SOURCE: Rive, Richard. “Black Poets of the Seventies.” English in Africa 4, no. 1 (1977): 47-54.

In the following essay, Rive—a South African fiction writer and playwright—argues that the urban Black and Colored South African protest poets occupied a different political and literary position than that of their predecessors in the 1950s and 1960s. The essay pays particular attention to the early work of Oswald Mtshali, Mongane Wally Serote, and Sipho Sepamla, examining the influence of American writers from the Harlem Renaissance, the white South African liberal literary tradition exemplified by the works of Alan Paton, and the extra-literary concerns of censorship, exile, and the increasing intensity of the political situation.

The Black poets of the seventies, living mainly in and around Johannesburg, form a unique group in South Africa for they stand entirely apart, with hardly any precedent to fall back on, and with a future beset by...