Search results for ""Author Keorapetse Kgositsile""

This is a stunning collection of more than 100 portraits, in black and white, of writers from Africa and, in particular, South Africa. The chronological arrangement reveals the changing conditions and roles of writers from the 1960s to the present. The most recent photographs were taken after the Pretoria Writers' Conference in 2002, which provided landmark debates around the identity and role of writers currently living in South Africa. A foreword by Keorapetse 'Willie' Kgositsile reflects on the early times, while short texts by more recent writers show the diversity of views held by writers living in contemporary South Africa.

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Z Pallo Jordan has long been the unapologetic moral guardian of the liberation struggle. His writings spanning decades are testament to the power of putting pen to paper and speaking the truth with forceful and eminently readable moral conviction.Letters to my Comrades is the ultimate collection of his piercing and yet embraceable thoughts and inquiries.This treasure trove of the writings of Jordan could not have been more timely in this critical – or should we say unfortunate – period of the promise that was the New Democratic Republic of South Africa, and published as it is on the eve of the African National Congress’s general elective congress in December 2017, and interestingly in the aftermath of the watershed municipal elections of 3 August 2016.

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Keorapetse Kgositsile, South Africa’s second poet laureate, was a political activist, teacher, and poet. He lived, wrote, and taught in the United States for a significant part of his life and collaborated with many influential and highly regarded writers, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Plumpp, Dudley Randall, and George Kent. This comprehensive collection of Kgositsile’s new and collected works spans almost fifty years. During his lifetime, Kgositsile dedicated the majority of his poems to people or movements, documenting the struggle against racism, Western imperialism, and racial capitalism, and celebrating human creativity, particularly music, as an inherent and essential aspect of the global liberation struggle. This collection demonstrates the commitment to equality, justice, and egalitarianism fostered by cultural workers within the mass liberation movement. As the introduction notes, Kgositsile had an “undisputed ability to honor the truth in all its complexity, with a musicality that draws on the repository of memory and history, rebuilt through the rhythms and cadences of jazz.” Addressing themes of Black solidarity, displacement, and anticolonialism, Kgositsile’s prose is fiery, witty, and filled with conviction. This collection showcases a voice that wanted to change the world—and did.

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