The Theme: 'Apartheid' is Never far away From South African Poetry

African writers have notoriously always explored social issues which are risqué; from Dennis Brutus's writing that was penned while behind bars in Rhodes Island, to Professor Syl Cheney-Coker's novel which forced him into exile in 1996 when the Sierra Leonean government took offense.

African Poetry is an explosive art. If poetry is ‘inquiry' then poetry opens your eyes.

Dennis Brutus

South Africa

A troubadour, I traverse all my land

exploring all her wide-flung parts with zest

probing in motion sweeter far than rest

her secret thickets with amorous hand

and I have laughed, disdaining those whose banned inquiry and movement, delighting in the test of will when doomed by Saracened arrest,

choosing, like unarmed thumb, simply to stand

Likewise, poetry has always been used in South Africa, to reclaim the narrative, from the work of the late human rights activist: Dennis Brutus to the evocative pieces of some contemporary poets such as Yuwinn A. Kraukamp (pictured).

Yuwinn A. Kraukamp was placed third in the 2026 Bridgette James Poetry Competition, judged by Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto. Yuwinn A. Kraukamp is a bilingual writer from the coastal corner of Cape Agulhas, South-Africa. He’s a natural born creative, a former English— and Communications major at the university of the Western Cape, and a patron (saint) of everything that’s artistically unique and beautifully weird in this world. Yuwinn has worked as a freelance columnist for Network 24, and a freelance journalist for The Southern Post Newspaper since 2022. In 2024 he was the third-place winner of the Diana Ferrus poetry prize, and in 2026 he was the first-place winner of the Njabulo S. Ndebele-themed ‘Rediscovering the Ordinary’ poetry competition. Both his English and Afrikaans poetry has appeared on various platforms such as Litnet, PEN Afrikaans and Versindaba; and has been published within poetry anthologies such as Ons Kom Van Hier and The Avbob Poetry Project.

Raw/Rou

By Yuwinn A. Kraukamp

Something is missing from my language. A word torn from my throat. A phrase confiscated

from my history

a sound or a sacred name

scythed from my mother tongue

as I searched for this pre-colonial vernacular (taal)

for this unvoiced veritas between you and me,

I Googled the words you threw at me on the day you left. You said I speak too white. Not the real

raw Afrikaans our people were born with

You said my language is as soulless as my identity

my identity as pale as my complexion

So I traced your words back to their linguistic roots

back to the indigenous speech we spoke without sound

I reopened words like wounds we could’ve unsaid. I relived conversations we could have survived

       And in each one, we’re speaking two different languages

         Two voices, reciting two different poems

        one hungry mouth to swallow the corpse

   of every dead dialect we failed to keep alive.

I carried the words you carved into me on the day you left, into every room like scars on my skin

Like something raw

And did you know that in Afrikaans rawness (rou)

has two different meanings: blood-red

cut open, uncooked meat

But it also means grief. It means mourning. The sort of loss you suffer that’s so deep, so unending

                 it becomes a second language you instantly

                   know how to speak

                       when a mother loses a son, then the word raw

                                is instantly fixed to her name: roumoeder

        rawmother: blood-red, cut open

Her rawness comes to life in every vocabulary. Every memory voiced with salt—a primal language

we all learn to speak.

I still struggle to spell God’s true name without autocorrection. I’m still missing something, I know

I’m still not fluent in the English language

But I know all the white words: fuck

Fuckup. Freakshow. Failure

I feel every word changing shape inside my mouth

every time I say them out loud: reminiscence turns into regret. Faithfulness turns into fear

eyes turn into tongues, sight turns into voice

our language turns into an emergency line

with no answer, no service

yet still I speak; honestly and painfully, in your tongue and mine. As if you would ever speak back.

---

‘Raw/Rou’ sent in by Yuwinn A. Kraukamp, is a visually stunning piece that uses language to debate about one’s identity. I gravitated like an archaeologist discovering an artifact, towards the phrases in Afrikaans because it is a language I was unfamiliar with — but which after watching YouTube videos, I have now come to love.

    The section about a grieving rawmother (a coinage) left me overwhelmed. This poet has such good linguistic flair. There are so many memorable lines, I do not know which I love the most; I still struggle to spell God’s true name without autocorrection perhaps?

     Central to’ Raw/Rou’ is the question of the hierarchy of language. Due to economic, cultural, and historic factors, are languages like English seen as superior to African languages such as Afrikaans, Swahili, Yoruba, Igbo et cetera?

On a side note, according to Wikipedia as many as four South African languages have been declared extinct. Where there are no native speakers, a dialect dies.

   What is a pre-colonial vernacular? I see this as a form of resistance to European domination. I like how Kraukamp switches between English and Afrikaans. I’m again reminded of the 2024 National Poetry Competition winner, Fiona Larkin’s poem: ‘Absence has a Grammar.’

The duality of meaning of some words in ‘Raw/Rou’ underscores the poet’s dual identity. Can they be both pale and African too?

A reader might burst out laughing at Kraukamp’s claim that they only know swear words in English. But I know all the white words: fuck /Fuckup. Freakshow. Failure. The use of fuck might be an allusion to British English. I read online that Brits are considered foul-mouthed and some of the world’s most prolific swearers. I found it consoling however reading that Americans use profanities too. On a more serious note, however in ‘Raw/Rou’ is English/language being used by an unnamed argumentative character to degrade the poet?

Those lines almost tripped me over due to the alliteration of the voiceless labiodental fricative /f/. Language play in this collection, also involves playing with phonemes not just morphemes, prefixes or suffixes.

The use of varying alignment in ‘Raw/Rou’ works even though we read from left to right in English. We get the impression a conversation is going on between speakers or at different periods of time because some stanzas are on the right hand of the page, while some are on the left. The mixture of long, short and enjambed lines to build tension and slow down the pace in the poem, may also count as features of ‘language play.’

And in each one, we’re speaking two different languages

         Two voices, reciting two different poems