SOURCE: McClintock, Anne. “‘Azikwelwa’ (We Will Not Ride): Politics and Value in Black South African Poetry.” Critical Inquiry 13, no. 3 (spring 1987): 597-623.

In the following essay, McClintock provides a history of protest poetry under apartheid and examines what she calls the “new forms of artistic creation” that emerged out of the Soweto uprisings of 1976. She pays particular attention to the relationship between the collective oral poetry produced in the black townships and Staffrider magazine, which was founded in 1978 to publish these poems, and, in so doing, challenge white South African cultural values.

In the colonial context the settler only ends his work of breaking in the native when the latter admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man's values. In the period of decolonization, the colonized masses mock at these very values, insult them and vomit them up.

—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

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