My Name is Afrika: Keorapetse Kgositsile, Black Arts Movement, and Polyglot Internationalism

South African national poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile’s work is firmly anchored in the Tswana oral and literary traditions shaped by a strong sense of community, customs and culture. I am interested in how he invigorates those traditions when in exile in the black diaspora (1962 – 1975), making his work stand out in the many black international journals and magazines he published in, thus necessitating a different lens of reading those print cultures previously delineated as African American. I demonstrate how he extends and interweaves the indigenous South African resource base with diasporic artistic traditions, tasking us to rethink genealogies of African knowledge production, their generative value and currency in the black radical imagination, and their translation and influence in black internationalism. My mission is to show how Kgositsile’s transatlantic engagements brought his black diaspora contemporaries into locution with a distinctly Tswana consciousness and epistemologies, transforming his interlocutors and the vision of their social movements. This way I establish a model of reading South Africa’s relationship with African Americans that eschews a “counterculture to modernity” born in the Northern Atlantic, rebutting a vertical North to South influence common in such transnational readings.

Uhuru Phalafala (PhD, University of Cape Town) is a lecturer in the English department at Stellenbosch University. She is the 2018 University of Michigan African Presidential Scholar, and 2019 African Humanities Program fellow. Her research interests are transnationalism, black internationalism, translation, decoloniality, and world literatures. She currently heads a Mellon-funded research project ‘Recovering Subterranean Archives’, which investigates South African culture in exile, with the ultimate goal of repatriating and republishing it. She is currently working on her book project Crossing Borders Without Leaving, a critical biography of South African writer-in-exile Keorapetse Kgositsile.