In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

137 WRITING AND RAPPING FOR A NEW SOUTH AFRICA The Poetry of Lesego Rampolokeng Gugu Hlongwane South Africa is a country desperately seeking normality. After centuries of repressive white domination, various efforts are being made to break with the violent past of apartheid, the system of legalized racism enforced by the National Party in 1948. But daily stories of ongoing racism, crime, rape, and government corruption suggest a country challenged by its new and fragile democracy. Poet Lesego Rampolokeng challenges the myth of a new South Africa by using both oral and written media to relay the urgency of his political project. Moreover, shaped by multiple African cultures in which the oral has traditionally been the most widely practised form of verbal art and continues to hold an important place, Rampolokeng carries a variety of oral features into his written work. He confronts oppressive colonial and postcolonial powers in works characterized by simple diction and uncluttered syntax as well as imagery drawn from the lifeworld (Ong 42) of the South African people he addresses, often directly, while drawing on effective mnemonic devices. For Rampolokeng, the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s popular jingle,“simunye: we are one,”not only perpetuates the lie of national oneness, but also is a sound bite that he effectively answers in ways that are aurally memorable. As I will illustrate in this essay, Rampolokeng speaks and writes against what Anthony O’Brien describes as “the hypnotic normalizing effect of the commonsense present,” a “Mandela honeymoon” (6) that is over “as public sector workers stage national economic/political strikes against the postapartheid state” (6). What Rampolokeng reveals in his work is a country limited by its apartheid past, a country of strangers—people who, as Njabulo Ndebele astutely observes, “don’t know one another as a people” (336). Rampolokeng’s published books, then, are important because they allow his challenge to both black and white oppressive regimes to take more widely transportable and enduring forms than the oral allows, although as I have 138 Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality suggested, he carries both an oral style and an oral frame of reference into his written work. While the critical evaluations of Rampolokeng’s poetry published to date do not have a bearing on the thesis of this essay, they nonetheless provide insight into the goals of Rampolokeng’s work. Kelwyn Sole and James Ogude, for example, seem to understand Rampolokeng’s refusal to sing along with the “simunye” jingle of a post-apartheid South Africa. In his discussion of the South African poetry written by the likes of Rampolokeng, Sole argues: Never is the aspiration that South Africans should fashion a meaningful future together negated, despite the burden of their heritage. This simultaneously uncompromising and gentle stance is indeed difficult to muster and maintain. Yet it is this attitude which strikes the reader of these new poets again and again, as they attempt to embrace and represent a world in transition, uncertain as to its identity and the outcome of the processes so bravely initiated in 1990. (31) Like Sole, who acknowledges both the difficulty of and the need to confront the ugly heritage of apartheid, James Ogude appreciates the importance of Rampolokeng’s mission: “Can we argue that we have adequately disposed of the theme of the apartheid past? Has resistance—the act of decolonisation— become irrelevant in South Africa’s emergent nation state?”(252). In Ogude’s response and estimation, the apartheid theme not only is relevant, but also allows Rampolokeng an opportunity “to restore the imprisoned nation to itself” (253). This fight for justice achievable through what Ogude terms the “guiding ideology … rooted in universal humanism” (254), must necessarily expose South Africa’s shortcomings. Rampolokeng, in this vein, ridicules the country’s “new victims” who “herd themselves like cattle in the colour kraal” (“Riding the victim train” 14), which is likely a reference to Orania, a town in South Africa’s Northern Cape where separatist whites have created an insulated Afrikaner community, complete with an independent flag and currency. The fight that Rampolokeng wages on two fronts, via oral and written media, is especially significant for a poet who, in the days of apartheid, would probably have had his work banned, or worse, would likely have been killed by the regime for writing and performing “subversive” literature. Ironically, as I will illustrate, in the post-1994 South Africa, which ushered in black rule after universal franchise was extended to all South Africans, Rampolokeng...

Share