The Colors of Resistance in Apartheid South Africa

Black Consciousness Poetry and the Racial Elusiveness of Wopko Jensma

Abstract

This article analyzes South African Black Consciousness poetry of the 1970s and 1980s alongside the protest poetry of white South African poet Wopko Jensma. It is argued that, while the racial definition of oppression and resistance characteristic of Black  Consciousness poetry had the important aim of recovering black people’s dignity and fostering racial solidarity and unity, it also had the unfortunate consequence of not recognizing white resistance and preventing cross-racial solidarity and empathy. By portraying the racial divide in South Africa as absolute, it implicitly allowed white people no ethical position to speak from. The poetry of Wopko Jensma is analyzed as a unique expression of white solidarity with black South Africans, demonstrated by the poet’s mastery of the social and linguistic idiom of a wide variety of South African people, as well as by his unusual, subversive, self-othering gesture of having himself legally reclassified as Black. By thus rejecting apartheid racial categories, as well as “European” and “African” poetics, he also deconstructed blackness and whiteness as essential identities, expressing an inclusive “human consciousness” and anticipating the ideal of the “rainbow nation” invoked in South Africa after 1990.