The South African literary landscape from the 19th century to the present day has been fundamentally shaped by the social and political evolution of the country, particularly the trajectory from a colonial trading station to an apartheid state and finally toward a democracy.
Primary forces of population growth and economic change, which have propelled urban development, have also impacted on the themes, forms and styles of literature and poetry.
Herbert Isaac Ernest Dhlomo's iconic works preached a "return to the Talita source" or the wisdom of finding traditional ways of dealing with modern problems.
[3] Alan Paton's world-renowned and highly poetic novel Cry, The Beloved Country, came into publication, just four months after the separatist National Party came to power in South Africa.
Some of the best known poets of this violently oppressive and politically turbulent period of South African history from 1948 to 1990 include Dennis Brutus, Ingrid Jonker, Mazisi Kunene, Nicolaas Petrus van Wyk Louw, William Ewart Gladstone (W. E. G.) Louw, James Matthews, Mzwakhe Mbuli, Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali, Sydney Vernon Petersen and Diederik Johannes Opperman.
[5] Among Black female authors of the time, the late Bessie Head and Sindiwe Magona (who went into exile in Botswana and USA respectively) are better known as novelists but did write poetry too.
Many of these poets, particularly the anti-apartheid writers, suffered personally in forms ranging from exile, house arrest, detention and torture to the banning of their literature or their right to public speaking.
This was because they questioned and opposed apartheid law, as well as raised national and international awareness of the injustices committed in the country during a long period of media censorship, state propaganda, cultural boycott, mass detentions, and the killing of freedom struggle activists as well as ordinary black citizens.
The Afrikaans literary scene in the 1960s also flourished with the emergence of Jan Rabie, Etienne Leroux, Andre Brink and the highly acclaimed exiled author and poet Breyten Breytenbach.
A new generation of white South African poets writing in English in the 1960s include greats such as Douglas Livingstone, Sidney Clouts, Ruth Miller, Lionel Abrahams and Stephen Gray.
[8] With the rise of the Black Consciousness (BC) movement, led by martyred Bantu Steve Biko, and the 1976 Soweto uprising, political and protest poetry became a vehicles used for their immediacy of impact.
The most notable writers from this period are Keorapetse William Kgositsile, Mongane Wally Serote, Sipho Sepamla, James Matthews, Oswald Joseph Mbuyiseni Mtshali, Christopher van Wyk, Mafika Gwala and Don Mattera.
With the demise of apartheid and the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, many observed that South African writers were confronted with the challenge of what was now most pertinent to write about, even though the after-effects of this history evidently still live on in the society.
Poets of this relatively stable transition period in South African history also include more irreverent voices such as Lesego Rampolokeng, Sandile Dikeni and Lefifi Tladi, founder of the Dashiki performance poetry movement in the late 1960s.
Poets such as Lesego Rampolokeng, Lebogang Mashile, Kgafela oa Magogodi, Blaq Pearl, Jessica Mbangeni and Mak Manaka are household names in the genre.
The book is characterized by the preoccupations of other Soweto poets such as Mongane Serote, Sipho Sepamla, and Mafika Gwala and employs the language of defiance and assertion in poetry that reveals at all times the Black Consciousness of the era.
Patrick Cullinan (born 1932) has published 50,000 volumes of poetry, an anthology on the work of Lionel Abrahams, a biography of Robert Jacob Gordon, and a novel, Matrix.