LINDA NDLOVU

Here is a book that galvanises and disturbs in equal measure; a spectacular descent into mines as both spiritual landscape and unsettling (self)consciousness, set within that particular and perpetually burdened direction called “South Africa”. The mine is this book’s central and governing metaphor, a pulse of dark ore that punctuates a vigorous, lyrical voice as it travels across a multi-dimensional terrain of the economically and politically maimed.

Uhuru Portia Phalafala’s voice carries within it spiritual inclinations wrenched from a diabolical system, evoked by a fractured mine-world intrinsically experienced by broken men and women whose lives the earth has swallowed and not returned.

Gold and diamonds, extracted from that same wounded earth, serve as the subtext that deepens and haunts the book’s central metaphor. The poet writes, with a restraint that cuts all the more keenly for it:

‘Gold and diamond mining
is the white pot
at the beginning
of the rainbow
nation’ (p. 83)

The subtle narrative threading these lines is nothing short of rebellious, a combative reckoning with neo-colonialism and post-colonialism alike. It shatters the orthodox labels that have inherited the darkness of a pillaged land and the ongoing self-effacement of the poet’s people.

Here is language that refuses its own diminishment.

Part 1: Mine — A Litany of Loss (pp. 3–57)

In the opening movement, Uhuru speaks the knowledge of historical injustice as a compass by which the future might yet be navigated. Her poetic narrative illuminates how nostalgia and the comprehension of one’s past equip the reader to grasp the present’s struggles: colonialism and slavery are not merely history’s relics but living presences, felt today in the body’s economic and social inequalities. It is, truly, as though the manacles that shackled the ancestors still linger on the wrists of the living.

‘History’s tide swells within us in full moon,
during the constant endings and beginnings
of our bodies remaking themselves’ (p. 62)

To know and understand Black history is, in Uhuru’s vision, to reclaim a rightful heritage: the ancestors were innovators, builders of empires, creators of masterpieces. The atmosphere of these poems shifts, at moments, into the gothic and sardonic, a darkly lit room in which pride, identity, and self-worth are nonetheless kindled, burnished, and returned to the reader as gifts. This knowledge impels unity with oneself and with all those Africans dispersed across the globe who embody a shared history of injustice. From that solidarity rises the motto, uttered with the quiet force of a vow:

‘...birth ourselves,
use our mother’s names
to sing our resurrection,
weave our purpose with gifts’ (p. 45)

Some poems investigate how history infiltrates even the pathological, informing decisions, warning which systems and ideologies to refuse, naming neoliberalism as colonialism reborn in new garments. The poet’s voice, at such moments, is clarion and purposeful: what the ancestors suffered shall not be rendered void.

Lekarapa — Movement 1 (p. 3) and Moletelo — Movement 2 (p. 9)

The first poem opens upon death in its several layers, whilst the second poem shares with it a metaphysical disposition; both lamenting the dualism of an aged male figure and a Black matriarchy swallowed whole by the chaos of mine labour; that matrix threading its dark filament through every poetic voice registered within this monumental narrative.

The grandfather figure is haunted by the spectre of the mine-labour system, which threatens and vapourises whatever stability the family has built. The voice does not weep; it assassinates. The historical injustice of mining — the hollowing out of a family’s heart — is here wielded as a weapon, economised into burial, tracing the dust and decay produced by a sadistic neoliberalism at work on and in the body of this woeful direction: South Africa.

The poet’s voice carries the full authority of female maturity; her words are sharp as assegais:

‘A vicious modernity
disfigures black maternity
turns Black women’s womb
into factories producing blackness
wombs of profit and prophets’ (p. 9)

This female metamorphosis unfolds across the epic poem, laying bare how the sanctuary of womanhood is desecrated and dehumanised. The aesthetics of the book’s multiple poetic voices illuminate the manner in which one must grapple with the apparition of mines in the modern South Africa:

‘our state of minds are of mines
Black bodies in colonial state capture
reproducing brokenness and death
refracting rainbows on our psyches’ (p. 64)

To evacuate the mine, Uhuru’s voice insists, is to learn how to breathe again, and to remove the mine’s venom is akin to expelling from the lungs their accumulated dust, a political asphyxiation against which this revolutionary voice strains and fights.

Ancestral Suit — Movement 5 (p. 31)

This movement explores displacement, disillusionment, and a spiritual fragmentation that reaches its tentacles into every corner of our lives and families, a global poisoning quietly sanctioned, silently endured.

Black Rage in Swallow — Movement 4 (p. 23)

This movement echoes the late Hugh Masekela’s musical depictions and, in the same breath, reflects upon the era of Kippie Moeketsi and the Shebeen Queens, upon jazz compositions and the South African blues and its controversial, combustible political slogans.

It sounds a warning: our Black ancestors were violated by foreign investors, their lives treated as ore to be extracted.

It confesses, too, how the contemporary South African government has shamefully colluded in the burying and exhuming of its people’s lives, placing Black people upon the pyre of an apartheid hangover whilst denying them the bright future that is rightfully theirs. That heartfelt paradox becomes the book’s most piercing indictment – witty, exact, and irrefutable.

The pages of this book are epitomised when:

‘a ring of fire
bonds Black women
to dutiful fits of historical rage
unprocessed grief
archived in the muscle of Black men’ (p. 40)

The poet’s voice implores Black people not to settle for exploitation and subjection. There are pages in this book that read like prayer, the poet standing in apostrophe, arms extended:

‘Do not be afraid
you have found
favour and redemption’ (p. 44)

That prayer deepens as it moves through the book, reaching its most searching and interior moment in the proclamation ‘Open your inner eye’ (p. 48), beseeching Black bones to remain, vehemently, ‘Unburied’ (p. 46). The symbolic ending of this remarkable collection epitomises both derision and the profound ambivalence with which we accede to the dualism of our political and ancestral outcry, that ancient, unresolved argument between the world as it is and the world as it was promised to us.