In celebration of World Poetry Day, we applaud Dr Uhuru Phalafala for her recent achievements in African poetry. Dr Phalafala is an exceptional South African poet and academic at Stellenbosch University.
Dr Phalafala has recently published her latest booklength poem, Mine Mine Mine. The book’s potent themes of extractive violence, regeneration, revolt, kinship, love, identity, and the human experience will surely make waves in the literary world.
The book is described as “a personal narration of Uhuru Phalafala’s family’s experience of the migrant labor system brought on by the gold mining industry in Johannesburg, South Africa. Using geopoetics to map geopolitics, Phalafala follows the death of her grandfather during a historic juncture in 2018, when a silicosis class action lawsuit against the mining industry in South Africa was settled in favor of the miners.”
Regarding her new book, Dr Phalafala said, “Mine Mine Mine is the story of my grandfather working as a migrant labourer in the gold mines of Johannesburg. It is a story about our collective grandfathers and fathers, about our grandmothers who were waiting and our mothers who raised us in the absence of emotional support from their husbands. It is a story of ambiguous loss, how that plays out intergenerationally; it is a story of extracted lands and extractive labour, reproduction and racial capitalist labour; it is a story about us, the beneficiaries of such exploitative plundering of bodies that created, birthed and raised us – how does that sit in our bodies? Where precisely does it all sit, and how do we breathe through the loss, trauma, waiting, absences, and desires that sits with it?”
The literary community has responded positively to the release of Mine Mine Mine. Chris Abani (author of Smoking the Bible and The Secret History of Las Vega) described the book as, “…a small miracle of craft: an intimate poem and yet also an epic. In the tradition of composers like Zim Ngqawana and poets like Okot p’Bitek, this work is personal narrative, a musical composition, an operatic libretto, simultaneously original and yet drawing from the lineage of griots, inyosis, and imbongis, with perfect play between soloist and chorus. An incredible book that spans self, history, and unknown dimensions, part spirit and part human.”
Lebogang Mashile (award-winning poet and performer) said, “Mine Mine Mine grabs my heart by its throat and tells it who it is…The breadth of Phalafala’s twelve-year academic devotion to the study of words is evident in the precision with which she wields her tremendous sonic and literary gifts. The mind’s ear hears the repetitive machinery of the mines. It connects to the sharp edge that Blackness gave birth to in the city. Phalafala guides the reader across the complex contours of womanhood, the embodiment of the land in Setswana, and mourns a lost cyclical relationship to both. Canons of Black feminist memory, music, and pan-African influences converge in a treatise so tight the only word that can crown this elegant elegy is ‘truth.”
Mine Mine Mine is accessible in bookshops and online and is sure to be a must-read for anyone interested in contemporary African poetry and literature.
Dr Phalafala is also the author of Keorapetse Kgositsile and the Black Arts Movement: Poetics of Possibility and coeditor of Keorapetse Kgositsile: Collected Poems, 1969–2018 (Nebraska, 2023).