Prof Eugene Skeef to feature at Poetry Africa festival

The Poetry Africa festival will be a coming home celebration for Professor Eugene Skeef.

The South African poet, percussionist, composer, educationalist and animateur, left South Africa and settled in London in the 1980s. He will be the featured poet at this year’s Poetry Africa festival.

The event will be held from Thursday October 5 to Tuesday October 17 in Johannesburg, Durban and Bloemfontein. Professor Skeef is an internationally celebrated poet known for his outstanding work as an artist and his active role in conflict resolution.

Professor Skeef spoke to YOUR Ethekwini from his home in Clapham Common, London this week.

He shared his love for South Africa and his excitement about returning home soon.

He has accepted the role of Professor of Practice at CERT (Centre for Education and Rights Transformation) at the University of Johannesburg (UJ).

He grew up in eNdunduma, Clermont, Durban, and left South Africa when he just turned 30 years old.

“I left South Africa due to the fact that my life was threatened by the Special Branch agents of the apartheid regime, because of my political activism alongside Steve Biko and other colleagues within the Black Consciousness Movement,” he said.

“I have been living in London for 43 years. I’m pleased and deeply honoured to be invited to Poetry Africa. This is a major landmark in my life as a poet; I have been writing poetry on an almost daily basis since I was five years old. Indeed, poetry has been the sustenance of my life as a creative being, always seeking to find harmony in a world acutely troubled by prejudices and human intolerance of one kind or another, often leading to violence. The alleviation of human brutality - both physical and spiritual - and attainment of peace and love are at the core of my poetry.”

Professor Skeef said his poetry tends towards being “lyrical and overflowing with powerful allegorical imagery”. His work possesses elements of music, movement and visual transpositions. It is strongly nature-based, he said. His inspiration comes from every imaginable area of life. A lot of his poems come to him from dreams, he said.

“There are times when I must get up in the middle of the night to quickly type a poetic inspiration on my phone or note pad by my bedside. My mother brings me poems through dreams. I also write poetic ideas inspired by a conversation I might overhear on public transport, or the shape of a cloud or tree, footprints in the park during my meditative power walks,” he added.

“The most powerful inspiration for my creative workshops comes from the power of nature as a repository of all human wisdom and our search for balance, alignment and harmony of being.”

His inspiration comes from his mother and father. They have passed but he believes they live through him. They are ever present in his every breath, he said. He added that his mother inspires his attainment of harmony and predisposition for healing. His father inspires his fortitude and attraction to, and pursuit of, beauty.

“He told me as a child that for life to be worth living, it must be an act of beauty,” said Professor Skeef.

Nigerian-born British poet Sir Ben Okri is his favourite poet. He said they share a common devotion to the power of African images of transcendence that infuse their consciousness - like the ancestral spirits that they breathe with the air, the sun that warms their hearts with the light of the infinite.

He will be making a trip back home in a few days. Professor Skeef said he has always desired to come home. Nowhere else in his vast travels has he encountered the undiluted human warmth of a stranger’s smile, the intensely exciting fragrance of mangoes growing freely on the verges of squalor, and the spontaneity of dance moves that invite him to unlock the groove in the time-tempered minds of some in the circles of imperial learning. He added that he could never find a family as massive and profusely loving as the one he was born into.

In his younger days, Professor Skeef was an activist and worked alongside anti-apartheid leader, Steve Biko.

“Along with my parents, Steve Biko was the most inspiring person I ever met. He was a man of prodigious gifts of human affirmation. He was a fire that could light up any gathering. He taught me that the struggle for freedom is a selfish act. What he meant by this was that we engage in the struggle for freedom not only to liberate our people, but to free as well. Of course, Biko was being philosophical in saying this; because he was in fact a selfless man who gave his life for his people’s freedom. He was fearless. He had an incredible sense of humour. He inspired all those who were fortunate to be in his presence. He charmed us with his charisma and expansive knowledge and wisdom as a natural leader. Above all, he was a man of peace and love as enshrined in the humanising African philosophy of Ubuntu. This is evident from his widely quoted statement: ‘In time we shall be in a position to bestow upon South Africa the greatest gift possible - a more human face,’” said Professor Skeef.

Professor Skeef met Mr Biko when he was a student. He was inspired by Mr Biko’s captivating speeches. Professor Skeef became his driver in the South African Student’s Organisation (SASO) and the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). He also contributed as a poet and artist, drawing the original clenched fist symbol of the movement.

“I admired everything about him. He was a well-rounded person who exuded immense intellectual gifts without losing his sense of humanity and the dignity of African humility - what we call ukuzithoba in the Zulu language. He taught me the unwavering belief in my innate ability to determine my own life through a rigorous sense of self-reliance,” said Professor Skeef.

“He loved my poetry, my general creativity as a person, and the immense respect I showed him. He also valued my incompatible driving skills, which were instrumental in assuring his safety, especially when we were chased by agents of the Special Branch, who always bayed for his blood.”

Professor Skeef said he got into activism because his parents raised him to be a conscious person. At an early age he could not accept the prejudices of racist apartheid policies. By the time he was a teenager at secondary school, he said he was writing plays and performing them for the education and mobilisation of fellow students and members of the community.

Meeting Steve Biko and others such as Strini Moodley, Sam Moodley, Ben Langa, Saths Cooper, Mafika Gwala, Mamphela Ramphele and Bokwe Mafuna took his activism to a much higher level.

He said he returned home around the time Nelson Mandela was about to become president. He brought community cultural education projects, the most famous one being the NGOMA Project. He also toured with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which was the first time a European classical orchestra came to South Africa since the advent of apartheid.

“South Africa today - from the government point, is in shambles. A profoundly saddening situation for someone like me, who was involved as an activist to end apartheid and usher in a free South Africa,” said Professor Skeef. “If Steve Biko were alive, he would continue to give his life for true freedom; because South Africa is in many ways further from being free than when he was alive. Black Consciousness is desperately needed now. I remember Biko saying: ‘Black Consciousness is a means towards an end, and not an end in itself”. The transition from apartheid to so-called democracy has not erased the need for Biko’s ethos.”

Professor Skeef said if he were to change anything about the current South Africa, he would make the time-tested wisdom of African holism the central ethos of governance and human and community development. The reverence for our ancestors and the power of nature to heal and teach about harmony and unconditional love would be the nucleus of all levels of education. Professor Skeef said he would opt for a more lateral and circular paradigm of accountable leadership, as opposed to the current top-down one, which is alien, fundamentally flawed Eurocentric one transplanted by colonial imposition. He would propose a culture based on ancestral African deep listening.

“South African may feel disillusioned but do not let those elected to power dupe you, as if by sleight of hand in a card trick, into thinking you are free. Knowledge leads to freedom. Know yourself! This is the first step towards real freedom. We cannot free what (or who) we do not know,” said Professor Skeef.

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