Setswana Roots en Route in Keorapetse Kgositsile’s Poetry

Abstract

In Keorapetse Kgositsile’s work we can see an example of Setswana roots and oral traditions remaining alive and being reinvigorated, providing a resource that is then carried across the Atlantic and renewed in translation. This paper centralizes Setswana language in his work, and demonstrates how its presence recalibrates identity as an ongoing production of collective memory, entangled in his ongoing becoming in the black diaspora. His work interweaves the oral and literary traditions of black South Africa and black America, revealing a dynamic and complex relationship between the two geographical sites. This paper maps the genealogies of Setswana influence in his work and shows how the cultural practices, literary and oral traditions, and vernaculars and aesthetics of that language provide a resource for Kgositsile’s work published in the United States of America. His relationship with Setswana language and literature, as well as other Southern African oratory practices, complicates and enriches scholarship on Africa’s relationship with its diaspora. His poetry shows how African oral traditions and indigenous literary forms become productive, generative and transformative in his work published in black diasporic print cultures and periodicals. This paper proposes and employs a model that tracks how those indigenous oral and written forms mutate in his work.