Mongane Wally Serote

Mongane Wally Serote is a South African poet and writer. He was born in Sophiatown, Johannesburg and went to school in Alexandra, Lesotho and Soweto. He first became involved in Black Consciousness when he was finishing high school in Soweto. His presence in that town linked him to a group known as the "township" or "Soweto" poets, and his poems often expressed themes of political activism, the development of black identity, and violent images of revolt and resistance. He was arrested by the apartheid government under the Terrorism Act in June 1969 and spent nine months in solitary... confinement, before being released without charge. He went to study in New York, obtaining a Fine Arts degree at the Columbia University, before going to work in Gaborone, Botswana and later London for the African National Congress in their Arts and Culture Department. After publishing in various journals, he published his first anthology in 1972, Yakhal'Inkomo. In 1973 he won the Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize. He was a Fulbright Scholar and received a fine arts degree from Columbia University in 1979.
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