| Sumario: | This essay seeks to provide a personal context to the enigmatic life of the poet and writer Lesego Rampolokeng. The essay divides into three sections which I call ‘Foreground’, ‘Middleground’ and ‘Background’, which provide a loose framework for a set of parameters around which to peg this (auto)biographic narrative. I met Lesego through various politics/ music/ poetry events, revolving around the Shifty Recording Studio during the late1980s. We developed a body of work which we performed in South Africa, Europe and Brazil and a friendship which continues to this day. The piece is framed by film making concepts of framing using Foreground, Middleground, Background and Extreme Close up. The incident which introduces us to the violence that underpins daily life in South Africa, and more specifically, to Lesego’s reaction; it foreshadows a source of his work, which is a background of juvenile pre-paredness to meet inevitable violence. The ‘Foreground’ also introduces the reader to the premise that he could be more usefully categorised as being a dadaist or surrealist than the epithets of ‘struggle’, ‘praise’ or ‘dub’ poet, that so are readily reached for when dealing with his work. Our 2009 performance at the ‘Dada South? Experimentation, Radicalism and Resistance’ exhibition at the Iziko Gallery in Cape Town frames much of this section. The ‘Middleground’, then, is the substance of my understanding of Lesego’s biography, and an analytical look at his work and his influences. I examine the album End Beginnings, which we did together, in 1990, and the socio-political circumstances around it. I touch on work with William Kentridge on Faustus in Africa, and Lesego’s pact with the devil; his frightening Catholic ambience, the trilogy of God, Man and the State which permeates his work. I look, too, at his fall from favour with the ruling party, throwing his lot in with the Black Consciousness Movement, a more sympathetic home for philosophers and poets. This section analyses his past writing and how it progresses and informs more current work – where poetry gives way to prose. The semi-biographic novel Bird Monk Seding (2017) was the most recent at the time of writing this article and, more than any other work of his, emphasises the ‘graphic’ in autobiographic. Readings from A Half Century Thing, a book of poems written during 2017, gave rise to a new set of recordings which became the album, Bantu Rejex which is also examined. The third section, ‘Background’ looks at the historical landscape of the arts and the role of poetry during the struggle years and at some of Lesego’s major influences and the formative events of the time. This section also discusses some of the recording studio technology used to make the album and focuses on two songs to see how they were put together. It also looks at another important poet of the time, Mzwakhe Mbuli, how he shaped a specific audience and demand for the performance poetry of the era, and how that differed from Lesego’s trajectory. The title of this essay quotes a line form the close of ‘Broederbondage’ in the book Talking Rain (1993), ‘We’re stickfighting against extinction’, spliced together with the title of Amiri Baraka’s famous ‘Black Dada Nihilismus’ poem, a Lesego favourite.
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