Since the 1970s Sipho Sepamla has been considered one of the most important black South African poets. He came of age during the late 1940s, a period of marked social and political upheaval in South Africa. Although the process had been underway for more than a half century, after the end of World War II the flood of black migrants into the cities from the impoverished rural areas of the country burgeoned. Many of these people--men, women, and children--sought to stay permanently in the cities, despite the restrictions of segregationist laws; and this class of urbanized and proletarianized black people became a significant factor in the political struggles of the time. The demand for equal rights and an end to segregation by black South Africans and their political parties became ever more insistent: indeed, the 1940s and 1950s were a time of political militancy, beginning with the black...