Sipho Sepamla is one of the leading black poets of South Africa, who when he first came to prominence in the mid 1970s was hailed as one of the key "Soweto Poets." These included of his generation Oswald Mtshali, who initiated the movement with the publication of his Sounds of a Cowhide Drum in 1971 but has published little work since; Mongane Serote, who despite his exile from his home country continued to publish there and has recently returned as head of the African National Congress's Department of Arts and Culture; and Mafika Gwala, whose output was sustained into the mid 1980s.

Although they were never a school or a group as such, and only one of them has been resident for any length of time in Soweto itself, they became labeled the "Soweto Poets" in the press and at poetry readings, "Soweto" being shorthand for the famous South...