f the youth had a voice that projects their viewpoint, desires, aspirations and mastery of the word Kgafela’s would be it. Like-minded young thinkers posed questions to this wordsmith and what manifested is a candid fermentation of this eloquent poet. Word, life and Uhuru stay in perfect balance as each question is tackled with precise precision reminiscent of Che Guvera’s approach to war tactics. Dive right in and experience Kgafela oa Magogodi.

Zhee [poet] : If rivers flow and trees grow, what the poet's purpose ?
To question the purpose.

What does the statement 'Poet as a revolutionary' mean to you ?
The last thing I want do is to prescribe or police the boundaries of poetic taste and its revolutionary impulse. But for me, history has two kinds of poets. There are those who put you to sleep and those who wake you from slumber. Surely you’ll remember how a lot of praise singers popped up during the political transition into the early days of the new political dispensation. Some of the leading politicians of the time had their personal praise singers. Television screens were teeming with images of poets wearing animal skins and all sorts of apparently traditional garments. Their voices carried the euphoria of the rainbow era. Television ignored the poets who saw and talked about the errors of the rainbow era. These poets existed as underground voices of those people for whom the “talks about talks” did not bring forth the anticipated fruits of the uhuru. Voices of dissent are beginning to emerge strongly especially in the new wave of poets.

kush khoza : How would you define or re-define poetry ?
There’s no “true poetry” out there that’s to be fetched & brought home. Poetry is that chameleonic creature which changes with time & place. Define it for yourself. Recently, someone was asking if what I do is rap or poetry. I told them I don’t rap I unwrap the napkins of our baby nation to show you things. Call me not a rapper. I am the un-wrapper.

kush khoza : Would you regard hip-hop artists as poets ?
Ynot? Hip-hop artistry is easily a neo-traditional take on a long-standing poetic impulse to “talk-over” musical sounds. Methinks there’s a family resemblance between the hip-hop scene & the spoken poetry scene. Let’s call it a Siamese relation where you can’t separate the two without shedding blood or fetching a tragedy.

kush khoza : You perform overseas quite often, how would you compare Mzantsi poetry with the rest of the continent and the world ?
Is there such a thing as Mzantsi poetry? Nothing is uniform here. Each poet fetches & carries their own fire... the embers glow & dance differently. Don’t get me wrong. No writer writes outside a given artistic tradition. Hence there’s a certain Mzantsiness about the stuff we cook at home. It is in the scamthoising of word, perhaps. Our stuff also gestures globally because there has been a cross-pollination of artistic ideas over the years. Through our travels we’ve rubbed things onto the skin of the world & the world has rubbed things onto our skins. The not so irie thing is how we often jump over the continent vying for European & American stages. There’s very little dialogue between Mzantsi & our bredas & sistas of Afrika.

kush khoza : Should Afrikan dialects [zulu, xhosa, tswana etc] take precedence over English as a medium for expression in poetry ?
I raise this question in the forthcoming piece of my column on Ymag. I am looking at what I termed “isicamtho poetry” as possibly gesturing towards a new lingo for South African poetry. Recently, at the BAT Center in Durban I bumped into these cats who say their poetry is in ZUNGLISH (a cross between Zulu and English). Fresh and dope, is it not? In CHIMURENGA 3 I interviewed Papa Ramps and he had some interesting stuff to say about how, perhaps, we shouldn’t be chained to the tongues of our grandmothers. We can create a lingo that we use to communicate everyday. I subscribe to this thought. But I’m also with Ngugi’s point of returning to the “original” languages. I do write some stuff in Setswana, which I bend a little to suit my “metropolitan” tongue. In the main, I will write in any language that I can speak. If I could flow in Swahili, German or French… I would. It’s all about reaching out.

kush khoza : Who do you look up to in terms of poetry? And why ?
I am fired up by writings of Bra Zinga Don Mattera and Sipho Sephamla. It was Bra Zinga who, in 1988, introduced me to Dambudzo Marechera’s work. My baby poems were breastfed on Marechera’s writings. Lefifi Tladi and Ingoapele Madingoana’s works were buzzing around our ears because people used to recite them, especially Ngoapzene’s Africa My Beginning. I look up to these elders on the spoken word. In fact, Lefifi, after hearing me recite, sometime ago at the Windybrow, he cut out a lock from his head and gave it to me. I am keeping Lefifi’s lock for life. It’s a great award from a great poet & painter.

There’s a cat called Benson Makele, who now goes as a freelance journalist. When he returned from exile he gave me valuable lessons on poetry & prose writing. He was with the African Writers Association, which I joined in 1991. In the AWA library I picked up Ayi Kwei Armah, and Okot P’Bitek. Later on came Mzwakhe Mbuli who really put the performative parts of poetry on the map. From overseas I was hearing the work of Amiri Baraka. In 1993 I flamed by Lesego Rampolokeng’s recitals one Friday at Kippies.

There are many young writers who continue to inspire me whenever I attend poetry sessions in and around Jozi: Phaswane Mpe, Lebogang Mashile, Modjadji, Hymphatic Thabs, Kabelo Mofokeng and Common Man. I fetch my fire from all these great Azanian word warriors.

Jabsi : What feeds your inspiration and what inspired you to put together 'Thy condom come' ?
My life inspires my writing. The people I meet. The pictures they paint. The music I hear. The books I read.
The pieces in THY CONDOM COME were born from my early days when I started putting out stuff in the pathways of the word. I wasn’t really writing a book then; I was groping and searching for a voice. That explains the nomadic expression of images and rhythm. It’s a restless aesthetic with each piece covering a plethora of themes while rhythmically I don’t stay in one place. If you are used to mono-thematic poems & mono-rhythmic styles and regular rhymes, the stuff I put out is likely to unsettle you. But I do that on purpose… that’s my deliberate attempt at exploring the chaotic morass of the lives of the marginalized during apartheid and in the neo-apartheid dispensation. THY CONDOM COME straddles the transition between the old and the not-so-new. I tried to capture the totality of what makes us human by taking on the elephant and the ant, the public & the pubic… There are no private parts in my art.

Jabsi : Poetry as a healing mechanism, could it be? Especially to those people infected/affected by HIV ?
Poetry is no panado or anti-retroviral treatment; but yes, it’s a spiritual balm of sorts. In "VARARA" you get a serio-comical treatment. I was recently discovered that in Tigrinya: an official language of Eritrea- an East African nation- independent since 1993, the word VARARA looks similar to farara- fiera which means a bad disease... that's HIV/AIDS. For me VARARA is a colloquial way of saying virus. When I grew up in Meadowlands, Soweto, there were gangsters who called themselves Ma-Varara.

They basically lived on parasitic activities, including robbing people of their lives with pangas and oukapies. They were like a virus eating, biting away big chunks from the body and soul of the community. The meaning of VARARA therefore extends to the way the HIV/AIDS pandemic is sweeping away human lives. But there's another not-so-hidden connotation. During the struggle against apartheid, members of the ANC were called Ma-Varara. Now, here is a subtle dialogue with neo-apartheid headache. So far, only Bra Zinga and a few other sharp people were able to de-code this thought. But you do get a small town clown taking cheap shot at me, demanding more content in my work.

Tumi [poet & mc] : What gives you the audacity to be a poet ?
Believe me, being a poet was the last thing on my mind. In the days of my laaitiehood you were told that poetry is not a child’s play & I left it alone. I wanted to be a singer until one day I tried to reach a high-pitched note and I squeaked so awkwardly that my music teacher asked: “ARE YOU KILLING A PIG?” So I had to reconsider my path.

When I dropped the singing thing I was left with all the lyrics/songs that I had written and had to do something with that stuff. The poetry thing began when I decided to half-speak & half-sing my lyrics. At home I imitated my grandpa, Keorapetse Kgomanyane, who would speak his poetry during family gatherings & therein lays the spark. I was also listening to the early wave of rap… sounds of Houdini and the Gary Byrd Experience. People of my vintage will remember that Gary Byrd featured Stevey Wonder who sang “You wear the Crown, I Wear The Crown…” I used to listen religiously to the vinyl recording of this song until it grew legs. But I still play it my head & I can rap every word. Soon I met “Bra Zinga” who took my hand and ushered me into the house of the spoken word.

Bra Zinga raised me & I have not forgotten. Do I need any amount of audacity to be a poet? Nix! What drives my lines is the simple desire to seek a place in the word where people meet to share the bread of the soul. I get my poetry from my people. I do not write to tower above anyone or anything. I don’t write to be cute or candy. I write to pull out rotten teeth in the mouth of a gun. I write to shelter myself from pus that pops out of the sky’s eye. I write to touch you with the stink of my ink. My poetry is about life and death and anything in between: eating, defecating and fart blasting; kissing and embracing; copulating and impregnating; abortions bleeding life from the womb to tomb. Human bodies seem to collide as they dance and jostle for life in the universe of my verse.

Lee @ Yfm : Consciousness is seen as being a sub-culture that most people don't even know anything about it except to wear dreadlocks, expensive clothes that look cheap and speak in a certain way. Is that how consciousness should be defined ?
If at all they are posturing I certainly appreciate the gestures. They are gesturing in the right direction. Consciousness is a process. It could start with the planting of dread seeds in the head and growing locks or even buying a Biko T-shirt at Stoned Cherrie. You may dismiss this as a fashionable craze that operates on the surface. But in my line of work I meet youngsters who, in the long run, go deeper than the ragamuffin look. That is what I am expressing in my Setswana poem, “mo faya”. It goes to all the young cats who are writing, as it were, “history from below”… those young voices who “bring the noise”. It goes to cats whose rhymes remember the embers of Biko’s fire, Lumumba’s fire, Mashinini’s fire, Che Guevara’s fire, Dedan Kimati’s Fire, Fanon’s Fire, Baraka’s Fire, Gerima’s Fire. To all the poets, young and old, who rock the scene of rhyme with their flames I say “mo faya”.

Miriam Chi Gondwe : Which poetry session do you go to ?
Since I am not opposed to fashion & mo faya I go with the latest buzz. Much respect to all the drivers of the word like Bra Peter Makurube, Erik Myeni, Makweru, Nonkululeko Godana, Zwesh Fi Kush & Rudeboy Paul. These cats have selflessly created platforms on which we express ourselves. I was there when Monday Blues was dope. When the Jungles Connection scene lived and died in Doornfonten, in Yeoville “Poetic Tuesdays” came to rise and I was there with all the lovers of the word. Now the Cool Runnings scene and the WORD OF MOUTH on Yfm are on the frontline & there I gwan.

Miriam Chi Gondwe : Do you subscribe to any afrikan or global revolution? What’s the nature of that revolution and what's the key message you are communicating through your poetry ?
I subscribe to the writing of our love stories in the midst of all these Babylonian bubbles. I subscribe to writing books and movies that liberate us and not rape us. People like Haile Gerima and Euzhan Palcy, for instance, give us cues in films like Sankofa and Sugar Cane Alley. They tell stories about people freeing themselves not waiting to be unchained by their enslavers. Our filmmaking, book writing and emceeing must be supported by a body scholarship. We need to spur on a new generation of scholars that take the baton from the great Eskia Mphahlele, Keorapetse Kgositsile and Njabulo Ndebele.

We need scholars and public commentators who will theorise and historicise the films of Dumisani Phakathi, Khalo Matabane, Zola Maseko and Teboho Mahlatsi. That’s what the African-Americans are doing so well. Molefi Kente Asante says we should raise our voices and occupy public space unapologetically.
I subscribe to the need to liberate our story by challenging official mythologies of a vegetative Africanism such as one that is peddled by the head of state in that “I am an African” speech which has found its way into the jazz scene. As a speech that serves the tourist market it is okay, perhaps. Flipside, it is loaded with Tarzanic sensibilities and therefore can be a serious distraction from the bread, butter and shelter realities of the present day. Where is the land question in our stories? Read Letlapa Mphahlele’s Child of the Soil for possibilities. We also need to be aware of the extent to which the paradigm of reconciliation without truth incarcerates our stories. We will not heal by concealing.

Miriam Chi Gondwe : Is there a way that lost-generation poets could be linked to new-generation poets beyond the older poets being role models (or whatever else) and younger poets being followers (or whatever else)?
Who is lost, exactly?

Kush Khoza : What is your view on the upcoming urban voices and why have you not participated ?
I have not been invited, that’s why I am not taking part. But it’s not about me, it’s about the WORD. What do I think about the Urban Voices? I missed last year’s stanza. I would have loved to catch & be caught by Muta & Sol but I was out there hustling for milk & euros on foreign stages. I will definitely catch this year’s showpiece & soak myself in the WORD. Much respect to the chosen poets.

Kush Khoza : Recently you’ve directed Spoken Word Theatre pieces. Itchy City & WAR have received their fair share of public acclaim. Your performances with your Afro- Jazz Band have been highly noted. There’s some noise about your two short stories on Chimurenga Magazine (2 & 4). There’s also your Y Magazine column, “The Spoken Word” for which you were I finalist for best magazine column in the Mondi Awards. Where to from here? What project are you bringing out ?
I am currently in the studio working on OUTSPOKEN. It’s all A cappella recitals... about twenty-one pieces or so. I am also cutting split ends to my book of poetry & prose. I had a few tentative titles for this one. But after THY CONDOM COME I’ll probably go for THE SECOND COMING. I think the title is irie considering that this will be my second offering bookwise. I am also seeking dialogue between the two titles.
Well, I have a lot more to say about my work and where it is going but, as someone said, you can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do. Allow me to stop here.
Kush Khoza is the voice behind kush.co.za; the spirit of kush kollective. he's that voice that speaks the truth in all of us.