​​Dr Uhuru Phalafala, a lecturer in the Department of English, is among a selected group of Stellenbosch University (SU) staff members who are participating in the Future Professors Programme (FPP), an initiative of the Department of Higher Education and Training. The FPP aims to develop a transformed next generation of South African professors across all disciplines. Read more about her career journey.

Dr Uhuru Phalafala of SU's Department of English was the driving force behind last year's reprint of Malibongwe: Poems from the Struggle by ANC Women, an anthology of poems originally published in 1981. The re-release forms part of her ongoing effort to repatriate and republish South African cultural texts written by black exiles during the apartheid years so that these cultural archives are available locally too and can be included in curriculums.

“South African black culture produced under apartheid is available in Sweden, London, the United States and Japan. It's available in Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia and Kenya – everywhere except in our country," explains Dr Phalafala, whose efforts were funded through an Andrew Mellon grant. “In the 1960s and 1970s, the producers and their works were banned and censored. When they returned to South Africa, they did not come back with their work. It is still out there. It is still in exile."

She is working towards a very clear goal: “It's only when an archive of South African black culture is available that one can see and establish what our predecessors have produced. This knowledge helps us take traditions forward, but also helps us know that we are not the first doing the work; that others have laid the groundwork for us."

Endless abundance

Dr Phalafala is one of three SU academics who have been included in this year's intake of the Department of Higher Education and Training's Future Professors Programme (Phase 01) – a preparatory programme for the next generation of South African professors.

She sees arts and culture as an entryway into aspects such as history, politics, psychology, geography and philosophy. Dr Phalafala teaches courses on black feminisms, Caribbean poetry, the black radical tradition, black consciousness poetry and “Writing as healing: Poetry by women of colour".

“I am invested in bridging the gap between academia and communities," she says. “When I do not join academia with communities, I find myself in a world that tells me that I do not come from a knowledge system or a place that has an entire world system, world view and different forms of knowledge. Academia can be enriched by this knowledge.

“Academia as a kind of Eurocentric, white, male institution is at the end of its life. I find that the worlds and knowledges that my colleagues and I from the global South bring help open up this formerly exclusionary, menial, tunnel-visioned, homogenous space, to make it quite an interesting space of research and collaboration, in which the new knowledge we bring is not new, but has actually always been there."

Writer

Dr Phalafala is completing a book on women's role in producing a knowledge system from the oral traditions of Southern Africa, and their influence on their children and grandchildren, who took this knowledge forward to fashion anti-apartheid and anti-colonial tools in Africa and the black diaspora.

Her grandmother, mother and aunts shaped her inner life of stories filled with cosmologies of the land. They equipped her with an orientation to literacy and literature that is different from that normally taught in schools and universities.

“They were stellar storytellers. I grew up with a literature that was spoken, and not presented through books," Dr Phalafala remembers. “It was a high kind of culture; of enjoyment of words in the everyday speech; very expressive, very deliberate, and not by chance. Things were spoken in poetic form, through proverbs, through figurative speech."

She wrote her first poem, about her brother, at age 16 in 2000, her matric year. She then spent the next five years exploring the Johannesburg art scene, writing full-time and performing her poetry. Only then did she enrol for English and African literature studies at the University of the Witwatersrand.

In 2016, she obtained her PhD in English Literature from the University of Cape Town with a dissertation on the late Keorapetse “Bra Willie" Kgositsile, South African poet laureate and ANC member. Dr Phalafala is also finalising a monograph on Kgositsile's life and work, and is editor of the upcoming publication The Collected Poetry of Keorapetse Kgositsile.

While working on the monograph during her recent National Research Foundation-funded sabbatical, she warded off writer's block by starting on an epic 50-page poem about her grandfather, a migrant miner in Johannesburg. Mine Mine Mine will be published later this year.

“It is part of my critical race work. To talk about white supremacy and racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, black modernity and black humanity in the abstract makes no sense to me, as I have experienced these things personally. My poetic form enables me to ground some of these theories in practice, in first-person expression."

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