Literary profile

Abstract

In the post-Sharpeville era, Mongane Wally Serote is one of the most accomplished and committed of South African poets. He is profoundly dedicated to the culture of the oppressed and exploited, as well as being actively engaged in asserting the highest ideals of the revolution. The development of Serote's poetry is indeed consonant with the momentum of the liberation struggle against apartheid. The poetry of Mongane Serote, as well as that of his contemporaries, has suffered critical neglect outside South Africa. Serote's poems deserve wider attention not only for having incisively anatomised the socio-political maladies ruthlessly afflicted upon black lives by a racist oligarchy, but also for their intrinsic poetic range and quality. Serote was born in 1944 in Sophiatown, the vibrant downtown multiracial Johannesburg township which was ruthlessly bulldozed by the apartheid regime in the 1960s and ironically renamed Triomf, meaning 'triumph'. The result was the shameless destruction of a community, with its concomitant dislocation of families, homelessness and abject deprivation. Serote pugnaciously exclaimed: