‘Remember Sharpeville’: Radical Commemoration in the Poetry of the Exiled South African Poets, Dennis Brutus and Keorapetse Kgositsile

The Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 has been widely seen as a watershed moment, marking a fundamental shift in the nature of the resistance to apartheid. Its effect on cultural production was monumental: in the face of a massive government crackdown, almost every black writer and artist of note was forced into exile. The poets who write within the long shadow of the massacre must negotiate its legacy and the fraught question of its commemoration.This article takes as its point of focus two poems by Dennis Brutus and Keorapetse Kgositsile that address the place of Sharpeville in cultural memory. I consider the distinctiveness of the poetics of mourning and commemoration that they fashion in relation to South Africa’s most renowned elegy for the victims of Sharpeville, Ingrid Jonker’s “The Child.” I suggest that Brutus’ anti-poetic, subverted elegy “Sharpeville” re-stages commemoration as an act of resistance that is prospective rather than retrospective. In considering Kgositsile’s poem “When Brown is Black,” I examine Kgositsile’s transnational framing of Sharpeville and its location on a continuum of racial suffering, drawing attention to the significance of the links that Kgositsile forges between Malcolm X and “the brothers on Robben Island,” (42) and between Sharpeville and the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965. This paper suggests that for both Brutus and Kgositsile commemoration is framed as a mode of activism. Keywords: Sharpeville, Ingrid Jonker, Dennis Brutus, Keorapetse Kgositsile, cultural memory, commemoration, elegy

The Cancer of Punitivity

Chapter 6 raises crucial ethical and political questions about the practice of punishment by means of the prison. It discusses the central importance of power in the carceral environment and its potential for humanitarian abuse. After a reading of Oscar Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’ the chapter outlines G. B. Shaw’s and Karl Menninger’s metaphoric thesis of imprisonment as crime and goes on to present an analysis of punitivity in current penal policy and public polemic. The second half of the chapter turns to a delineation of the close affinities between penal punitivity and colonial oppression, analysing memoirs by Robben Island inmates and the Malawian Sam Mpasu, as well as poetry by Dennis Brutus and Jack Mapanje.

Echo of Poesy in South Africa’s Politics: Form and Resistance in Dennis Brutus’ “Simple Lust” and “Letters to Martha”

Apartheid in South Africa began in 1948 AD with the introduction of separatist rule that introduced draconian principles in government. This made formation of associations impossible. There was no free movement of the Blacks. Pass laws were imposed to prevent the Blacks from free movement. This approach brought protest among reasonable people of the World. Within the literary circle, protest literature ensued and emerged to join forces with organizations to clamp down on the draconian system operatives in South Africa. From the 1950s through the 60s and 80s witnessed a plethora of protest literature against the system of government in South Africa. This paper entitled “Echo of Poesy in South Africa Politics: Form and Resistance in Dennis Brutus’ Letters to Martha and A Simple Lust examined South Africa’s protest literature with particular reference to Dennis Brutus’s poetry of resistance showing the various circumstances which Dennis Brutus offers his poetry of resistance.