Week Six Day Three: Sipho Sepamla

During the apartheid era, Black writers were gagged from publishing prose. To get around the gag, those writers began covering political themes through poetry. This didn't make it effective poetry, though. Their cause was true, but was the writing sufficient to create real change? This is how a group of Black and Brown writers launched a little writing workshop in Alexandra township where they learned to write poetry well.

These writers came to be known as the Drum Magazine Poets. One went on to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Another, Sipho Sepamla, became one of the most important poets in global literary history. Before his death in 2007, Sepamla went on to an academic career, but that workshop still runs today from a little house in Rivonia. @Woody715 spent a lot of time in that very workshop, which graduated to Zoom over the pandemic.

Sepamla sometimes wrote in ordinary English, sometimes in Pidgen, and sometimes in Zulu, Xhosa, and Tsotsi taal. His pidgin poem, Da Same, Da Same, became perhaps the most important political poem of the apartheid era. Here it is:

Da Same, Da Same

I doesn't care of you black
I doesn't care of you white
I doesn't care of you India
I doesn't care of you clearlink
if sometimes you Saus Afrika
you gotta big terrible, terrible
somewheres in yourselves

I mean for sure now
all da peoples is make like God
an' da God I knows for sure
He make avarybudy wit' one heart
for sure now dis heart go-go da same
dats for meaning to say
one man no diflent to anader

so now
you see a big terrible terrible stand here
how one man make anader man feel
da pain he doesn't feel hisself
for sure now dats da whole point

sometime you wanna know how I meaning for
is simple
when da nail of say da t'orn tree
scratch little bit little bit of da skin
I doesn't care of say black
I doesn't care of say white
I doesn't care of say India
I doesn't care of say clearlink
I mean for sure da skin
only one t'ing come for sure
an' da one t'ing for sure is red blood
dats for sure da same, da same for avarybudy

so for sure now
you doesn't look anader man in de eye.

Politics and religion are dangerous terrain for literature. We must express an idea without getting preachy or looking down on our audience. Sepamla achieved this in many different ways, not just by using Pidgin and Tsotsi Taal, but also by speaking about individuals rather than ideas. He also achieved it through irony:

Bearer
Bare of everything but particulars
Is a Bantu
The language of a people in Southern Africa
He seeks to proceed from here to there
Please pass him on
Subject to these particulars
He lives
Subject to the provisions
Of the Urban Act of 1925
Amended often
To update it to his sophistication
Subject to the provisions of the said Act
He may roam freely within a prescribed area
Free only from the anxiety of conscription
In terms of the Abolition of Passes Act
A latter-day amendment
In keeping with the moon-age naming
Bearer's designation is Reference number 417181
And (he) acquires a niche in the said area
As a temporary sojourner
To which he must betake himself
At all times
When his services are dispensed with for the day
As a permanent measure of law and order
Please note
The remains of R/N 417181
Will be laid to rest in peace
On a plot
Set aside for Methodist Xhosas
A measure also adopted
At the express request of the Bantu
In anticipation of any faction fight
Before the Day of Judgement.

The Drum Magazine poets were taught that politics would never be enough until the poetry itself was mastered and respected. They went onto greatness, not because they said important things, but also because they said them well.

I'm not going to ask specific questions today. I'd rather hear your thoughts. If you have examples of political work that you feel is successful, please share them.