Living Archives and the Project of Poetry Recurriculation in South Africa

Abstract

This article, dedicated to the memory of the late Poet Laureate of South Africa and patron of the South African Poetry Project (ZAPP), Professor Keorapetse Kgositsile, situates itself within Kgositsile's struggle for cultural liberation through the arts and education. It is also located within the current South African project of decolonising the curriculum. The call to decolonise existing educational curricula—to transform colonial curricula through processes of indigenisation—is ubiquitous and strident. As a response to the contemporary call from students, educators, and theorists—more than twenty years after South Africa's liberation from apartheid—this article seeks to interrogate how one might decolonise the poetry curriculum within the discipline of English literature. As researchers of English studies, we have chosen to investigate poetry, Kgositsile's favoured genre. Our choice is informed by poetry's status as a capacious genre that stretches the boundaries of both language and knowledge. This article considers what it might mean to decolonise the poetry curriculum in terms of its selection of texts, although we acknowledge that pedagogic and assessment practices also have important roles to play in processes of educational decolonisation. We introduce decoloniality and indigeneity as concepts and analyse excerpts of current South African poetry in English in terms of these. Our aim is to open a space for discussion around the complex, sensitive issues involved in shaping a decolonised poetry curriculum.