esego Rampolokeng was born in 1965 in Soweto. He began studying law at university, discontinued his studies, had a family and worked at the stock

exchange in Johannesburg, but left after a short time. Instead, he began to live his life as a South African rapper and oral poet, and was deeply involved in the political movement, the Black Consciousness Movement, in the fight against apartheid.

Asked if he regarded poetry as a free zone, Rampolokeng at once responded: “Freedom? For me, poetry is a meaningless Sisyphean la- bour. I know that everything I am trying to deal with is much bigger than I could ever be. But it is, perhaps, just the impossibility of the task that drives me on and attracts me”.

From an early age, he began to observe eve-rything, gather impressions from the streets of Soweto, listen to music from the Caribbean, read Apollinaire, Pasolini, Artaud, and inter-pret words and form them into his own poetic expression. He lashes out at abuse of power and conceit and believes in the power of the word to shake the foundations of society. Or, as the cultural journalist Carita Backström puts it: “To read him is to enter into a WORD-SCAPE, like going into a landscape. You do not come out of it unscathed”.

LESEGO/ RAMPOLOKENG SOUTH AFRICA POETRY AND MUSIC

L