The train as motif in Soweto poetry

Abstract

This article considers protest poetry written between 1961 and 1976. I argue that the Soweto poetry of the 1970s enabled activism that would change Johannesburg’s landscape, facilitating the racial mixing of inner city areas and eroding the segregationist policies that had defined the city from its beginnings. Concomitantly, the paper focuses on representations of the train as a site through which black localities were produced as resistance. Via close readings of poetry by Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali, Sipho Sepamla, and Mongane Wally Serote, I show how the train establishes Soweto as a “neighbourhood”, while also constructing a white “other” against which its identity is affirmed.