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Former wife of Keorapetse Kgositsile, Baleka Mbete photo by Presidential Press and Information Office –

Top 10 Outstanding Facts about Keorapetse Kgositsile

Keorapetse William Kgositsile OIS was born on 19 September 1938. He died on 3 January 2018. Keorapetse was also known by his pen name Bra Willie.

He was a South African Tswana poet, journalist and political activist. An influential member of the African National Congress in the 1960s and 1970s.

Keorapetse was inaugurated as South Africa’s National Poet Laureate in 2006. Kgositsile lived in exile in the United States from 1962 until 1975, the peak of his literary career. In the article are the top ten outstanding facts about Keorapetse Kgositsile.

1. He bridged the gap between African poetry and black poetry in the United States

He made an extensive study of African-American literature and culture, becoming particularly interested in jazz. During the 1970s he was a central figure among African-American poets, encouraging interest in Africa as well as the practice of poetry as performance art.

He was well known for his readings in New York City jazz clubs. Kgositsile was one of the first to bridge the gap between African poetry and black poetry in the United States.

2. His first experience of apartheid was in the place he lived as a kid

Kgositile was born in a mostly white section of Johannesburg and grew up in a small shack at the back of a house in a white neighbourhood that was rented by his mother. His first experience of apartheid. The apartheid regime affected him as early as he was a kid.

While other kids from the white neighbourhood encountered apartheid when they had to go to school outside of their neighbourhood, he experienced both going to outside schools and a conflict with a local white family.

This was after he fought a white friend of his who hesitated when other friends refused to join a boxing club that denied Kgositsile membership.

3. The books of Langston Hughes and Richard Wright influenced him

Langston Hughes photo by Carl Van Vechten –

James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. Richard Nathaniel Wright was an American author of novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction.

Kgositsile attended Madibane High School in Johannesburg, as well as schools in other parts of the country. During that time he was able to find books by Langston Hughes and Richard Wright though finding the books was difficult for him.

The books by the authors influenced him as well as by European writers principally Charles Dickens and D. H. Lawrence. He began writing stories, though not yet with any intention of doing so professionally.

4. After high school Kgositile worked with the newspaper New Age

New Age was an influential leftist newspaper in Johannesburg operating from 1953 to 1962. It was formed with the cooperation of several left-wing groups in the area; New Age received the assets of the communist Jewish Worker’s Club, which had been liquidated in 1948.

The newspaper later received support from a committee of the anti-apartheid South African Students’ Association. After working at a series of odd jobs after high school, he took to writing more seriously, getting a job with the politically charged newspaper New Age.

He contributed both reporting and poetry to the newspaper. These early poems, anticipating a lifetime of Kgositsile’s work, combine lyricism with an unmuted call to arms.

5. Why did Kgositile go into exile in 1961?

In 1961, under considerable pressure both for himself and as part of a government effort to shut down New Age, Kgositile was urged by the African National Congress, of which he was a vocal member, to leave the country.

He went initially to Dar es Salaam to write for Spearhead magazine which is unrelated to the right-wing British magazine of the same name. The following year emigrated to the United States.

6. Kgositsile as a leading African-American poet

After he graduated from Columbia in 1971, he remained in New York. He taught and gave his characteristically dynamic readings in downtown clubs and as part of the Uptown Black Arts Movement.

Kgositsile’s most influential collection, My Name is Afrika, was published that year. The response, including an introduction to the book by Gwendolyn Brooks, established Kgositsile as a leading African-American poet.

The Last Poets, a group of revolutionary African-American poets, took their name from one of his poems. This is the main reason why early we said that He bridged the gap between African poetry and black poetry in the United States.

7. Jazz and the black aesthetic were influential to Kgositsile

Nina Simone photo by Gerrit de Bruin –

Jazz was particularly important to Kgositsile’s sense of black American culture and his place in it. He saw John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, B. B. King, and many others in the jazz clubs of New York, and wrote to them and of them in his poems.

Jazz was crucial to Kgositsile’s most influential idea. It was his sense of a worldwide African diaspora united by an ear for a certain quintessentially black sound. He wrote of the black aesthetic he pursued and celebrated.

8. Kgositsile became active in theatre while in New York

He was the founding member of the Black Arts Theatre in Harlem. He saw black theatre as a fundamentally revolutionary activity, whose ambition must be the destruction of the ingrained habits of thought responsible for perceptions of black people both by white people and by themselves.

The Black Arts Theatre was part of a larger project aimed at the creation of a literary black voice unafraid to be militant.

9. Kgositsile argued persistently against the idea of Négritude

Négritude is the quality or fact of being of black African origin. For him Négritude was a purely aesthetic conception of black culture because it was dependent on white aesthetic models of perception, a process he called “fornicating with the white eye.”

10. Baleka Mbete was his former wife

Baleka Mbete photo by Ali Khara –

Baleka Mbete is a South African politician who served as the Speaker of the National Assembly of South Africa from May 2014 to May 2019. She was previously Speaker of the National Assembly from 2004 to 2008, and Deputy President of South Africa from 2008 to 2009 under Kgalema Motlanthe.

She was elected National Chairperson of the African National Congress in 2007 and re-elected in 2012 and served until 18 December 2017. With Baleka he had his first son Duma and daughter Nkuli.