Linton Kwesi Johnson gave poetry back to the people - The Mail & Guardian

It was around this time that, by chance, South African poet Rustum Kozain, who was born and grew up in Paarl in the Western Cape, first heard LKJ. A childhood friend who used to visit Kozain at his family home had LKJ’s “It’s winter 1980. I am 13, 14 and there is something in LKJ’s voice. You can’t quite figure out a lot of what he is saying, because of the Caribbean English he is using, but we could figure out it was anti-authoritarian. There is something about the voice, the defiant tone.

“What made me go back to LKJ was when South African critics were, in my opinion, patronising Mbuli because they lionised him as someone who had revolutionised English poetics with music. And I said, ‘But there is a guy who has been doing this long before Mbuli.’” The gist of what paternalistic critics were saying was: Mbuli’s poetry could not be deep because he was coming from an oral tradition. Thinking of LKJ’s song , Kozain revolted against this thinking.

I interviewed LKJ in April 2009, before a four-city tour in which he performed in Johannesburg, Makhanda, Durban and Cape Town. At the time, he explained that the gains enjoyed by minorities hadn’t come about by happenstance. When he said this, George Floyd, Trayvon Martins, Collins Khosa, Eric Garner and Breonna Taylor were still alive and the Black Lives Matter movement was still on the distant horizon.

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