ABSTRACT
Political poetry provided an important form of communal and aesthetic resistance during the apartheid era in South Africa by challenging the racist domination of indigenous African people, who comprised 87% of the population, by European colonial settlers, who comprised 13%. Motivated by the belief that “culture is a weapon of struggle,” anti-apartheid poets of the 1950s–1980s often addressed in polemical terms such themes as colonization, land rights, geographic and cultural dislocation, and state-sponsored violence. This chapter identifies three key types of poems in which contemporary women inscribe their post-apartheid literacies: oral poetry, franchise poetry, and poetry of reconciliation. Each category of post-apartheid literacy narratives serves as a vibrant postcolonial act of aesthetic intervention. Gender figures prominently in any post-apartheid imaginary, because women’s voices, especially those of black women, have emerged in contemporary South Africa as an important source of postcolonial agency.
