Sandile Dikeni

About Sandile Dikeni

The politically motivated poet Sandile Dikeni was born in Victoria West (North Cape Province, South Africa) in 1966 and studied at the University of the Western Cape, which had been founded in 1960 primarily for coloreds. There he was active in the student parliament, and in the mid-1980s he was drawn into the vortex of violent conflict. During his detention in 1986, he discovered the power of poetry as a means to achieve political ends. Readings in prison and at political and cultural events after his release, such as a public performance in London in 1990, made Dikeni an important poet of freedom. His colored audience, inspired by the sense a new era was coming, greedily consumed his texts, especially after they began to be published in newspapers and then in the much admired anthology "Guava Juice" (Cape Town, 1992). After democracy was introduced in South Africa in 1995, Dikeni’s poetic idiom became more subtle. Now working primarily as a journalist and press spokesman, he increasingly turned to broader human themes, expressing them in a distinctive style. Many of his more recent texts published in "Telegraph to the Sky" (Pietermaritzburg, 2000) are inspired by the musicality of jazz. When he recites his poems in public, he always does it: from memory, spontaneously, and with variations on the printed texts.