Four Poems

Abstract

Sydney Sipho Sepamla was born in 1932 and has lived most of his life in Soweto, the giant township southwest of Johannesburg, so recently notorious. Soweto, with an unofficial population perhaps upward of a million (so much in Soweto has been unofficial always, even the people are thought of as temporary sojourners) living in a vast dormitory of jerry-built houses stretching for astonishing miles over the flat, bleak veld, existing in the minds of the planners and ideologues as merely a place to sleep the thousands who service the white city next door by day. Sepamla must be ranked along with Oswald Mtshali and Wally Mongane Serote among what I might call the poets of the new cities. I am referring not to Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, but to their black satellites, Soweto, Langa and Kwa Mashu, cities of night attending the cities of the sun. Such mirror images and inverted relationships are characteristic in South Africa. In his anthology of Black South African verse, the first and best introduction to the new city poets, which takes its title from Sepamla's fine satirical poem ‘To Whom It May Concern’, Robert Royston remarked that the new poetry was ‘a form of self-preservation’. However angry and expressive it might be, it presented less of a target to censors, priests and police who had sunk, literally without trace, an entire raft of black prose writers in the fifties and sixties. Understandably, some of the new city verse is assertive, angry and confused - but in South African poetry there has been nothing so invigorating for years. What sets Sepamla apart from the others, I think, has been a certain wariness of political rhetoric, a most un-South African subtlety. There is nothing unusual about using the big stick in South Africa; everybody has one. But in a country of brutal distinctions what is truly rare is the ability to distinguish. Sepamla's is a nervy, urban sensibility, perfectly suited to finding the chinks in the regime's fibrous armour and thrusting in his spear. He is at his steely best in ‘the deadpan, factual, throwaway line’ which Douglas Livingstone has pointed to, splendidly instanced in this poem, ‘The Will’: The burglar-proofing and the gate will go to my elder son so will the bicycle and a pair of bracelets His strength is double-edged; not only does he recount the pains of the blacks under apartheid, but articulates, too, the white nightmare of dispossession, often imagined, always expected, forever abjured. Sepamla's books include Hurry Up To It! ( 1975) and The Blues Is You In Me ( 1976), both published in Johannesburg. With the publication of The Soweto I Love his work is for the first time available abroad. He edits the review New Classic ( named for the dry-cleaning business in the room above which the magazine was founded), now in its latest metamorphosis and always amongst the most worthwhile South African little magazines open to the work of black writers. He edits, too, the drama magazine, Sketsh!