Keorapetse Kgositsile

Keorapetse William Kgositsile, known to many as Bra Willie, was a South African Tswana poet, journalist, and political activist. Born on 19 September 1938, he died on 3 January 2018. He was a key figure in the African National Congress during the 1960s and 1970s, and in 2006 he was named South Africa's National Poet Laureate. From 1962 to 1975, he lived in exile in the United States, a period that marked the height of his literary output. He immersed himself in African-American literature and culture, with a particular fascination for jazz. In the 1970s, he became a central presence among African-American poets, promoting interest in Africa and championing poetry as a performance art; his readings in New York City jazz clubs were especially well known. He was among the first to connect African poetry with African-American poetry in the U.S. His son is the American rapper Earl Sweatshirt.

Kgositsile grew up in a small shack behind a house in a white Johannesburg neighborhood, rented by his mother. His first encounter with apartheid came when a white friend hesitated to join a boxing club that excluded him, leading to a fight and a lasting lesson. As a teenager, he faced increasing exclusion, and he saw adulthood as an entry into apartheid. He attended Madibane High School and other schools around the country, where he managed to find books by Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, along with European writers like Charles Dickens and D. H. Lawrence. He began writing stories, though not yet with professional intent. After a series of odd jobs following high school, he took writing more seriously and joined the politically charged newspaper *New Age*, contributing both reporting and poetry. His early poems, such as those in "Dawn," mixed lyricism with a direct call to action, as in lines about violence in Soweto. He soon abandoned fiction for what he saw as the urgent need to communicate; as he put it, under oppression, writing is either a tool of oppression or an instrument of liberation.

In 1961, facing pressure from the government and the shutdown of *New Age*, the ANC urged Kgositsile to leave South Africa. He first went to Dar es Salaam to write for *Spearhead* magazine, then emigrated to the United States in 1962. He studied at several universities, starting with Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he spent much of his time in the library reading black literature. After stints at the University of New Hampshire and The New School for Social Research, he entered Columbia University's MFA program in creative writing. While there, he published his first poetry collection, *Spirits Unchained*, which earned him a Harlem Cultural Council Poetry Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Award. He graduated in 1971 and stayed in New York, teaching and performing dynamic readings in downtown clubs and as part of the Uptown Black Arts Movement. His most influential collection, *My Name is Afrika*, came out that same year, with an introduction by Gwendolyn Brooks, cementing his status as a leading African-American poet. The group The Last Poets took their name from one of his poems.

Jazz was central to Kgositsile's understanding of black American culture. He saw performers like John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, and B. B. King in New York clubs and wrote about them in his poems. Jazz shaped his key idea: a worldwide African diaspora united by a distinct black sound. He described the black aesthetic he pursued as movement, force, and creative power—found in the walk of a Sophiatown tsotsi, a Harlem brother on Lenox Avenue, field hollers, the blues, a Coltrane riff, or mbaqanga. For him, breaking free from a white aesthetic and discovering a shared rhythmic experience among black people everywhere were two parts of the same struggle.

In New York, Kgositsile also founded the Black Arts Theatre in Harlem. He saw black theater as a revolutionary act aimed at destroying ingrained habits of thought that shaped how black people were seen by others and themselves. He wrote that this work would destroy the symbols of captivity and create new symbols for a necessary, ongoing beginning.