Keorapetse Kgositsile

After a short illness, Kgositsile died aged 79 on 3 January 2018 at Johannesburg's Milpark Hospital.

"Black music and pan-African solidarity in Keorapetse Kgositsile’s poetry", Journal of South African and American Studies, Volume 18, Number 4, 2017.

His former wife, Baleka Mbete (they had married in 1978, while both living in exile in Tanzania), is the former Deputy President of South Africa; Speaker of the National Assembly of South Africa since 21 May 2014 and chairperson of the African National Congress. With Baleka he had his first son Duma and daughter Nkuli. His daughter Ipeleng (from his previous marriage to the late Melba Johnson Kgositsile) is a journalist and fiction writer who has written for Vibe and Essence magazines. He had his second son, Thebe Neruda Kgositsile (given his middle name after the poet Pablo Neruda), with Cheryl Harris, a law professor at University of California, Los Angeles. Thebe is better known as a hip hop artist under the stage name Earl Sweatshirt. Kgositsile was posthumously featured, alongside Harris, on the song "Playing Possum" from Earl Sweatshirt's 2018 album Some Rap Songs.

In 2013 he was elected as Director of Culture Department and one of the first Executive Committee Members of SA-China People's Friendship Association.

In 2009 Bra Willie was part of the Beyond Words UK tour that also featured South African poets Don Mattera, Lesego Rampolokeng, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers and Lebo Mashile (presented by Apples & Snakes in association with Sustained Theatre, funded by the British Council South Africa, Arts Council England and the South African government).

In 2008, Kgositsile was awarded the national Order of Ikhamanga Silver (OIS) "For excellent achievements in the field of literature and using these exceptional talents to expose the evils of the system of apartheid to the world."

Despite that sense of distance from the country, he dove immediately back into politics and cultural activism, and was quick to say that less had changed than should have: "there is the reality," he said in a 1992 interview, "that the South Africa that alienated black people to a very large extent still exists." Kgositsile was quick to criticize black leaders as well as white for this status quo, accusing the ANC of "being criminally backward when it comes to questions of culture and its place in society or struggle." In the early 1990s he served as vice president of COSAW, fostering the careers of young writers while continuing his steady critique of South African politics.

In July 1990, after 29 years in exile, Kgositsile returned to South Africa. He arrived in a country wholly different from the one he had left, transformed by the beginning of the end of apartheid and the release and later the political triumph of Nelson Mandela. In 1990, however, it was still a place of great confusion, particularly for the many exiled black writers, artists, and intellectuals pouring into the country. In a 1991 essay, "Crossing Borders Without Leaving", Kgostitsile describes his first trip back to Johannesburg, where he was sponsored by COSAW: "Here are my colleagues and hosts. Can you deal with that? Hosts! In my own country." But it is not his country anymore: "there are no memories here. The streets of Johannesburg cannot claim me. I cannot claim them either." Still, he returned to the country as a kind of hero to young black writers and activists:

In 1975, Kgositsile decided to return to Africa, despite his blossoming career in the United States, and took up a teaching position at the University of Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania. In 1978, he married another ANC exile, Baleka Mbete, who was also living in Tanzania. Still from exile, he renewed his activities with the ANC, founding its Department of Education in 1977 and its Department of Arts and Culture in 1983; he became Deputy Secretary in 1987. Kgositsile taught at several schools in different parts of Africa, including Kenya, Botswana, and Zambia. Throughout this period he was banned in South Africa, but in 1990 the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW), with which he was already associated, decided to attempt a publication within the country. The successful result was When the Clouds Clear, a collection of poems from other volumes, which was Kgositsile's first book to be available in his native country.

After studying at the University of New Hampshire and The New School for Social Research, Kgositsile entered the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing at Columbia University. At the same time, he published his first collection of poems, Spirits Unchained. The collection was well received, and he was given a Harlem Cultural Council Poetry Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Award. He graduated from Columbia in 1971, and remained in New York, teaching and giving his characteristically dynamic readings in downtown clubs and as part of the Uptown Black Arts Movement. Kgositsile's most influential collection, My Name is Afrika, was published in that year. The response, including an introduction to the book by Gwendolyn Brooks, established Kgositsile as a leading African-American poet. The Last Poets, a group of revolutionary African-American poets, took their name from one of his poems.

The Black Arts Theatre was part of a larger project aimed at the creation of literary black voice unafraid to be militant. Kgositsile argued persistently against the idea of Négritude, a purely aesthetic conception of black culture, on the grounds that it was dependent on white aesthetic models of perception, a process he called "fornicating with the white eye." This work took place while Kgositsile was teaching at Columbia in the earlier 1970s; he left to work briefly at Black Dialogue Magazine.

In 1961, under considerable pressure both for himself and as part of a government effort to shut down New Age, Kgositile was urged by the African National Congress, of which he was a vocal member, to leave the country. He went initially to Dar es Salaam to write for Spearhead magazine (unrelated to the right-wing British magazine of the same name), but the following year emigrated to the United States. He studied at a series of universities, beginning with Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he "spent a lot of time in the library trying to read as much black literature as I could lay my hands on."

Keorapetse William Kgositsile OIS (19 September 1938 – 3 January 2018), also known by his pen name Bra Willie, was a South African Tswana poet, journalist and political activist. An influential member of the African National Congress in the 1960s and 1970s, he was inaugurated as South Africa's National Poet Laureate in 2006. Kgositsile lived in exile in the United States from 1962 until 1975, the peak of his literary career. He made an extensive study of African-American literature and culture, becoming particularly interested in jazz. During the 1970s he was a central figure among African-American poets, encouraging interest in Africa as well as the practice of poetry as a performance art; he was well known for his readings in New York City jazz clubs. Kgositsile was one of the first to bridge the gap between African poetry and black poetry in the United States.