First Mafika Gwala Lecture: The Arts of Resistance - Mafika Gwala and South African Poetry by Ari Sitas

At first I thought that a reading and a republishing of my Traditions of Poetry in Natal2 which attempted to situate Mafika Pascal Gwala’s work in the late 1980s would be appropriate in marking his legacy. The more I re-read what I had said then the more despondent I got about the fate of the poetic and what I hear around me as what is appropriate for our times and what was inappropriate in those times. I have kept my analysis of his poems of the 1970s and 1980s largely unaltered, hoping that I could expand on his newer stuff that he promised he had in piles back home. To my horror, I found out from Omar Badsha that in a bout of absent-mindedness he had left it all in a bag in a taxi as he was going to get them copied in town. What remained where the number of conversations I had with him since, his anger at the “academic crawl” and what the suburbs had done to the township and its poetry. Remembering Mafika Pascal Gwala brought with it a haunting sensation. It was about the landscape that threaded together, Umlazi, KwaMashu, Inanda, Mpumalanga, Edendale, Dambuza, Sobantu and Mpophomeni. It was a common landscape of black experience, hope and fire. It was where, the poet found the Children of Nonti Nzimande and found them…resilient.