Bilakhulu! is a book of seven poems varying in length from three pages to over 30 pages. They are narrative poems, politically outspoken yet personal, buoyant with vitality and humour. Though immersed in the poet’s rural village and the marginalised communities of South Africa’s cities, they embrace the wider world.
Vonani Bila has written: ‘I believe in poetry’s ability to cut across frontiers. It transmits its poison or honey to readers or potential readers in aeroplanes, airconditioned university lecture rooms, mansions, hotel en suites and to their children who roam around our colossal shopping malls. Poetry’s readers may also be found in barbershops, spaza shops, or village schools somewhere in Limpopo, or under trees, in hair and beauty salons, in taxis and bus stations, taverns, churches, stokvels, threadbare soccer fields, or jazz pubs.’
Vonani Bila grew up in Shirley Village, Limpopo, from where he used to walk 14 kilometres daily to Lemana High School in Elim. His expansive poetry continues the tradition of South African resistance poetry of the 1970s and 1980s, exposing with anger and humour the callousness of the post-apartheid government, and giving voice to the poor and marginalised and the victims of violence, both domestic and political. Bila is also a cultural activist, founder of the Timbila Poetry Project, which has published many books of poetry as well as the literary journal Timbila. He is the author of eight storybooks in English, Northern Sotho and Xitsonga for newly literate adult readers, and two children’s books, as well as being a co-compiler of a Xitsonga monolingual dictionary. He is currently a lecturer in English at the University of Limpopo.
“Incantatory, attentive, [Vonani Bila is] a poet of searing honesty who did not leave behind his critical eye with the end of apartheid but also measures the brutalities of the present. Yet, he is also a poet of patience and gentleness, and his meditation on the love story of a political activist is unforgettable . . . Bila [proves that] politics is alive in South African writing, but its domain is longer than the struggle.”
– Gabeba Baderoon
