About Mongane Wally Serote
Mongane Wally Serote (Johannesburg, 1944 —) is a South African poet and writer. He became involved in political resistance to the apartheid government by joining the African National Congress. In 1969 he was arrested and detained for several months without trial. He then spent several years in exile, working in Botswana for the Arts and Culture department of the ANC, before returning to South Africa in 1990. Mongane Wally Serote published his first collection Yakhal'inkomo in 1972, which received a mixed reception: if the literary critics were bad, calling Serote a Protest Poet, the black community felt very much identified with the man they now called The Son of the People, and he won the Ingrid-Jonker prize for this collection. In 1974, he published Tsetlo, which continued his work of raising awareness of the black community, the first necessary step for the emancipation of black people. This book as folloed by No Baby Must Weep, (1975), Behold Mama, Flowers, (1978) and The Night Keeps Winking, (1982).Mongane Wally Serote is perhaps the greatest black South African poet of his generation and throughout his career his poetry has always been political, committed and liberating poetry. According to Essop Patel, Mongane Wally Serote is one of South Africa's most accomplished and committed poets. He is deeply committed to the culture of the oppressed and exploited, while being actively committed to defending the highest ideals of the revolution. The development of Serote's poetry is indeed in tune with the dynamics of the liberation struggle against apartheid. Mongane Serote's poetry, as well as that of his contemporaries, has been critically overlooked outside of South Africa. Serote's poems deserve greater attention not only for their discerning anatomization of the socio-political diseases ruthlessly inflicted on black lives by a racist oligarchy, but also for their intrinsic poetic scope and quality.
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