Black music and pan-African solidarity in Keorapetse Kgositsile’s poetry

Abstract

The African American revolutionary poetry outfit and purported grandfathers of rap The Last Poets coined their name from Keorapetse Kgositsile's poem “Towards a Walk in the Sun”. This is relatively common knowledge. However, no sustained academic research has been conducted on this crucial exchange in diasporic studies. In this paper, I show how Kgositsile's poem in question harvested the rich oral, aural, and literary practices of his native Setswana, which in turn enabled The Last Poets to not only draw a name from Kgositsile's poetry, but also a language and poetic. This way, I demonstrate multivalent streams of influences between black South Africa and black America, as opposed to the current one-way exchange in scholarship that almost always presents black South Africans as emulators and mimickers of Afro-American culture. I expose how Kgositsile's poetry trans/figures both Afro-American literary and musical histories. Functioning within the framework of pan-Africanism, I uncover black music's transatlantic arch in Kgositsile's poetry, which unifies Africa, the Caribbean, and black America. I offer a deep analysis of that arch, and demonstrate its dynamic and complex networks which span generations and centuries, and continues to be generative till today. I focus particularly on the evolution of orality and aurality in black expressive cultures, understood as practices that express the black cultural continuum on both sides of the Atlantic.