Poet, born in Vryheid, E South Africa. He was one of the wave of ‘township poets’ whose angry verse in the 1970s broke a decade of black creative silence. He published Sounds of a Cowhide Drum in 1971. These poems, in forceful everyday language, conveyed the harshness and emotions of ghetto life to a stunned white readership. Later works include Fireflames (1980).
Mtshali worked as a messenger in Soweto before he became a poet, and his first book, Sounds of a Cowhide Drum (1971), explores both the banality and extremity of apartheid through the eyes of working men of South Africa, even while it recalls the energy of those Mtshali frequently calls simply "ancestors." Sounds of a Cowhide Drum was one of the first books of poems by a black South African poet to be widely distributed, and provoked considerable debate among the white South African population, but it was extremely successful, making a considerable profit for its white publisher, Lionel Abrahams.
Mtshali's work was popular among white liberals in South Africa, which may have made him less of an icon for other black poets. In a 1978 interview, the poet Keorapetse Kgositsile compares Mtshali's case to the Harlem Renaissance in the United States, a period when the importance of white patronage for black work made the emerging black literature more politically complex.
After his success as a poet, Mtshali became an educator.
Mtshali lives currently in The Bronx, New York City, United States, where he continues to teach and write poetry.
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