This paper traces aspects of the history of the trope of translation, familiar both in critical works that address South African literature and in South African literary texts, in relation to two poems by the black South African poets, Dennis Brutus and Keorapetse Kgositsile. It considers their insinuation of untranslated or translated Afrikaans into an English text as a radical poetic strategy that both reinforces and disrupts established paradigms of the trope of translation. The paper focuses on the poems: "Here of the Things I Mark," by Dennis Brutus, published in 1978 at the height of apartheid rule and the post-apartheid poem, "No Serenity Here" by Keorapetse Kgositsile, published in 2009. I consider the ways in which Brutus both confirms and subverts the identification of Afrikaans as the language of apartheid and suggest that his use of Afrikaans constitutes a practice of resistance that breaches the rigid segregations enforced by apartheid and exposes their permeability. In a close reading of Kgositsile's "No Serenity Here," I relate to his use of the trope of translation and of untranslated Afrikaans within the poem as a radical critique both of European colonization and of post-apartheid South Africa, still unliberated from the perverse legacies of that colonization. In parsing the anomalies of Brutus and Kgositsile's use of Afrikaans in these poems, I map possible future directions for the historiography of the trope of translation in South African poetics.

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In 1986 the Nigerian writer, Wole Soyinka, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. This paper considers the role of the Nobel Prize in the construction, promotion and cementing of literary celebrity, addressing the ways in which the prize augments Soyinka's literary and political renown, already substantial at the time of the award. It takes as focus Soyinka's Nobel lecture and his decision to leverage the global platform afforded him to highlight the struggle against apartheid. The lecture is structured around a refusal to concede the exceptionalism of the South African state, and around a framing of apartheid as a pan-African catastrophe. In the Nobel lecture, Soyinka levels a comprehensive accusation against European racism which he conceives as directly implicated in the ideological underpinning of apartheid policies. Dedicating the address to Mandela and taking his life as paradigm, Soyinka uses his own presence in Stockholm as a subversive supplement to Mandela's absence and addresses the crimes of apartheid both within their particular temporal and geographical context and as a means to expose the global scourge of racism.

The Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 has been widely seen as a watershed moment, marking a fundamental shift in the nature of the resistance to apartheid. Its effect on cultural production was monumental: in the face of a massive government crackdown, almost every black writer and artist of note was forced into exile. The poets who write within the long shadow of the massacre must negotiate its legacy and the fraught question of its commemoration.This article takes as its point of focus two poems by Dennis Brutus and Keorapetse Kgositsile that address the place of Sharpeville in cultural memory. I consider the distinctiveness of the poetics of mourning and commemoration that they fashion in relation to South Africa’s most renowned elegy for the victims of Sharpeville, Ingrid Jonker’s “The Child.” I suggest that Brutus’ anti-poetic, subverted elegy “Sharpeville” re-stages commemoration as an act of resistance that is prospective rather than retrospective. In considering Kgositsile’s poem “When Brown is Black,” I examine Kgositsile’s transnational framing of Sharpeville and its location on a continuum of racial suffering, drawing attention to the significance of the links that Kgositsile forges between Malcolm X and “the brothers on Robben Island,” (42) and between Sharpeville and the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965. This paper suggests that for both Brutus and Kgositsile commemoration is framed as a mode of activism. Keywords: Sharpeville, Ingrid Jonker, Dennis Brutus, Keorapetse Kgositsile, cultural memory, commemoration, elegy

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