Abstract
This article considers protest poetry written between 1961 and 1976. I argue that the Soweto poetry of the 1970s enabled activism that would change Johannesburg’s landscape, facilitating the racial mixing of inner city areas and eroding the segregationist policies that had defined the city from its beginnings. Concomitantly, the paper focuses on representations of the train as a site through which black localities were produced as resistance. Via close readings of poetry by Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali, Sipho Sepamla, and Mongane Wally Serote, I show how the train establishes Soweto as a “neighbourhood”, while also constructing a white “other” against which its identity is affirmed.
The genealogy of racial spatialization in South Africa is well known (see, for example, Robinson, 1996): under colonialism and then apartheid, black South Africans were forced to the economic, political, and social margins of society through legal measures that deprived them of land and limited their means of survival in the rural areas, while making them non-citizens in the urban. Spatialized racial segregation was in turn deeply embedded in formations of place. The pre-apartheid state’s insistence on the whiteness of the urban was increasingly entrenched during the period of National Party governance beginning in 1948, under which the creation of Bantustans, the implementation of Pass Laws and the restriction of black people to under-resourced, peripheral townships in the cities were all ways in which the discriminatory power of the white state found spatial realization. And yet, as David M. Smith argues, “urbanization under apartheid, no matter how carefully the state contrived to control it […] undermined apartheid itself” (1992: 1).
This article explores the ways in which urbanization provided fertile ground for counter-discourses that challenged the spatial impositions of the white state. While the city may have operated as a sign of “whiteness”, it was also an interface for cross-cultural encounters and the development and exploration of new and diverse modernities. Across literary genres, black writers reconfigured the places of their marginalization into sites of heterogeneity and vibrancy that would directly impact the spaces of the white city. The focus of this paper is on Johannesburg because since the discovery of gold in the Rand in 1886, it has been the dominant site of economic and cultural production in southern Africa. While it is acknowledged that forms of struggle were, following Gillian Hart (2002), locally specific, the figuring and re-figuring of Johannesburg space can be understood as emblematic of the ways in which race, gender, and class were and are negotiated in urban South Africa as a whole. Accordingly, I concentrate on Soweto poetry (also known as new black poetry, protest poetry, and township poetry) by three key figures writing from and of Johannesburg between 1961 and 1976: Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali, Sipho Sepamla, and Mongane Wally Serote. I argue that the genre agitated for forms of, to borrow from Raymond Williams, “militant particularism” that would shift Johannesburg’s cityscape. Drawing on David Attwell’s 2005 study of the relationship between form and modernity in black poetry of this period, I discuss representations of the train as a site through which black localities were produced as resistance.
After a period of retreat during the 1960s, black literature emerged changed by the intensified oppressions of the white government and the attendant radicalization of black politics. The black consciousness ideology espoused by the black student body SASO (South African Students’ Organisation) came to prominence after the banning of black political parties during the 1960s. Following the shooting of 69 unarmed anti-pass protesters at Sharpeville township in March 1960, the apartheid government declared a partial state of emergency and the ANC (African National Congress) and PAC (Pan-African Congress) were banned. The former rejected its policy of non-violence and went underground, establishing its military wing “Umkhonto we Sizwe” (MK) in 1961 and embarking on a series of acts of sabotage. But this resistance was to little effect and in 1963 Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, and other members of the ANC were arrested and subsequently imprisoned in a move that Chris Alden notes, “effectively destroyed resistance to the South African government for nearly two decades” (1996: 18).
Against the tightening of apartheid, black consciousness asserted the motto “Black man, you are on your own”. It drew on the works of African American writers such as the Pan-Africanist W. E. B. Du Bois, the black civil rights movement in the United States, the “negritude” of Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Cesaire, and Frantz Fanon’s analysis of the racial binaries constructed by imperial definitions of “superior” and “inferior” civilizations. Black consciousness rejected the involvement of white liberals as lacking experiential authenticity. It sought to mitigate the psychological as well as the political and social traumas of apartheid through an ideology of black self-definition and transformation.
The influence of these new forms of political expression on black literature was significant; as “blackness” became political, so too did black cultural production. Literature was a tool in the processes of conscientization and an enunciation of black experience (Brewer, 1986).
As Nadine Gordimer described in her seminal 1973 essay “New Black Poetry in South Africa”, the banning of prose written during the 1950s and 1960s and fear of state censorship severely affected the production of black fiction. Writers were compelled to seek out an aesthetic that was, in Gordimer’s words, “implicit” and less vulnerable to governmental interference (1973: 52). The poetic turn of the 1970s was an artistic and pragmatic response to the exigencies of making black voices heard at a time when black literary production had been curtailed by the white state.
I argue that the Soweto poetry of the 1970s asserted forms of localized activism that would alter Johannesburg’s landscape, facilitating the racial mixing of inner city areas and slowly but surely eroding the segregationist policies that had defined the city from its beginnings. The argument is framed by explorations of the train as a spatial signifier for the production of locality and belonging in the poetry. As Laurence Wright demonstrates in an anthology of South African train poetry, its representation is tied to historical and social upheavals since colonialism, whose imperial acquisitiveness was crystallized in Rhodes’ dream of a “Cape to Cairo” line (2008: xi). From the early twentieth century onwards, black poets read the train as a greedy consumer of men and labour, a signifier for white modernity, although also as an object of power and desire transcending the human. 1 By the 1980s an element of collective defiance animated the writing, as evidenced by the matriarchal revolutionary in Mafika Gwala’s 1982 poem of a train journey between Cato Ridge and Durban, “Mother Courage on the Train Carriage” (in Wright, 2008: 67).
The poetry reveals the train’s fricative possibilities as a site of oppression and opposition. Trains were the tools of white capitalism, bringing migrant labour from the rural areas to the cities and workers from the townships to work in the central “white” areas during the day. But they could also operate as spaces of subversion where political opposition to apartheid could be shared on what Rita Barnard has described as “mobile meeting places”. Thus, says Barnard, “imposed divisions open up the possibility of new communities, new identities, new affiliations” (2007: 8).
Given its particular focus on the spatial politics of late apartheid Johannesburg and its largest township, this article does not attempt an exhaustive analysis of the train in work by black South African poets. Rather, it seeks to bring to the surface what Hart has called “divergent practices of place-making” (2002: 111) that imprint South Africa’s townships. The paper traces the poetics of motility across the distinct but related concerns of Mtshali, Sepamla, and Serote. I begin by thinking through the train as marked by a rural/urban dichotomy in Mtshali’s early poetry, next I explore township particularity and resilience in Sepamla, before concluding with the universalizing imperative of Serote.
Analyses of the “spatial” in literary studies owe much to the sociologist Henri Lefebvre, whose seminal text
Constructions of space in segregationist and apartheid South Africa were rooted in racial inequalities. The Johannesburg of the 1960s entrenched these differences: it was marked by the massive growth of state administered townships to the southwest of the city. In 1963 these areas were ascribed the collective acronym of SOWETO (South Western Townships). Areas like Soweto came into being as a result of white capital’s demand for cheap black labour. Apartheid policy was premised on the refusal to recognize black South Africans as permanent city-dwellers, but economic development required their presence in the white city (Freund, 2007: 126–8). In order to discourage black identification with the urban, Johannesburg’s townships denied even the most basic markers of human interaction and dignity. Keith Beavon describes Soweto as “little more than a bleak residential outpost on the veld” (2004: 121). The township was defined by identical, single-storey “matchbox” housing, unpaved roads and an almost complete absence of public amenities or greenery. Soweto became the focus of opposition to apartheid during the 1970s and into the 1980s. The effectiveness of this resistance depended on forging a unified identity that was shaped by locale. Given the harshness of this environment, the forging of Soweto as more than just “space” but also “place” depended on the development of what Raymond Williams has described as a “structure of feeling” (1983: 19–21); 2 lived communal experience in the township superseded apartheid’s ideological and spatial impositions. Soweto’s “placeness” would be inscribed by an active and assertive black identity in which poetry played a vital role.
What then is Soweto poetry? Michael Chapman has described it as filling the vacuum left by the dead or exiled writers of the 1950s and emerging out of the particular oppressions of the 1960s, beginning with the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960. He identifies three fundamental characteristics. First, the emphasis on Soweto, particularly since the student uprisings of 1976, as a vehicle for black resistance to apartheid; second, adherence to the ethos of Black Consciousness espoused by the activist Steve Biko, and finally, a rejection of rhyme or closed forms in favour of open or “naked forms” (1996: 11–13). Much of the work produced by the Soweto poets was published in the literary magazine
The city/country divide: Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali
Mtshali’s “Amagoduka at Glencoe Station” is taken from his first collection, We travelled a long journey through the wattle forests of Vryheid crossed the low-levelled Blood River whose water flowed languidly as if dispirited for the shattered glory of my ancestors (2011: 162)
The natural imagery sets up a parallel between the poet, commuters, and the river, reinforcing African links to the landscape. Ties between black subjectivities and the local scenery are further naturalized by the personification of the river as “dispirited” over the defeat of Mtshali’s ancestors at the “Battle of Blood River” (1838), during which Boer trekkers armed with rifles massacred 3,000 Zulu soldiers. The river is so named because the number of Zulus killed turned the waters of the Tugela River red with blood. In Afrikaner nationalism, the “Battle of Blood River” became mythologized as a victory awarded by God, validating Afrikaner presence in and ownership of areas formerly controlled by the Zulu.
Rob Gaylard has argued that
Mtshali’s perception of modernity and industrialization as destructive to black subjectivity is underscored by his representation of train and train station:
our train ultimately came to a hissing stop at Glencoe. Many people got off Leaving the enraged train to snort and charge at the night on its way to Durban. (2011: 162)
Enjambment distorts the flow of the piece and has a jarring, discomforting effect. Juxtaposed against the “languid” flow of the river, the train is likened to a mechanized and hostile beast, “hissing”, “enraged”, snorting, and charging. The disjuncture between human subjectivity and the mechanical fury of the train suggests the inevitable alienation of its passengers. The station itself signifies limbo, a kind of halfway house between the city as modernity and the rural, devastated landscapes the men have left behind. The use of the Zulu their faces sucking the warmth of the coal fire cracking in the corner. The two began to sing, their voices crying for the mountains and the hills of Msinga, stripped naked of their green garment. They crossed rivers and streams, gouged dry by the sun’s rays, where lowing cattle genuflected for a blade of grass and a drop of water on riverbeds littered with carcasses and bones (2011: 164)
Mtshali evokes the plight of the migrant worker, forced to labour in the city where he is refused belonging and bound to a rural “homeland” that is under-resourced and over farmed, stricken by drought, soil erosion, and starvation. His vision of the estrangement of black rural identities from the urban resonates with other literary representations of rural migration to Johannesburg, notably Alan Paton’s We come from across the Tugela river, we are going to EGoli! EGoli! EGoli! where they’ll turn us into moles that eat the gold dust and spit out blood (2011: 168)
The river is a boundary between the selves the men locate as rural and the roles they are forced to enact in the city. It is a river Styx, the border between the familiarity of the homeland and the underworld of the city. The doubling of the “we” in the first two lines and the use of the Zulu word for Johannesburg, eGoli (literally translated as “place of gold”) might be construed as an attempt to present the city within an indigenous linguistic paradigm. The writing of eGoli with a capital “E” could be interpreted as undermining that intention through adherence to the logic of English language punctuation and grammar. Alternatively, it could also signify the capturing of Zulu identity within a city constructed along those very lines of Westernized logic and the accompanying alienation of the miners from its spaces. The latter assumption is borne out by the depiction of the workers as “moles” and the use of “that” and “and”. Combined with a shortening of the lines, these words reduce the men to mere vehicles for the production of gold. The gold dust is taken into the men’s bodies as the boundaries between white capitalism and black selfhood disintegrate.
Migrant workers who came to labour in the mines seldom identified themselves with the city in the same way as those living in the townships. They were housed in overcrowded and under-equipped single-sex compounds, actively encouraged to associate with each other in terms of “tribal” origin and were often in conflict with township dwellers. Bill Freund demonstrates that the Soweto uprisings of 1976–1977 were
Dampened in good part because of the rage of migrant workers from the compounds, resentful of the apparent privileges of the youths at the schools, angry at the destruction of shebeens at the hands of the self-righteous, where they enjoyed drinking away their sorrows. (2007: 130)
Writes Hart: “the urban-based liberation movement has […] paid comparatively little attention to agrarian issues or to linking rural with urban struggles” (2002: 11). An exception provided by Hart’s 2002 study is the co-organization of youth activists relocated from Soweto to rural northeastern KwaZulu-Natal by their parents with local labour movements in the 1980s. In Mtshali’s imaginary however, the train reproduces this division between black urban communities. The identity that is articulated in “Amagoduka” situates itself outside the city. Black urbanism is binarized into those who live permanently in Johannesburg’s townships and those for whom they are transitory. The mineworkers are members of the working class but their sense of place, their identification with the rural, means that they are excluded from the shared experiences of the township’s permanent inhabitants. This conflict between identifications with place prevents class alliance and creates antagonism rather than solidarity. Indeed, as Merle Lipton (1985) points out, migrant workers perceived the students who would initiate the Soweto uprising as “privileged”, thus revealing perceived divisions of class
The failure of students to incorporate migrant workers into a lasting alliance against the apartheid state ought to be considered in terms of place. Mtshali’s depiction of the train station prefigures the displacement faced by miners in the city, thereby stressing the importance of place in the formation of collective consciousness. For his migrant workers the urban is a place of non-belonging but for those who have lived in Soweto all their lives, the townships are the only site from which to challenge the practices of the state. This “embeddedness” in the particulars of urban experience formed the fuel for the Soweto uprisings, but it also excluded those who perceived themselves as located outside the urban.
Mtshali’s sense of the train/city as loci of alienation, rather than identification, surfaces in another poem from I go to work for five days a week with a thousand black bodies encased in eleven coaches that hurtle through stations into the red ribbon of dawn crowning the city skyscrapers. (2011: 118)
The lack of punctuation in the first stanza gives the poem a density that evokes the oppressive mundanity of the commute and renders those on the train one undifferentiated stream of experience. The enumeration “five”, “a thousand”, and “eleven” reduces the commuters to statistics, pointing to the dehumanizing effects of white capitalism on the categories of black identity. The “red ribbon” of dawn repeats the blood river of “Amagoduka”, directly interlinking modernity, industry, and blood.
A commuter mumbles like dreamer muffled by a brandy nightcap. “Brothers, who doesn’t know me … ? I’m a cog in Mr. Jobstein’s wheel, and Mr Jobstein is a big wheel rolling under Mr. de Wiel’s oxwaggon.” (2011: 118)
Contrastingly to “Amagoduka”, the black workers are situated within the urban but what remains strikingly absent is any sense of shared community. The travellers are anonymous to the state, to themselves, and to each other. The mumbling commuter ironically diagnoses his lack of identity with the words: “Brothers, who doesn’t know me? […] I’m a cog in Mr. Jobstein’s wheel”. The fusion of “job” with “Stein” caricatures the white capitalist and emphasizes white control over the means of production. White dominance and the exploitation of black labour are reinforced by the description of Mr Jobstein as “[A] big wheel | rolling under Mr. de Wiel’s oxwaggon”. The Afrikaans word
Representations of the train in “Amagoduka” and “Going to Work” suggest dislocation between the black self and the city. Blackness is defined by the impositions placed upon it by whiteness and, since the city is where whiteness would appear to be most directly situated, it is figured in terms of white belonging rather than black. The challenge for black poetry would be to generate race- and class-based solidarities that redefined Soweto and wider Johannesburg.
Putting the “place” into Soweto: Sipho Sepamla
The relationship between subjectivity and locality in Soweto poetry was crucial to the creation of the township as a site of resistance. With his indebtedness to Raymond Williams, David Harvey’s use of “militant particularism” to describe localized class politics is useful here (Wright, 2006). Militant particularism frames commitment to place within a socialist agenda. That is, attempts to alter the material conditions of one’s circumstances must originate from within the specifics of locale (Westwood, 2002: 103).
Harvey’s conception of militant particularism can be applied to the nurturing of a place-specific resistance in Soweto that was asserted against the homogenizing effects of apartheid capitalism. Questions of class during this period in South Africa’s history are inextricably linked to questions of race. There was a black petty bourgeoisie of lawyers, doctors, teachers, and other professionals in the townships but their numbers were tiny (Hyslop, 1988); the majority of black South Africans in the city were working-class. Although the primary instigators of the political upheavals in the townships during the 1970s were not workers but students, most of these were from working-class backgrounds. As Tom Lodge notes, “They were the children of the strongest and most sophisticated urban working-class in Africa. Their instincts were shaped by a community that had undergone one of the most rapid industrial revolutions in recent history” (1983: 38). While competing notions of identity anchored in ethnic and age divisions caution against essentializing all black experiences in the townships under assumptions of working-class solidarity, in Mtshali, Sepamla, and Serote, identity is poetically aligned with the experiences of the worker.
Harvey admits that Williams’ formulation of community as tied to shared place and experience problematically rejects outsiders and can generate a dangerous and even fascist exclusivity. As I have demonstrated in my analysis of Mtshali’s poetry, lack of shared identification with place alienated migrant workers from Soweto’s residents. But Harvey also affirms the “embeddedness” of communities in place by pointing out that agency is tied to location: “All politics has its origins in the collective development of a particular political vision on the part of particular persons in particular places at particular times” (2001: 190). In fixing on the local, the national and global reach of militant particularism can be limited (Callinicos, 2006). Thus for Harvey, militant particularism is validated in terms of its contribution to altering the broader political and economic structures in which it is located: “[i]deas forged out of the affirmative experience of solidarities in one place, get generalized and particularized as a working model of a society that will benefit all humanity” (1996: 32). Soweto poetry fashioned the township as a place of race and class solidarity but its influence extended well beyond the township’s borders.
Formations of “place” in Soweto emerge in the work of Sipho Sepamla. In the poem “Pimville Station”, from his 1975 collection On the one side stood a ticket office two poles overlooking it one bringing light the other a link with the world outside both symbols of its higher status in the surroundings Under the same roof was a fish and chips shop too busy frying to watch its smell Behind it was a sulky pair of toilets The whole sight was like a pregnant cockroach waiting expectantly The platform looked like a street pavement raised waist-high this was Pimville Station (1975: 35)
Sepamla’s matter-of-fact language prevents any sentimentalization of the scene. The station is marked out as having “higher status” than its surroundings through signifiers of technology, the poles bringing light and communication — and by extension, civilization — from the “outside”, the white world. Contact with this world is mediated through a technology that facilitates the flow of black labour into the white city. The station’s significance is in large part connected to its role in the capitalist system under which black people are denigrated. Yet the comparison of the station platform to a street pavement works against its elevated status by pulling it down to the level of the ordinary. The single lines allocated to “raised” and “waist-high” continue the reduction of the station to a symbol of banality further emphasized by the laconic phrase “this was Pimville Station”. The poem continues:
On and around the station business was brisk: peanut vendors thugs frisking fellow-travellers women roasting mealie cobs and a herbalist brooding over a dry root Sometimes I heard crammed passengers chatter and grumble above others bemoaning increased house rents early morning house raids and the sordid drunkenness of their neighbours (1975: 36)
Sepamla relies on an exterior, observational perspective to convey the everyday minutiae of the station’s existence and the human interactions around it. The poem produces the station as a symbol of apartheid’s banal but systemic oppression. Black presences give the station a human quality, even if this is contingent on the demands of white capital. Vendors turn the station into a site of black enterprise and the herbalist fuses the spaces of the traditional with modern, suggesting the possibility of a hybrid African modernity. The passengers are not merely the objects of labour figured in Mtshali’s, “Going to Work”. They complain about the experiences of their ordinary lives and enunciate their subjectivities. These experiences are directly linked to a broader system of coercion. The house rents reflect the lack of adequate housing facilities for black families in the townships and the exploitative rents charged for substandard accommodation. House raids were a means through which the state monitored and clamped down on resistance, while “sordid” drunkenness can be traced to the denigration of black identities under a dehumanizing system:
So many times have I thought about the defiant stance of a railway station in a Location my very first experience of what is permissively called: separate and equal amenities! (1975:37)
In this last stanza, Sepamla ironizes the station as an example of “giving technology to the masses”, since its amenities are clearly woefully inadequate. The colon preceding the final sentence separates the line as a direct quotation from state discourse, and the apartheid lie of “separate but equal” is revealed as hollow and absurd. The presence of the station is “defiant”, because as a symbol of white oppression in a black area it invites its own destruction.
Sepamla’s poem continues Mtshali’s idea of train and train station as mechanisms of white dominance, but it also suggests black ways of being in sites that function as signs of whiteness. The commuters on the train are resolutely urban dwellers; they, the thugs and the vendors all form part of a black urban matrix. Pimville is situated in Soweto, and Sepamla’s direct naming of the place frames it within black perceptions. The positioning of Pimville within the paradigm of daily black experience expressly links blackness to a specific locale. Pimville’s segregation from the “outside world” of white Johannesburg is clearly delineated, but this division does not reduce the township to the status of inferior; rather it underscores a separate black collective from which resistance can be forged. In contradistinction, Mtshali’s poems present the train as a non-place, the commuters lacking an urban identity based in their own referential matrix.
The white system may determine Sepamla’s speakers’ location in the city but they are also produced by the poet as a collective whose presence is able, within limits, to reshape those sites which are symbols of their oppression. By drawing attention to the precariousness of the station’s “defiance” and the absurdities of its claim to equity, Sepamla points to the potential overturn of white emblems of power. Although the poem begins with an externalized and squalid view, Sepamla describes the whole scene as “like a pregnant cockroach, waiting expectantly”. The actions of the poem’s black subjects and our access to the poet’s “I thought” situate the poem within interior and shared human experience. The production of a localized identity is set against the homogenizing “flattening out” of black subjectivities deployed by the white state. The poem creates a context of “blackness” tied to the specificities of township place in ways that construct it contra the “outside” and begin to generate resistance to that outside’s categories and impositions.
The forging of place in “Pimville Station” is reflected in a piece from the same volume entitled, “The Loneliness Beyond”:
Like raindrops pattering They come singly and in pairs Then as a torrent the rush of feet Shuffles onto platforms Dragging the last strains of energy (1975: 39)
The train is a metaphor for the communal loss of identity under the exhausting demands of the white system and reinforces the dissonance between black subjectivity and urban landscapes. But the train also functions as a site of black community:
I’ve seen hearts palpitating Behind a single maskless face Tired from the hurrying of a city Spirits maimed by commands. I’ve heard the clicks of tongues Laughter rising above the grouse of mouths That never rest From grinding complaints (1975: 39)
The images here seem to evoke a homogenous, undifferentiated mass, a “single maskless face”; the black body is mechanized by the white state as a labouring object. However, Sepamla’s stress on the workings of the black body (palpitating hearts, clicking tongues, laughter, and grousing mouths) asserts its humanity. The train is not simply a weapon of control over black selfhood but is also
As in “Pimville Station”, the poem references shared conversations, laughter, and frustration that hint at a community of place. While not overt, this is sufficient to render the train as more than simply a tool of oppression. It is a place where people are brought together in ways that figuratively and literally defy stasis. The poem works against the reduction of black selfhood by gesturing towards its multiple meanings. The train’s trajectory may be limited and circumscribed within the linear movement between point A and point B, but its existence also implies change, flux, and shifting interactions between groups of people who might not otherwise encounter one another:
Like sheep herded into a kraal They crowded numbered coaches Hopeful of a safe landing I’ve watched the multitude rub shoulders And I’ve wondered what they do With the loneliness beyond; I’ve seen throngs of people Disappear into little holes of resting And I’ve pondered what might be happening With the loneliness beyond. (1975: 39)
The poem subtly implies that black bodies are defined above and “beyond” their physical oppression. In order for there to be a “beyond”, the poet implicitly suggests the black community’s potential to transcend the fear instilled by the white state. This suggestion relies on an inward movement that recognizes individual alienation and its communal nature, the singular and the “multitude”. What prevents the members of the multitude from becoming anonymous symbols of black suffering is Sepamla’s attentiveness to their everyday interiorities — their laughter, clicking tongues, and disgruntled chat. 3 The train’s comparison to an animal carrier is counter-balanced by the poem’s awareness of the possible reorientation of black identities. The loneliness evoked by Sepamla may be figured as a catalyst for self-recognition and change. The movement from an exterior to an interior contemplation of apartheid’s effects on black subjectivity and Serote’s depictions of the everyday articulate notions of blackness which counter white definitions. 4
In “Pimville Station” and “The Loneliness Beyond”, scenes evoking ordinary communal activity figure the train as a symbol of the black collective in the city. Sepamla’s poems disclose the emergence of a self-defining black community and the beginnings of resistance entrenched in the particularities of Soweto. The internal aspects of the poetry construct a feeling of neighbourhood and resist white delimitations, anticipating and working towards the development a militant particularism that challenged the racial and economic status quo.
The Soweto Uprising of June 1976 was a manifestation of the kinds of working-class, localized identifications that distinguish militant particularism. The revolt of school students was precipitated by the imposition of what the state described as “Bantu Education” but was also a product of the violent crime, unemployment, and state harassment that had marked the township for decades. The Bantu Education Act of 1953 limited the schooling available to Africans according to the state’s insistence that they were suitable only for unskilled labour. The Act was severely criticized and to some extent resisted by the ANC but continued to be implemented. Missionary education previously accessible to, for instance, the journalists of
The Bantu Education Act served as a catalyst for militant particularism in Soweto, and the coming together of otherwise disparate groups. On 16 June, after weeks of protest, 15,000 students between the ages of ten and 20 gathered at Orlando West Junior Secondary School to demonstrate against the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. They were to march to Orlando Stadium but before they could reach it they were confronted by armed police who opened fire. Several students were killed, including the 12-year-old Hector Pietersen, captured in an iconic photograph by Sam Nzima. Throughout the day, youths stoned passing cars, set up barricades, burnt down major administrative buildings, and attacked bottle stores and beerhalls. When residents returned that night they were met with police violence, but instead of retreating they joined the students in the destruction of any symbol of state control (Beinart and Dubow, 1995).
The events of the 16th of June sparked nationwide protests. By 25 June there had been major incidents throughout South Africa, resulting in a slow process of liberalization and reform. By November of that year, nearly one million students, workers, and parents in over 200 black communities had participated in protest action. Perhaps the most significant change was the impact of the uprising on the political consciousness of black South Africans, who started to perceive that the social and political landscape of their country was not fixed and unalterable. John D. Brewer (1986) shows that at the beginning of the 1970s Africans did not view themselves on a par with whites, but by the 1980s equality had become a dominant issue. The localized militant particularism out of which the Soweto uprising developed became part of a national process of change that bridged locational differences between communities across South Africa. Thus, although the protests excluded groups such as migrant workers at a local level, their ultimate value lay in moulding the basis from which an inclusive countrywide liberation politics evolved.
Beyond the township: Mongane Wally Serote
The trajectory of Soweto’s militant particularism from local, working-class mobilization to national movement is reflected in a shift from Sepamla’s engagement with the local to the epic, universalized voice of Mongane Wally Serote.
Serote is considered by Mzamane to have been the “most accomplished poet” during the period of 1969–1979 (1982: 7). Two of the poems from his first collection
According to Attwell, Serote’s early poems fuse forms of traditional black praise poetry, A pattern that will grow […] in Serote’s poetry (and indeed, later in his fiction) can be readily identified: it lies in the conjunction between a subject who registers the violence of history on the body, and a developing, communal and more encompassing historical perspective. This is the basic structure of Serote’s
Sepamla’s “Pimville Station” and “The Loneliness Beyond” express a localized consciousness that is beginning to map itself onto the township and its residents, generating a shared sense of place; in Serote’s epics that mapping has become fusion. As Attwell discusses, the point of consciousness in Serote’s the train took me out into a long nightmare this monotonous lullaby rattling at the bottom of my body keeping me awake rattling deep inside piercing i running frightened to trip and fall not stopping the rattle long, long like a moment of waiting (1975: 13)
The movement of the poem follows the long shudders of the train, as the individual nightmare of the poet is projected on to the black community as a whole. The lack of punctuation and openness of form insist upon the long coming into consciousness of the speaker, the long narrative of black being. The length and verbal density of the line, “this monotonous lullaby rattling at the bottom of my body”, contrasts strikingly with the shorter, sharper lines that follow, its drawn-out quality mirroring the slow rumble of the train in its rhythmic movement. The line is repeated later in the poem, recalling the repetitive techniques of praise poetry and thus maintaining the authenticity of the black voice. The lullaby is at once soothing, threatening, infantilizing and, in keeping the poet awake, effects disjuncture. However, the train is also a motif through which the poet can access different spaces/places of consciousness through memory. The poet’s “seeing” is not limited to the urban environment, rather the “country” becomes a site through which the “city” can be seen and described. Standing as it does for broader black experience, the poem suggests the potency of the train as a signifier for the transformation of consciousness and a coming into an awareness of the black condition.
The recurrence of “rattling” and “rattle” summons interlinked imagery. The rattle is a death sound, a struggle to breathe as the chest constricts; its mapping onto the train makes it an instrument of “nightmare”. A “rattle” is also a toy that sends the baby to sleep, although the poem figures this as an inversion, as both rattle and lullaby represent uneasy wakefulness. Serote’s writing of the train is multi-layered and highly ambivalent. It is both nature and machine, life and death. It is the tool of the oppressor and a means through which to expand consciousness. These images of the train lead the reader into a description of an urban location and images focusing on deprivation and squalor:
the rattle this smell of decayed breath, burnt breath, rotting breath breath soaked in flames of waters reaches me drags me back to those silly little houses where the men’s voices buzz hanging on the mirage of alcohol i look at the window this mocking window reeling the Karoo a face wiped out by winds and sheep with a struggling gait eating tasteless grass (1975: 14)
The train’s rattle is likened to the rattle of a dying breath. Breath gives life, but the smell of “decayed breath, burnt breath, rotting breath” conjures only the degrading and “death-like” circumstances under which black people must exist. Life and death are separated by only the most fragile of boundaries, as living is depicted to be a certain kind of deathliness and the places that nurture the speaker are simultaneously his destruction. On one level, the train is a metonym for death and the “wiping out” of identity, but it also connects the poet to the urban landscapes of his origin, reinforcing the interweaving of rural and urban spaces. The poem works against the binarization of blackness by evincing the multiple places it inhabits — urban and rural, local and national. Like the train the black self is in movement and flux, working and reworking itself in accordance with its environment.
In these early pages of that boy a majestic sight on a throne of stone holding a stick crowned like that by the heavy heat of the Karoo while this silence sings in sinister whistles that boy caught by time, place (1975:15)
Place — and time — are figured as entrapment; the sterile stones and the parched Karoo reflect the “blackmanchild’s” binding to the historical affliction of apartheid, physically realized by the barrenness of the township. And yet, what Attwell has described as Serote’s “representational chaos and formal instability”, makes sites traditionally associated with oppression unfamiliar and strange (2005: 160). Serote’s volatile use of language displaces the linear movement of the train by meshing the spaces of rural and urban, the individual and the collective. It follows that the binaries imposed by the state are ruptured and destabilized, allowing counter-assertions of blackness to be voiced.
The train in Serote is a metaphor for the ways in which the “community as self” is able, or unable, to escape the boundaries imposed upon it by white ways of seeing and being. The township is evoked through the representation of an alternate landscape, the semi-desert of the Karoo. This allocates the ability to “see” both rural and city landscapes to the black eye and enjoins them as sites of poverty and potential identification. Blackness is connected to the site of the township and lifted out of it. The effects of blackness are not limited to the borders of black living and working. Ultimately, Serote’s writing transcends the need for localized militant particularisms by extending the community of place established in Sepamla’s poetry to a universalized vision of black identity. This vision extended beyond the national: as Thengani Ngwena discusses, the forging of black poetic sensibility in South Africa was in conversation with movements in America and post-colonial Africa:
The poetry emanating from Harlem, Senegal, Algeria and the Caribbean islands at the time attested to the growing need for black people around the world to be recognised as human beings. (2012: 520)
Much like Serote’s poetics, the consequences of black action in the townships of Johannesburg exceeded the local. As Beavon has shown, the events of 1976 led to what was termed a “greying” of Johannesburg’s central business district that would have seemed inconceivable a decade previously:
The Soweto Uprising in June 1976 had a profound effect […] the state adopted a reactionary stance but progressive elements in the business community and owners of apartment blocks, particularly in the inner-city areas, accepted the revolt as a wake-up call. It was clear to them that changes to the race-space of at least parts of the city would be inevitable […] some of the responses helped bring about the first radical alteration in to the social and racial geography of the white city in 90 years. (2004: 213)
Beavon explains that the massive shortage in housing for Indians and “Coloureds”, combined with the opening up of jobs available to these groups in the centre of the city, provided opportunities for accommodation in the city centre, particularly in areas like the previously whites-only Mayfair and Hillbrow. Vacant properties were occupied by “Coloured” and Indian families. Although there was an attempt at state prosecution against this kind of movement, concerted legal efforts anchored in community affiliations proved successful in challenging the city council’s attempt to remove the inner city’s new inhabitants. Increasingly the authorities began to turn a blind eye. Beavon observes, “In pre-1976 Johannesburg it is almost certain that the state would have brutally stamped out the ‘illegal’ occupation of apartments by people of colour” (2004: 217). The Soweto Uprising flared out after a few months but its impact would reverberate into the 1980s and mark a shift in the South African urban landscape. The production of locality in the work of the Soweto poets and the shaping of Johannesburg’s townships as sites of community-based black action impacted the spaces outside the townships in ways that previous black writing had not. By embedding black action in the particularities of place, poets and activists were able to generate a militant radicalism that reworked the spaces of township and city.
Resistant localities
This article has read the production of collective identities in the Soweto poets through the motif of the train. It has sketched histories of the train in the black South African imaginary before moving to a closer consideration of the links between the forging of “place” in Soweto and beyond, and images of the train in Soweto poetry. Mtshali’s early poems maintain the binary between the black self and the city, writing the train as a site of oppression and alienation. His poems deploy irony and pathos to reveal the inequities of apartheid but fail to offer up avenues of resistance to the racial status quo. Poems such as “Amagoduka” reveal the fractures between migrant workers and township residents and stress the importance of place in shaping communities.
With Sipho Sepamla, the poems reflect the development of a neighbourhood that is very specifically located within the township. The deconstruction of the train as a white “tool of civilization” discloses the absurdities of the apartheid system while simultaneously making train and train station sites of everyday black activity. Sepamla’s poems produce areas like Soweto as sites of black solidarity. By tying politics to place, the poetry engenders a class opposition that finds its correlation in Williams’ notion of “militant particularism”. If Sepamla creates localities, then in Serote’s epics, fusion of the individual poetic voice with the black community moves beyond the local towards universal identifications. The power of the poetry inheres in the fact that, by producing the township against the city, it formed part of a process in which such spaces would actually become less discrete.
These works illuminate the increasing sense of crisis and frustration in the townships during the 1970s. Their black consciousness ethos emphasizes shared black humanity and forms part of the groundswell of black identification that would play a role in the Soweto uprisings of 1976. The insurgency of schoolchildren against Bantu Education was marked by violence and death but also succeeded in bringing together disparate groups in the township’s social landscape.
I want to conclude with Hart’s use of the term “trajectories” in her study of the links between global and local space in the townships of Newcastle in northern KwaZulu-Natal. She explains trajectories as capturing “the ongoing processes through which sets of power-laden practices in the multiple, interconnected arenas of everyday life at different spatial scales constantly rework places and identities” (2002: 13). What forms have the trajectories surfacing in Soweto poetry taken in the present moment, and what continuities and breaks do they animate?
The Soweto of 2016 is, on population numbers alone, a city. It contains more than a million inhabitants, by far the majority of whom are black and cannot afford access to private vehicles (Statistics South Africa, 2011: n.p.). In fact, emerging modes of government-sponsored public transport in the Johannesburg region seem to point to a hardening of the spatial divisions pressurized by the activism of the 1970s and 1980s. A salient example for our purposes is the Gautrain, a high-speed locomotive line linking Johannesburg and Pretoria to O. R. Tambo Airport. Envisioned as a project for the improvement of public transport throughout greater Johannesburg, the train symbolizes its neoliberal, global aspirations and has been vigorously criticized as a privileged form of transport that is unaffordable for the majority and the preserve of tourists and commuters from affluent suburbs (Pirie, 2013: 313). Three lines from a recent poem by Karen Lazar (n.d.) address this exclusivity:
In sandton the sand had turned to marble And my feet grew cold Not all can afford this ticket
If the Gautrain, in its current iteration at least, suggests a lack of meaningful mobility across the city’s economically segregated spaces, the student movement #FeesMustFall offers a more hopeful reworking of student–worker alliances. In language and iconography drawing explicitly on the 1976 protests, the final months of 2015 saw university students protesting nationwide against the planned increase in fees and the outsourcing of cleaning and other staff. For critics such as Patrick Bond (2015), the movement represents a triumphant fusion of race and class interests that evaded the 1976 cohort. In an article for the online newspaper The protests at universities across the country are bigger than Wits. That’s why the movement spread and that’s why the iconography touches those who have never been to the university and don’t normally care for student issues. (2015: n.p.)
Here then, multiple processes of place-claiming and place-making undertaken between students and workers promise to transform university space and transgress the boundaries between universities and their wider contexts. The challenge, as Nicholson (2015) notes, will be to sustain a momentum already splintering under intervention from political parties and competing student interests.
The construction of place in South Africa is, as elsewhere, constituted by ongoing and even conflicting processes whose outcomes are rarely predictable or static. The poetry and activism arising from Soweto in the 1970s and 1980s impacted the reconfiguration of space in Johannesburg that in 2016 continues to be contested. The student movements of the present owe an historical debt to those of 40 years ago; the futures they instantiate have yet to be determined.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This article began as a long-archived PhD chapter. As such, I would like to belatedly thank Christopher Warnes. I also thank the two anonymous readers for the very helpful comments that enabled me to revivify it.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.