Many of the participants at this year's Poetry Africa festival saw things in black and white, writes Niren Tolsi It is one of those white-knuckled rides. Lesego Rampolokeng's words are careening and swirling off the Poetry Africa stage; his ideas bucking notions of white superiority, his tongue "digging into the orifices" of the present to locate understanding of South Africa's sold-out revolution that, 21 years after apartheid, administers "even more violence" upon blackness.Rampolokeng is pin-balling between the present and the past. Remembering the Soweto he grew up in, where the smell of teargas clung to the '70s and '80s and the state's bullets pierced buildings, people and memory. Of being chastised for reading by an aunt, "because books attracted rats" and furtively listening to Bob Dylan. Of the seminal influence of the black consciousness poet Mafika Gwala: "I am raised William Burroughs, I am raised Howl. I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness," he growls."But, in the middle of that dropped Mr Gwala, defining for me what blackness was. One most important line in that definition is this: black is energetic release from the shackles of kaffir, bantu, non-white."story_article_left1We swerve to a discussion among black poets and intellectuals in Maboneng, the hipster epicentre of Johannesburg's inner-city class genocide masquerading as "urban regeneration". Rampolokeng recounts one of the bright young things telling him: "Look, I think we are too locked into this 'black thing'. I don't know what this 'black thing' is. We can't move beyond that [as artists, poets and writers] ... We've got white friends. We went to school with these white friends. What's this blackness all about?'""I was like, 'It's OK, man ... You can be as unaware of your blackness as you are, but the world will conk you on the head and remind you," Rampolokeng says to applause from the audience at the 19th edition of Poetry Africa, held at the University of KwaZulu-Natal's Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre last month.Rampolokeng is launching his latest collection, a half century thing. It is an apt vehicle to interrogate South Africa's post-Mandela moment. One that has seen the rise of student protest that has rejected both mainstream politics in the form of political parties and their leaders, and mainstream pop culture, in the form of Simphiwe Dana and AKA at the University of the Witwatersrand, who have attempted to co-opt their movement.The "born-frees", dismissed as politically apathetic, have suggested a new politics that rejects the respectability of a failed reconciliation project. They have urgently demanded South Africans re-examine whiteness, privilege and what it means to be black, sentient and thoughtful - usually still impoverished and bearing the brunt of violence - in contemporary South Africa.block_quotes_start There is no Marikana, only media ... You cannot sleep with the devil and expect the sheets to be clean. block_quotes_endThis year's Poetry Africa programme consisted largely of South African poets, so these themes bled, fed and were read out - on stage, at the many outreach workshops and programmes the festival runs at local prisons and schools, and behind the scenes among the poets themselves.Insiders say the poetry festival's mother-body, the Centre for Creative Arts, appears to be suffering cutbacks linked to the corporatisation of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where it is housed. (The centre, a cultural fulcrum on the Durban scene, also organises the Time of the Writer Festival, the Jomba Dance Festival and the Durban International Film Festival.)story_article_right2As a consequence of the cutbacks, there were fewer foreign poets, like the floppy-haired Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan who ruminated on the condition of exile with mesmerising, painful acuteness.But the proliferation of South Africans sharpened the vital, uncomfortable conversations with which South Africa is currently grappling.Poetry was also presented in dynamic new ways that shifted past merely paper and performance. Aryan Kaganof's rumination on Marikana saw the lights turned off, the only light emanating from his phone which played a recitation of his poem. The audience squinted and focused on the moving lips on the screen, homing in on the words: "There is no Marikana, only media ... You cannot sleep with the devil and expect the sheets to be clean." It was powerful and focused.Serame Icebound Makhele's Freedom resurrected Andries Tatane who was killed by police during a protest over water in Ficksburg in 2011, and Mido Macia, who was dragged to his death while manacled to the back of a police van in Daveyton in 2013.Vonani Bila conveyed the rawness of the trauma and violence of black disaffection. Whiteness and the monopoly it has had until now on our memory and conversations about contemporary South Africa, on where economic and political power resides, and on who has a right to interrogate what exactly, was disturbed to its inner core...