Ask poet Lesego Rampolokeng where he has been for the past few years and he’ll tell you that he was avoiding ‘the spectacle” that poetry gatherings have become. ‘I went to a few so-called events and I was struck by the uniformity of the whole thing,” he says with his trademark derisiveness. ‘You could go in there and close your eyes and if there were 10 people who claimed to be poets stepping up, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were listening to the same person through that entire run — So I said I wasn’t going to be a part of that. I didn’t want to be monkey dancing anymore.”
Personal losses, such as losing a studio with two albums’ worth of material in a burglary, might also have contributed to his absence, but these are mentioned only in passing. One gets the distinct impression that as long as he hasn’t lost the will to write, Rampolokeng can overcome any setback. ‘If I’m saying the word is my life, then it means I am tied to it until death,” he proffers from behind a cluttered desk at the Market Theatre Lab, where he is fine-tuning his most recent theatre project, Bantu Ghost, a stream of (black) unconsciousness.
Of the past three years, since publishing his novel BlackHeart, Rampolokeng dismissively says that he ‘published stuff here and there and contributed to this, that and the other thing”.
‘I just wasn’t going out and advertising myself because you get neutralised by applause,” he says. ‘Like when you get paid to scream and shout and be ‘militant’. I came out [not because of the need for applause] because there were issues that I felt strongly enough about expressing and I believed that I could express them, in a way that was true to me and to me alone.”
While he might have been missing in action from the stage, he turned up on pages, even in newsprint, as a cultural critic — incisive, yet bearing no false pretences of objectivity.
In an article published in January this year filmmaker Khalo Matabane, an ideological kindred spirit, received a glowing analysis of his recent works, such as the television series, When We Were Black, while Sunday Times columnist Fred Khumalo probably bore the brunt of the poet’s frustrations with what he once called the deficiencies in our literary criticism. In a scathing review of the novel, Touch My Blood, Rampolokeng wrote that the book was ‘almost easy reading for retarded Caucasians”.
With Bantu Ghost, a collaboration with director Oscar Motsikoe, producer Bobby Rodwell, choreographer Nelisiwe Xaba and dancer Lulu Mlangeni, Rampolokeng takes another moment to reflect on our collective direction as a nation. ‘It is essentially what I do with everything that I do,” he asserts. ‘With Fanon’s Children [my last play], it was a moment where I felt I needed to retrace my steps and try to look at whether or not what I had envisioned at a certain point in my life had indeed been realised or had been sold out along the way. Throughout my life I had been inspired by certain people who have just never sold out their vision, who would much rather be ignored or battered down by whoever wields the power to do so. In this piece I try to show my love and respect for them.”
The ‘deviants”, as he calls them, ‘the mutants who fell off the conveyor belt”, form a sprawling roll-call of black thinkers that includes the likes of Mafikwa Gwala, Steve Biko and Amiri Baraka, as much as it does rapper Ras Kass or Basemental Platform, whose disappearance from the local hip-hop scene he mourns, or The Hymphatic Thabs, whose album launch Rampolokeng hosted earlier this week. These are celebrated in scalding word, dub-heavy sounds and poetic movement.
Rather than merely pay tribute, Bantu Ghost rebukes savagely and suggests a new route to follow. ‘They took black consciousness and added coffee creamer to it and created black economic empowerment,” he says. ‘But I believe if there has ever been a time for consciousness in the history of this country it is now. There is a deliberate need to make sure that people don’t question — and if you’re not happy with this moment then it means that you’re pining for apartheid and that’s absolute bullshit. I do believe for us to strip right down to the bone and see exactly how ugly we are as a people.”
Bantu Ghost, a stream of (black) unconsciousness runs at the Market Theatre Laboratory until October 13