of his bitter experience in prison during the rulership of Banda, one finds the same spirit
of “combativeness.”
Concerning South Africa, Lewis Nkosi (1988:50) argues against the possibility of
periodization in her literature of the 50s to the 70s. This is because of what he describes
as “our single epic theme (which then was) still apartheid”. Michael Chapman (2002:
498), however, is quick to contest this by pointing to the period of the interregnum and
in fact “poets of the interregnum”; that is, poets who had to take the initiative of filling
the space left behind by poets of the first generation such as the Brutus and Kunene. For
by the mid 1960s, apartheid had succeeded in banning all publications by black writers
that reflected on the injustice of the system. The situation was worsened by the fact that
most of these writers had been forced into exile or committed to prison. As a result,
between this time and the early 70s there was a serious dearth of any form of literary
creativity by black writers. It was this yearning against a creative vacuum that produced a
second generation of black poets sometimes referred to as poets of Black Consciousness,^5
or Soweto poets in South Africa. That their poetry was employed at this point in time as a
medium of liberation struggle can hardly be denied, since the kind of poetry produced at
this period was framed essentially by the need to actualize the Steve Biko mandate of
pumping “black life into the empty shell” of the black man (Ritske Zuidema 2002: 12).
What is more, “poems could be performed orally in front of large audiences, and because
of their brevity, and density, they could be turned into effective carriers of urgent political
5
With respect to South Africa, it needs to be further clarified that that the question of periodization is
particularly problematic. To deny this fact is to be vulnerable to what Harry Garuba (2003:4) calls “the
naïve homogenizing” which arises from attempts at theorizing in African scholarship. On account of this,
“poets of the interregnum” are only appropriately so if we deploy Ken Goodwin’s (1982) model which
places Brutus and Kunene in what can be broadly designated at the first generation of modern African poets
in English. Otherwise, it has become necessary to acknowledge the long history of black poetic tradition in
South Africa. While it is possible to trace this back to the late 19th century, we may however consign
ourselves to the generation beginning with the “New Africans” to which the likes of R. Dhlomo, and A.C.
Jordan in particular belonged. They wrote mainly between the 1930s and 40s. It is thus only after this
generation can we be discussing the generation of Brutus and Kunene, which may within this paradigm of
convenience place the Black Consciousness poets in the third generation (See Michael Chapman 1996:452-
3). But as indicated earlier, for the purpose of convenience in this thesis, it will suffice to place the “poets
of the interregnum” in the third generation. This younger generation, in the words of Serote, “had to search
very, very desperately indeed for who we were, where we were going, and where we came from... which
explains what came to be called the ‘Black Consciousness era.’ ” See Jane Wilkinson, Talking with African
Writers , (London, James Currey, 1992), 177.