Introduction: Elsewhere

Summary

African cultures and cosmologies can provide a wealth of inexhaustible resources for the project of epistemic decentring. Having exhausted technoscientific reason and confronted the civilizational consequences of its impasses, new metaphors are required for the future. We must heed the call for a renewal of the very sources of the imaginary and of a thought coming from an elsewhere.

Felwine Sarr, Afrotopia (2019: 80, my emphasis)

When South African poet and statesman Keorapetse Kgositsile (1938–2018) was instructed by senior members of his party, the African National Congress (ANC), to flee the country into exile in 1961, he packed among his meagre belongings a corpus of Tswana literary classics. To him, they enshrined a set of valuables, of knowledge systems, aesthetic practices, cosmologies, and mythologies he could marshal to counter colonial modernity's anti-Black warfare. As a revolutionary writer, he used the worlds from these classics as a basis to assert the existence of other forms of being, knowing, and belonging that were otherwise to the Eurocentric, racist, capitalist, and Christian social orders imposed by colonialism and apartheid. The Tswana literatures that accompanied him into exile were material representations of the values instilled in his formative years, used as bridges to connect politics of the homeplace with those of his unfolding exile travels and writing life.

He arrived with this treasure trove in the nascent cultural and political ferment of the Black Power and Black Arts Movements (BAM) in the United States of America in 1962. He harnessed that Tswana archive – comprising dramas, novels, and an anthology of poetry – in his five collections of poetry published in the States with the intent to foster continuities between the African American struggle and the struggles of Black South Africa. Further, he understood the Black experience as connected, thereby embracing Black world politics as fundamentally opposed to the culture of Jim Crow, colonialism, and apartheid. Operating in this world of Blackness he sought to bridge geographical and linguistic chasms, to foster political solidarities through cultural relations with Black diasporans.

His literary corpus published in the States, as well as his political activities, illustrate an assertion of the existence of otherworlds within the dominant paradigm of anti-Blackness.