Moving mouth first eating their feet
fart hot taking a run before the gun
it’s the plight of spit
in the fairy tale mouth of hell
with lots of stories to scream shout yell
nothing intelligent to tell
i’m rap-ranting
Rap Ranting from The Bavino Sermons
Lesego Rampolokeng says that the day he starts making sense he will quit. Matthew Krouse tries to make sense of the poet’s burgeoning career
It was in 1989 that Lesego Rampolokeng first wandered into the national office of the Congress of South African Writers (Cosaw), proclaiming himself an oral poet. Scruffy and emaciated, his dreadlocks stuffed into a Guevara beret, he clutched a notebook brimming with couplets scrawled in blue ink.
Many guessed, early on, that Rampolokeng would become a raging success story of the organisation that, for all its efforts to nurture writers, enjoyed brief glory before fading into untimely obscurity. Another projected success would be the singer and songwriter Vusi Mahlasela, now a household name.
Rampolokeng, Mahlasela and a hoard of township poets hung out in Cosaw’s Fordsburg office, begging time on the computers and helping themselves to coffee in the kitchen, where they traded anecdotes about the struggling writer’s lot. While they moaned a lot, they weren’t short of successful role models: Cosaw president Mzwakhe Mbuli, general editor Andries Oliphant, writer Achmat Dangor and, of course, their tireless patron Nadine Gordimer.
Some of these, with the organisation’s Transvaal regional executive, mandated the publication of Rampolokeng’s first book Horns for Hondo. It was a slim volume, published in 1990, a time of political and poetic fervour. The organisation had enjoyed unprecedented success with Mbuli’s Before Dawn, selling up to 10 000 copies of what amounted to the lyrics of his first album. They were hoping that other grass roots poets would perform the same miracle.
Speaking with an urgency, barely stopping between sentences, Rampolokeng is always quick to build his own mythology: “I think that book is where I started mutilating myself so to speak,” he says of Horns for Hondo. “That’s where I tried to tear my own senses up, to get to the heart of what it was made me whatever it is I’m supposed to be, in relation to society, in relation to the politics of the day.”
In his introduction to the book, Cosaw general editor Andries Oliphant used Rampolokeng’s poetry to prove what the German critic Walter Benjamin had written, that “every document of civilisation is also a document of barbarism”.
Horns for Hondo contained 50 confused and violent, rhyming raps, rounding off with his poem End-beginnings, claiming, “Truth is treason now liars rule the world.”
The liars were the rulers of apartheid South Africa, and Rampolokeng was doing a sterling job of mouthing the tune of resistance culture. He became the darling of the writers’ organisation, traveling to London that same year to attend a skills acquiring workshop as part of the Zabalaza festival, a gathering of emergent South African talent.
“The Zabalaza course is where I had my first exposure to pornography, South Africa being what it was,” he says with ambivalence. “I don’t suppose I learned much, actually. All I can lay claim to, from the workshops, was the ability to get connected to people such as Wally Serote and Mandla Langa – all those people I looked up to, and just couldn’t touch before.”
Perhaps his ambivalence has something to do with the fact that, like many exceptional talents, he has had to credit the anti- apartheid movement for his recognition. For Rampolokeng, though, his growing success is just a painful reminder of his uncertain past.
“I can safely say that poetry and the word saved me,” he says melodramatically. “Were it not for it, I would have been dead by now. Ninety percent of my friends are dead. Some of them are rotting in jail. Some of them are just rolling around in the ghetto streets as part of the death that makes up Soweto.
“Those are people I was at school with. Those are people I ran the streets with. I think 99% of males who grew up in Soweto got into this or that bit of trouble at some point. And I wielded the odd knife on occasion. But I wielded the knife very much like I wield the pen. Now I rate myself as a knife artist.”
Rampolokeng was a “knife artist” long before becoming a professional poet. Born in Soweto’s Orlando West in 1965, in his teens he began memorising the major works of African poets of the day.
“When I was 14, I was reciting Ingoapele Madingoane’s Africa my Beginning, backwards. I was trying to be a baby Ingoapele,” he says about the legendary, banned master of oral poetry.
“The first time that I tried to go on stage and read my lines, the black consciousness people chased me away. That was in Soweto, in the church Regina Mundi.”
And he begins reciting the poem he still knows today: “They came from the west sailing to the east, with hatred and disease flowing from their flesh …”
In 1992 Rampolokeng got lucky when he met the then German cultural representative Tilman Henkel. With German funding, two further works followed. Shifty Studios recorded his cassette End Beginnings with Kalahari Surfers bandleader Warrick Sony. And in 1993 Rampolokeng saw the publication of his second Cosaw book, Talking Rain, edited by poet and friend Robert Berold.
Now his verse reflected the irony of black experience in the “new” South Africa: “Welcome to the new consciousness, of deranged senses, we utilise everyone,” were the final words of a poem about the political changes on their way.
With the publication of two books behind him and a sound recording, Rampolokeng was becoming prolific in an industry that sells only a handful of poetry volumes annually.
Fortunately, he is a talking poet and his performances are a further means of survival. By touring, he has been able to do what few modern African poets have managed to do – live exclusively by their art. But he has to do plenty of yacking in the process.
“I’ve been abroad more often than I can remember,” he says. “I’ve been to South America, to the Netherlands, to the United Kingdom. I’ve stood alone, solo as a poet, with the world’s speaking poets. I’ve fronted a band at music festivals in Austria and Wales and in London.
“I’ve gone on stage with a DJ, and been on the road with Warrick Sony in Sweden. I could say that within the last six or seven years I spent more than half the time away which, I suppose, makes me the ultimate whore.”
Whoring around Europe has had its rewards. Last year, Rampolokeng presided over two German translations of his published and unpublished works – Endbeginnings and Blue V’s, and the production of a new CD.
Later this month Rampolokeng’s work will take a new turn when he travels to Germany to indulge in the the luxury of a writers’ retreat.
Last month saw the local publication of his new book, The Bavino Sermons, published by Gecko Books. “Bavino” is apparently ghetto- talk for “everyman”. Afraid of becoming a poet in an ivory tower, the title asserts his determination to come across as an ordinary guy.
His spoken poems, once called raps, are now called rants. There is endless stream-of- consciousness prose, anger is vented in all directions and, most alarmingly, there are many sentimental love poems.
It makes one wonder, does Rampolokeng know what he’s trying say? “The day I start making sense to myself, then I’ll be prepared to die,” he says with finality. “I’ll just take my own life – what will be the point of living anymore?
“My life is a constant quest to celebrate myself. But I can only celebrate myself if I find myself being this glorious creature, this golden creature, this beautiful creature that needs to have a halo hanging above its head – and that hasn’t happened. The day that happens, the day I start making sense to myself, I’ll stop. I’ll just give it all up.”
No, he’s not making sense – yet.