”
included in Kgositsile’s anthology, in which Clark dubs Okigbo “a weaverbird //
whose inverted house // has a straw from every soil” (126). The poem ends with
the rich refrain and challenge, “At the head of a flock I have led // to this pass. //
How can I return to sing another song? // To help start a counter surge?” (126).
Responding to this call, Kgositsile creates a medium through which the song of
these weaverbirds from Africa and its diaspora can continue to sound.
Kgositsile employs the phrase “dream keepers” in reference to Hurston and
Hughes. In the latter’s eponymous poem from the eponymous collection, Hughes
(1932) writes,
Bring me all of your dreams,

You dreamer,
Bring me all your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Or the world.
Kgositsile puts his dreams, then, in the care of the dream keepers—his literary
ancestors. Kgositsile was a voracious student of African American literature. In
echoing Hurston’s voice, that “the dream is the truth,” Kgositsile invokes Themba’s
“House of Truth” where dreams were made, curtailing apartheid’s surveillance.
The anthology is subdivided into five sections that essentially represent differ-
ent parts of the African continent: “From the North,” ‘From the East,” “From the
Center,” “From the South,” and “From the West.” These sections are preceded and
divided by refrains in the form of stanzas from Kgositsile’s poem “Exile,” which
first appears in its entirety in The Present Is a Dangerous Place to Live.

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The chronology of the poem—the fragments of which preface every section

of the anthology in 1973, and its first appearance in 1974, preceded by an epigraph
derived from Cèsaire’s Notebook—is generative for these discussions on themes
of exile, translation, and ecologies of exchange. The epigraph of “Exile” states,
for instance, “My memory is surrounded by blood // my memory has its belt of
corpses” (15). Cèsaire was the most cited black writer at the time (Hale 164), and
quoting from Notebook enabled Kgositsile to confront themes of exile, alienation,
and the cultural bomb detonated on black people by Western racist capitalism
and imperialism in his poetry. The epigraph presents an image influenced by
surrealism, where a belt of corpses orbits his memory. The surrealist practice, as
Kunene points out in his introduction to Cèsaire’s Notebook, breaks up the English
language and shields indigenous knowledges from total assimilation. These are
the preoccupations of Kgositsile’s introduction to The Word Is Here:
The publishers of African poetry are overwhelmingly Euro-American. The

greater bulk of the poetry in this anthology, as in all the anthologies contributed
to by contemporary African writers, is of European expression, that is, English,
French, Portuguese. So one is tempted to ask: Who is the audience of the contem-
porary African writer? The bored Euro-American liberal literati searching for
literary exotica in the African quarters of their empire? The African elite trained
away from themselves in institutions of European design? Who? You see, the
audience whose approval an artist seeks is influential on the artist’s vision—the
totality of his thinking, feeling and understanding of his responsibilities, his
commitment, his allegiances, his values, both ethical and aesthetic. (xv)
These questions address themselves to issues of literary production, indigenous

languages, translation, dissemination, and audience—extremely important and
principal concerns at the time, famously raised at the first meeting of African
literary authors of English expression, in 1962, at Makerere University in Uganda.
Such questions are evocatively explored in the periodical Lotus: Afro-Asian
Writing, in which both Kgositsile’s and Kunene’s works appeared regularly. Lotus
was the official organ of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau (AAWB), the cultural wing
of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO). Both were political
and cultural organizations stemming directly out of the Bandung Conference
of 1956, formed by the colonized and the exploited as historical necessity, and
funded by the German Democratic Republic and USSR.5 According to Duncan
Yoon, the AAPSO and AAWB “brought together a variety of vectors, exchanges,
and influences including Soviet influences, pan-Asianism, pan-Africanism, and
increasingly, the influence of the tri-continental and the Cuban experiences” (204).
The questions that Kgositsile grappled with found a solid place of interrogation
and contingent solutions in the AAWB’s manifesto and in Lotus, simultaneously
expanding the scope of pan-Africanism to a larger third world consciousness and
solidarity.
To counterattack the cultural bomb of the West, the colonized devised an
“oppositional politics” and “cultural cooperation” that would meet, consolidate,
and react with one another (Yoon 204) against the colonizer. The AAWB tended
toward cultural cooperation and established writers’ conferences, which over
time were attended by representatives from countries such Iraq, India, Pakistan,
Algeria, South Africa, Palestine, Kenya, Egypt, Lebanon, and Nigeria—all finding

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wide publication in Lotus. The periodical was produced in Cairo, later Beirut, then
Tunis, and released in English, French, and Arabic. At the first meeting of the
AAPSO in Cairo from December 1957 to January 1958, the writer’s bureau adopted
as its manifesto an espousal of “translation to and from the languages of member
countries, and the establishment in every member country of a planning body to
coordinate the translation movement” (Yoon 240). As Hala Halim points out, these
cultural exchanges would serve to “de-emphas[ize] the colonial dynamic in favor
of a commitment of global south vectors of translation and exchange” and thus
decenter the Euro-American liberal literati as producer and audience. Further, such
action would potentially “reorient intercultural dialogue, as no longer primarily
between metropole and colony but between former colonies” (571). Yoon describes
this formation of a third world literature serving “as an intervention into the typi-
cal genealogy of world literature that begins with Goethe’s 1827 coinage of the term
Weltliteratur” by offering “an alternative literary history rooted in the experience of
decolonization, namely, in a ‘third world literature’” (241). In these instantiations
of self-determinism, Kgositsile and Kunene became actors in “a postcolonialism
based on transnational solidarities rather than exclusive relationship with the
colonial metropole” (Halim 572).
The distinct relationship of Kunene and Kgositsile to anticolonial politics,
decolonization, national modernity, deterritorialized vernaculars, and their trans-
lation provides a rich area of analysis. Kgositsile’s The Word Is Here, for example,
made it into “the Afro-Asian Library”—a section of book reviews in Lotus—in the
January–March 1978 issue. Rosette Francis reviewed the anthology in a compre-
hensive five-page essay, in what is more an affirmation, validation, and induction
than a book review. If the periodical functions as a technical means for represent-
ing the imagined community of the third world, to borrow from Rossen Djagalov
(“The People’s Republic of Letters”) and Brent Edwards (The Practice of Diaspora
115), then Francis’s essay places Kgositsile’s anthology in Lotus in a kinship within
the Afro-Asian/Arabic community.
I use the term “home” here to attend to the overarching themes of exile,
alienation, misrecognition, and transnational border-crossing, diaspora, and inter-
nationalism. Francis’s active extraction of long quotations from Kgositsile’s intro-
duction—on topics of indigenous languages, translation, audience, and literary
production and her translation of these into Arabic and French—enabled her to
bring outside material “in” to a domestic context, thus transforming that domestic
“inside” (Venuti, Scandal of Translation). That is, by bringing the “foreign” voice,
as Lawrence Venuti refers to the practice of translation, into the “home” space
of domestic Arabic and Francophone third world nations, Francis necessarily
brings those domestic worlds into locution with, and cognizance of, distinct South
African and African poetic visions and themes. She outlines these as follows:
In “The Word is Here” poetry, the word at its most expressive, is a prayer, con-
demnation, an appeal, encouragement, affirmation and an endless list expressive
of a people’s spirit, alienation, political problems, return to African roots and val-
ues, praise of the beauty of the African women and of Africa as the mother of all
mankind, solidarity with nature and self-consciousness that comes with a search
for identity. The word is here expresses a new man in a new world, an African
living in a modern world where life is multifarious and in a state of flux. (157)

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Francis’s translations of African poetry into French and Arabic introduce

those worlds to a new man in a new world, illustrating how this man’s struggles,
value system, consciousness, and determinations resound in those worlds too. This
is expressive of Afro-Asian and Afro-Arab solidarity, even in the face of capacious
difference. Upon reading Okigbo’s poetry in the Lotus anthology, Francis writes:
The worst effects of colonialism in West Africa is the suppression of the indig-
enous culture and religious worship. Christopher Okigbo, for instance, felt a
prodigal who left his home religion to a foreign one…. Okigbo has struggled as
much to establish his fame as a poet as to revive and preserve his indigenous
religion and culture. His poetry is generally difficult and sometimes obscure. It
is sometimes so confused that it appears meaningless. In “The Path of Thunder”
the emphasis is on word and image, and the projection of meaning through poi-
gnant images rather than through a mental logic of exposition. His writings are
packed full with images of the desire for expression and of his struggle against
those who force him to sing “tongue-tied.” (159)
Okigbo, Kunene, Kgositsile, and Cèsaire had all faced this challenge of circumvent-
ing the limitations of the English/French language and employed either surreal-
ism, abstract expression, or jazz to untie their tongues and sing who they are, free
of the confines of Western language. In Francis’s translations, we encounter a way
out of the restrictive mental logic of exposition, as she produced a medium that
expresses non-Western experience and articulates this in a manner that sounds
immediate to a third world writer of Arabic or French expression. As such, we are
able to recognize in these poets a polyglot internationalism, which is central to the
conjugation of black and red internationalisms (Edwards).
The cover of The Word Is Here further invokes such themes of solidarity and
connection across the red and black world. It features a painting by New York–born
Caribbean painter Avel de Knight entitled “Fertility Mask II.” In this image, we are
offered a connection of the black diaspora to its continent through the evocation of
ritual and ceremony. This in turn creates an aesthetic parallel between Africa, Asia,
and Arab worlds through the religious images and spiritual language employed
in the Lotus anthology and was a further means of fostering solidarity between
these otherwise disparate regions.6
WEAVERBIRDS IN TRANSLATION
Mazisi Kunene published his essay “Magolwane—The Greatest Zulu Poet” in the
Lotus anthology of January–March 1970. In it, he describes Magolwane as:
one of the greatest of African poets, indeed I would say one of the greatest world
poets. He lived in the early 19th Century and was the national poet at the peak of
Zulu power. His poetry can best be understood within an appreciation of the his-
torical background which nurtured his immense genius. Prior to the accession of
Shaka to the Zulu throne, the dominant power was that of the Mthethwas who
had established an empire through skilfully arranged defensive alliances…. The
greatness of Magolwane clearly emerges against the background of these com-
positions. He revolutionised the whole poetic idiom…. The conflicts between
individuals were depicted as conflicts of character and national interests so

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that the individuals in his greatest epic poem became symbolic of greater issues
involving the destiny of nations and peoples. (13)
If Kgositsile’s The Word Is Here was introduced to (Soviet) Asia, Franḉafrique, and
Arabic worlds, then Kunene voyages with those regions to nineteenth-century Zulu
history. Where the myth and legend of Shaka inspired cultural and political for-
mations on other parts of the continent and its diaspora—take Leopold Senghor’s
Chaka (1951) and Afro-American hip-hop outfit Zulu Nation for example—Kunene
takes us into deeper time, “prior to the accession of Shaka to the Zulu throne.”7
This is important as it historicizes warfare and the social structures of the Zulu
people, giving us a deeper understanding of internal conflicts that occurred before
the advent of the colonizer, hitherto erased by colonial modernity’s historicism.
What Kunene does in the poem, and in its transcultural translation, is
reminiscent of how Tswana writers such as Solomon Plaatje and Leetile Raditladi
translated the work of William Shakespeare to Setswana. Shakespeare’s stories,
curiously, could translate well into Tswana settings. In his study of Raditladi’s
translation of Macbeth, Shole, for instance, states that “although Macbeth is set in
ancient Scotland, its themes and milieu, the witches, battles, ambitious generals
and feuding for monarchy do have parallels in our tribal histories and are some-
thing of a reality to Batswana” (53).
Kunene’s narrative about Shaka and the poet Magolwane would likely have
found similar resonances in the Arabic world, while bringing that world into
cognizance of, and in dialogue with, the Zulu world. The Arab context is, after
all, flush with histories of poetic expression in service of social phenomena, just
like the Zulu world, as Kunene’s oeuvre shows. He continues his description of
Magolwane’s writing:
In this sense, his poetry depicts two levels of meaning. On the one hand we
are given meaning of reality as it impresses itself on our senses. History itself
is in this sense descriptive of events, but these events must have their validity
and must have an aesthetic meaning of their own. The description must be so
constructed that it conveys a well-ordered reality. This is one level of meaning.
On the second the same events became symbolic of human drama and life. This
symbolism is not accidental, the poet consciously gives hints and suggestions as
to the interconnection between the first level of meaning—descriptive, and the
second—philosophical. It is for that very reason that Magolwane is not contented
with giving description in the first few lines of his stanzas, but always, as has
been indicated, draws a philosophical conclusion. This conclusion must have a
direct relationship with the first introductory description and must at the same
time be a lead on to the next stanza. In this sense Magolwane’s poetry impresses
itself in waves of meaning. The meaning which is not only assumed in words
but also in the structure and form of the poetry. (15)
Kunene articulates a cultural imperative that synthesizes philosophy and history

as lived experience, a social order whose description holds space for human drama
and life, placing emphasis on human values, intersubjective relations, conflict, phi-
losophy, aesthetics, and so forth. Kunene derives this poetic from Magolwane and
in his essay expresses his own historical project of reconstructing history through
his epics, which were inspired by his literary predecessor.

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Kunene’s practice in this essay, and in his own literary texts, can be under-
stood as what Jean and John Comaroff call “Afromodernity,” which, they argue,
has lain implicit in signs and practices, dispositions and discourses, aesthetics
values and indigenous ways of knowing. Nor is it best labelled an “alternative
modernity.” It is a vernacular—just as Euromodernity is a vernacular—wrought
in an ongoing, geopolitically situated engagement with the unfolding history of
the present. And, like Euromodernity, it takes many forms. (16)
Kunene’s philosophical musings certainly articulate an Afromodernity that, as a

vernacular, is translated in Lotus into Arabic, according to Achebe, entering another
locus with its own “signs and practices, dispositions and discourses, aesthetics
values and indigenous ways of knowing” (qtd. in Wilkinson vi). Translations into
Arabic are unique because Arabic, unlike French, offers possibilities to theorize
South-South relationships away from the colonial metropole. The Comaroffs’
definition of Afromodernity in the context of Lotus is expressive of the Afro-
Asian Writers’ Bureau’s concept of postcolonialism that was set as criterion at its
first conference in Tashkent in 1958—a privileging of Afro-Asian solidarity over
a vertical relationship with the colonial metropole and a commitment to human
rights and humanism.
An exchange of reciprocity between the Zulu and the Arabic worlds is thus
pivotal to Lotus’s project of encouraging South-South transcultural exchange,
indigenous languages, translation, and humanist practices. Kunene’s synthesis of
social conflict between individuals with national interests and how they translate
into Magolwane’s epic and heroic poetry, and in turn resonate with Arabic worlds,
highlights the historical relationship between poetry and politics and potentially
reveals resonances with Arab-modernity and its deep history of poetic expres-
sion. This platform for making South-South comparisons is what informed Alex
La Guma’s statement, in his review of short stories published in Lotus, that “what
we have started to do is provide a valuable service, not only to students of Afro-
Asian literature… but to bringing the literature of our continents into the arena of
world literature” (qtd. in Halim 572). The platform of Lotus offers an intervention
in the genealogy of world literature by “providing an alternative history rooted in
the experience of decolonization, namely, in a ‘third world literature’” (Yoon 241)
undergirded by particular national histories.
Chinua Achebe articulates the value of these traveling “signs and practices,
dispositions and discourses, aesthetic values and indigenous ways of knowing”
in his praise of Kunene. Talking to Jane Wilkinson (1988), he explicates the impor-
tance of invoking incidents in his Anthills of the Savannah:
As Africans today we should make it habit of invoking these powerful images

from our history, legend and art…. You don’t have to repeat everything that
Kunene said, but just mention the keyword, the password, and the whole image
is called up in the imagination of those who know, who are aware, who are liter-
ate in our traditions. I think this is very important. (vi)
What is encoded in Kunene’s literary criticism as a project of reconstructing his-

tory and using the past to inform future desires are invocations that resonate with
the Igbo worldview, cosmology, and onto-epistemology. These invocations, when

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brought into dialogue with the Arab world, rouse the Arab world into encounters
with its own set of social and cultural values and logics. In this way, Kunene’s
piece, presented in multilingual versions in Lotus, could be understood to coalesce
Afromodernity and Arab-modernity to articulate an “alternative modernity.”
According to Dilip Gaonkar,
One can provincialize Western modernity only by thinking through and against
its self-understanding, which are frequently cast in universalist idioms. To think
through and against means to think with a difference—a difference that would
destabilize the universalist idioms, historicize the contexts, and pluralize the
experiences of modernity. (15)
The project of decentering Western modernity and its universalism—by treating

it as one vernacular of modernity among the many—is what Achebe infers with
regard to Kunene’s Emperor Shaka, and it is similarly what Kunene emphasizes in
his estimation of Magolwane as the greatest Zulu poet.
Kunene wrote critical essays on his experience as a Zulu writer first and then
as translator of his own work. “About Translations, Especially Zulu in European
Languages,” appears in the oldest Dutch literary periodical, De Gids, translated
from English to Dutch by Dutch poet Bob Den Uyl. It will be instructive to cite
Kunene at length here:
If translations want to be effective, certain conditions must be met, or at least

certain problems must be acknowledged. Some of these problems are insur-
mountable, so that intelligent translators from a language area make a choice
that is translatable. First of all, all discussions about translation problems
must determine whether a translation is meant (a) a literal translation from
one language into another, (b) a translation of concepts from one literary form
into another, or (c) a synthesis between the two approaches. Although it seems
tempting to regard the latter as the best, it is not always the happiest approach
in practice. For example, many concepts do not have the same meaning in the
language in which the translation is made and those concepts differ from culture
to culture. This is especially the case if the cultures are completely different, for
example European and Chinese, European and African, European and Indian
culture. For example… a European when he talks about the earth sees only the
geographical, geological and botanical entities that constitute the earth together.
But for the African the earth is “alive.” The concept immediately arouses special
associations that relate to the totality of life, the world in its “active” relationship
with other celestial bodies. For example, it is often argued by carefully thinking
people that “heaven and earth touch each other.” This is called an optical illusion
in Europe. Yet it is only a description that comes from a certain way of seeing
things, and not from fact. The truth is that there are two levels from which this
phenomenon can be observed. Heaven begins at the surface of the earth, and
that is one truth level as perceived by the eye. It is real and true as far as the eye
can describe it. But then there is a second level. Experience teaches us that this
meeting point is never “physical”; we take it to be true only at a distance. As soon
as we get closer it withdraws. This convinces us that what we saw at a distance
with our eyes was an illusion. Yet, if an illusion can exercise such a power on
our perception, it must have a livelihood in itself. And from this point of view, the
African creates myths and legends that are more active and play a much greater
role in daily life than those in Europe. (238)

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Kunene puts India, China, and Africa in relation here and in contradistinction
with Europe. He is emphatic about the fissures and disjunctions that occur when
carrying over a language that represents a worldview from the “South” into
European language. He takes European languages to task for displaying a lack of
“carefully thinking people,” who as a result, miss the totality of life as conceived
by third world vernaculars of modernity, which is subsequently embedded in
their languages. These languages of the South can be carried over, to a large
extent successfully, from one to another in translation, using what Achebe has
called “keywords and passwords” to invoke images and relational meanings. The
publication of this essay that points out the deficiencies of European languages
in a Dutch periodical is thus an act of “provincializing Europe”—revealing that
the third world’s transition to capitalist modernity has been a translation of exist-
ing worlds and thought to categories of self-understanding of that modernity
(Chakrabarty).
In Kunene’s examples, “if an illusion can exercise such a power on our per-
ception, it must have a livelihood in itself” (238). Perhaps this is what the other
weaverbird, Hurston, meant when she said, “the dream is the truth.” How do we
then understand the worldview of the Afro-American and the black diaspora
subject? Ntongela Masilela uses the figure of Kunene to bridge these two worlds:
[Kunene’s] poetic vision encompassing a profound philosophy of life and a

true African cosmology is what holds together the metaphysical unity of the
continent. This poetic vision also postulates the unity of Africa and the African
Diaspora. In this unification of the black world, Mazisi Kunene’s achievement
is similar to that realized by Aime Cèsaire in Return to My Native Land. (“The
South African National”)
Kgositsile’s dedication for The Word Is Here suggests that those black worlds share
a third world vernacular, logic, and thought system. In this sense, the dedication of
that anthology is apt, and the message it sends is apparent—Magolwane, Hurston,
Themba, Hughes, and Okigbo are dream keepers and weavers of the continent and
its diaspora. The black world is interwoven, and continues to be woven, by rich
linguistic, visual, and musical practices; cosmologies; philosophies; intersubjective
relations; and value systems.
In citing them and deploying Kunene’s scholarship and literary criticism as
a preamble for the anthology, Kgositsile identifies with and inserts himself into
this lineage of weavers and dream keepers. Having been attributed with bridging
the continent and its diaspora himself, his poetic vision extends that project to the
third world with unbridling commitment. He follows Kunene, who had already
published a book that was produced only in the German language, namely Die
Grossfamilie: Eine Afrikan: Gesellschaftstheorie [The Great Family: An African Theory
of Society], published in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1971 (Masilela
“The South African National”); had written the unpublished essay “Modern
Poetry in Afro-Asian Literature” (Lumchembe 3); and had also published widely
in Lotus as early as the late 1960s.8 In this sense, through these later-national poet
laureates of democratic South Africa, the tapestry of the black world became inter-
woven with that of the red world and their patterns, images, colors, and motifs
found synergy and relation.

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BLACK AND RED SONG

Kgositsile was a pivotal actor within the complex politics of the African National
Congress (ANC) and South African Communist Party (SACP) alliance during the
Cold War, coinciding with his time in exile.9 This alliance imbricated the anti-
apartheid struggle with broader third world politics spanning Africa, Asia, USSR,
and the GDR. The Soviet Union played a key role as “patron, host, and political
model” (Lee 4) for many liberation struggles around the world. This patronage
enabled Kgositsile to carve cultural pathways in Afro-Asia and Afro-Arabia, and
it is exemplary of what Christopher Lee calls a fugitive cosmopolitanism—Cold War
cosmopolitanism defined by enforced political exile (4).
In September 1976, Kgositsile attended the AAWB’s young writer’s conference
in Tashkent, Uzbekistan; the trip was funded by the USSR through the ANC. It
was his first visit to the larger USSR outside of Moscow and that trip recalibrated
his vision of a decolonized Global South and post-apartheid South Africa. He
attended the conference with, among others, anti-apartheid leftist activist Barry
Feinberg and Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo. Feinberg edited an anthology of
poetry, Poets to the People: South African Freedom Poems, originally published in
1975, later reproduced with new poems by Kgositsile in 1980. It was funded by
The International Defence and Aid Fund, a London-based organization that was
closely linked to the ANC and committed to funding victims of apartheid laws.10
Feinberg penned a post-Tashkent poem entitled “We Found Common Song
(for Keorapetse, Alma-Ata, and the Uzbek People),” first published in Lotus in
January–March 1978, before it was republished in Poets to the People. In this poem,
we encounter some of the solidarities the ANC and its alliances were forging
with the Soviet world. The dedication here is an index of events, spatiality, and
political and cultural affinities. To collapse Kgositsile with the capital city of
USSR’s Kazakhstan (Alma-Ata), as the dedication expressed, as well as to place
him alongside the people of Uzbekistan in the South African anthology of free-
dom poems and in the Lotus anthology, can be read as an expression of solidar-
ity between South Africa and the Soviet bloc, thus representing a unification of
black and red worlds. This is revealed in the first and second stanza of Feinberg’s
poem (37):
Testing Solidarity
in Tashkent
we found
common song
…
And Uzbek sands
grow green
and Uzbek skies
glow red
and Africa
echoes home
in this brother
continent

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The poem echoes Afro-Asian solidarities through “song”—an aesthetic that articu-
lates the importance of “soft power” (Nye): an approach to internationalism based
on cultural relations. Finding a “common song,” as opposed to a “common poem,”
speaks directly to another vernacular of modernity, where song is emblematic of
signs and practices, dispositions and discourses, as well as aesthetic values and
indigenous ways of knowing that override colonial modernity’s logic.
Song gives primacy to rhythm, ritual, movement, and dance more than it
does language. In poetic histories of Afro-Arabia, song and poetry are one and
the same: song constitutes poetry; there are no demarcations between the two.
The encounter with the “song” of the colonized in the Global South was dis-
missed by the colonizer as simple emotional outpourings of irrational minds,
while their poetry was deemed ritualistic and instinctual and not “high art.”
But song is central to these societies; everything significant is accompanied by
song—in ceremonies such as weddings, funerals, rites of passages, protests, and
war, the singing of song constitutes a fundamental part of proceedings. Song
expresses “solidarity of the group,” as Kunene (1977) ruminates: “if the group
moves in a direction that complements the others” (22), then unification of the
group is expressed.
Song can be understood, then, as a vernacular of Afro/Arab-modernity
and articulates a “stereomodernism” that imbricates pan-African and pan-Asian
worlds.11 The poem uses this practice and its aesthetic and philosophical values to
echo home in this brother continent. The dictum “brother and sister” is conven-
tionally used in discourses of Africa’s relation with its diaspora, and we see here
an expansion of that geography and conceptual framing that asks us to rethink
the making of the South. The last stanza of Feinberg’s poem traces a historical and
spatial geography of shared struggle:
Against this backdrop

with the sun
an open fire
we rallied
on the steps
of the ceramics factory:
blazed our rage
about Soweto
our deserts
yet to be irrigated
our Shakas
yet to be resurrected
and our victories
soon to be celebrated!
Following Kgositsile’s predilection for collapsing space through a poetic practice

that puts Soweto in relation to Harlem as a means of expressing pan-African soli-
darity, Feinberg situates the sands of Uzbek deserts in relation to Soweto. There
are broader and generative implications to this besides the obvious meaning of
Soweto’s metaphorical aridness and lack. The poem follows the events of student
uprisings in Soweto, where apartheid police opened unrestrained fire on protest-
ing students, killing hundreds. This is the reference that Feinberg makes in the line

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“blazing our rage” in the open fire of the sun and in a kiln of Alma-Ata’s ceramic
factories. The channeling of this rage into something material embodies the soft
power of cultural affinities. Moreover, the resurrection of “our” Shakas, in its plu-
ral rendering, is a resurrection of not only Afro-Arabia’s tactics of warfare, but also
invokes heroics and indigenous aesthetics, a formulation that reroutes tradition
into modern articulations of self, community, politics, and culture.
The Uzbek desert and Soweto have a significant relationship, not yet fully
considered. Feinberg, through drawing these parallels, makes reference to Soviet
modernity through the Hungry Steppe—a large Soviet agricultural project that
began in 1956 aimed at cultivating the naturally arid and virgin lands of Eastern
Uzbekistan. The project was located 160 kilometres from Tashkent, the capital of
Uzbekistan, where Kgositsile and Feinberg traveled for the AWWA writer’s confer-
ence. It was in this desert that the great famine took place from 1930 to 1933 in the
Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, under Stalin’s rule. A million and a half people
died—then a quarter of Kazakhstan’s population. The Hungry Steppe project thus
marked how a site of national trauma through famine could be transformed into
an area of food security.12 In referencing this desert, Feinberg illustrates his roman-
tic dreams for Soweto’s desert-state (reflecting those of ANC and SACP’s biases
toward Soviet modernity): for it to be irrigated by Shaka’s bravery and war tactics
against apartheid. To place Soweto alongside Uzbekistan and other Soviet states
is to foster “grounds of engagement” (Robolin) between the two places. It is thus
through this strategy of invocation through translation that “We Found Common
Song” looks to forge solidarities between the African world and the Arab world,
black consciousness and third world consciousness, as well as between black and
red internationalism.
VARIATION OF A CONCLUSION
This paper investigated vernacular languages and aesthetics in political and cul-
tural networks created by the South African poets Mazisi Kunene and Keorapetse
Kgositsile through four interrelated practices: literary production as acts of soli-
darities between social and political movements, translation, the making of a third
world literature, and articulations of various vernaculars of modernity. I attempted
to answer the question what happens when a text is translated from one world to
another? Employing examples of Kgositsile’s poetry, published in the pan-African
periodical Black World in both English and Setswana, the discussion traced how his
poetry was carried across to the red world, where it was translated into German,
to demonstrate how, firstly, the black radical traditions of South Africa and the
black diaspora found interconnectivities with those of tricontinental communist
literature; and secondly, to uncover the cultural affinities that obtain through
soft power, enabled through the Cold War. The crossings of such literary texts
from one conceptual, ideological, and geographical context to another has also
been outlined, and the processes and implications of literary translations through
investigating the networks of exchange that enabled Kgositsile and Kunene’s texts
from the black world to travel to the Arabic world through the periodical Lotus
have been traced.
In doing so, some of the connections between Afro- and Arab-modernities—
arguing that theirs signs, aesthetics, worldviews, and logic complimented one

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another—have been illuminated. These complementary connections enabled

meaning in these texts to be carried over in productive and transformative ways
that subvert colonial capitalist modernity while simultaneously decentering the
northern metropoles as central to translation in postcolonial studies. Lotus there-
fore enabled South-South translation, collaboration, dissemination, and subse-
quently cultivated alternative audiences. Translating South African texts to Arabic
necessarily brought the Arab world and its poetics into dialogue with a distinct
South African aesthetic, radical tradition, decolonial poetic vision, and worldview.
Much can be gained by analyzing the making of South African literature outside
its national borders, as this has revealed how Cold War networks enabled hitherto
unexplored solidarities between the red and black worlds of the second half of the
twentieth century.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work is based on the research supported in part by the National Research
Foundation of South Africa (Grant Numbers: 112169). It is also funded by the
Andrew Mellon “Unsettling Paradigms” Grant, for the project “Recovering
Subterranean Archives” of which the author is principal investigator.
NOTES
1. As renowned playwright Duma Ndlovu aptly records, “Dumile left the country
in 1968 and by the early 1970s he was considered one of the leading black artists of the
day in South Africa. He became a Black Consciousness icon and joined the league of
Steven Biko and [Onkgopotse] Tiro, among others” (Manganyi 116).
2. In “My Name Is Afrika” (2018), I explore and uncover Kgositsile’s literary rela-
tionship with Hoyt Fuller, the editor of Black World.
3. Inaugurated at the Makerere Conference of 1962.
4. Lotus is “produced in the German Democratic Republic appointed by: The
Solidarity Committee of the GDR on behalf of the Afro-Asian Writer’s Union,” as the
sleeve of the January–March 1978 periodical states.
5. Lotus relies on religious and spiritual images from Africa, the Middle East, and
Asia as a means of fostering solidarity between these otherwise disparate regions. This
edition (January–March 1978) alone boasts fifteen consecutive pages of photographic
expositions of spiritual artefact from as early as the 13th century from Nepal, Sikkim,
Bhutan, and Spiti Valley.
6. It is important to note that Senghor’s poem was a narrative instantiation of
Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka (1925), originally written in Sesotho. See Vasilattos.
7. I suspect this is an essay published in Lotus, however it is not possible to confirm
this due to lack of access to all Lotus editions.
8. Popescu explores the role of the Soviet Union in the South African cultural
imaginary.
9. The organization established branches in Sweden, Norway, Australia, and
Switzerland.
10. Although Tsitsi Jaji uses this heuristic to signal music as a tool for Pan-African
solidarity, I adapt it here to function within Afro-Arab and Afro-Asian solidarities.
11. While the USSR played a crucial role in supporting the ANC, it is important
not to romanticize it as some of the ANC and SACP member did. As Popescu observes,
“in South Africa, Marxist philosophy contributed fundamentally to the formation
of a struggle culture and to the examination of apartheid as a form of colonialism.

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However, some of its forms and analysis were encumbered by a teleological view of
history, overemphasis on economic factors, and biased approval of the Eastern Bloc”
(17). For example, the famine in Kazakstan (and in Ukraine) in the 1930s was a hor-
rifying means of keeping restive populations, that had transitioned from subjects of
the Russian empire in the nineteenth century to being forcefully included in the Soviet
Union, in check. Some of the collective farms in Kazakstan in the second half of the
twentieth century were places where dissidents or minorities were forcefully displaced.
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Phalafala WorldsBlackRed 2019

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Of Worlds Black and Red: South Africa's Poet Laureates and Their World-Making

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/reseafrilite.50.3.09

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Concentrating on the first two national poet laureates of democratic South

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EXILE AND RESISTANCE

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Kgositsile’s collection Heartprints, his first to be published after leaving the US

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The disarticulations caused by the differences of these worlds are produc-

Kgositsile’s appraisal of Kunene’s approach to language mirrors Kunene’s

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“REDDENING THE BLACKEST FOLDS”

Bring me all of your dreams,

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The chronology of the poem—the fragments of which preface every section

The publishers of African poetry are overwhelmingly Euro-American. The

These questions address themselves to issues of literary production, indigenous

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Francis’s translations of African poetry into French and Arabic introduce

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Kunene articulates a cultural imperative that synthesizes philosophy and history

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Kunene’s philosophical musings certainly articulate an Afromodernity that, as a

As Africans today we should make it habit of invoking these powerful images

What is encoded in Kunene’s literary criticism as a project of reconstructing his-

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The project of decentering Western modernity and its universalism—by treating

If translations want to be effective, certain conditions must be met, or at least

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[Kunene’s] poetic vision encompassing a profound philosophy of life and a

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BLACK AND RED SONG

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Against this backdrop

Following Kgositsile’s predilection for collapsing space through a poetic practice

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another—have been illuminated. These complementary connections enabled

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