Lesego Rampolokeng

South African performance poet and playwright Lesego Rampolokeng was born into a Catholic, working-class family in Soweto, then a Johannesburg township. His mother raised him alone after the early death of his father, who worked in a platinum mine. Rampolokeng briefly studied law at the University of the North. The violence and Catholicism of his childhood inform his poetry’s blunt, unflinching examination of degradation and oppression. Oral folk traditions and contemporary rap music echo throughout his work, and he often incorporates music into his performances.

Rampolokeng’s many poetry and mixed-genre collections include A Half Century Thing (2015), Head on Fire: Rants / Notes / Poems 2001–2011, The Bavino Sermons (1999), Talking Rain (1993), and Horns for Hondo (1990), which won an Africa Network Kwanzaa Award. He is also the author of the novels Bird-Monk Seding (2017),  Whiteheart: Prologue to Hysteria (2005), and Blackheart: (epilogue to Insanity) (2004). His play, Fanon’s Children, was performed at Cape Town’s Baxter Theater in 2002, and his poetry was incorporated into the Handspring Puppet Company production of Faustus in Africa.