(1932) spent most of his life in Soweto, the enormous township southwest of Johannesburg, where approximately a million people live in terrible conditions. Together with Oswald Mtshali and Wally Mongane Serote, Sipho Sepamla is included among what has been called the poets of the big cities. These are not Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, but rather their black satellites Soweto, Langa and Kwa Mashu.

For a long time, the new city poetry was self-assertive, wrathful and disconcerting. What has distinguished Sepamla from the other poets, however, is his reluctance as concerns political rhetoric. He has used the black girl as a metaphor of Africa and has provided us again and again with surprising images to sketch the South African situation. The satirical poem To Whom It May Concern, which has been called `a form of self-preservation', made quite an impact in its time. To the tragic events in Soweto in 1976, Sepamla reacted with the collection The Soweto I Love (1977) in which he compares the township with a dough in a state of ferment. The collection was banned during the days of apartheid.

Sipho Sepamla has also written novels, including The Root is One (1979) and A Ride in the Whirlwind (1981). Both have the daily circumstances in which the author and other black inhabitants had to live as its subject matter. The second novel, about the uprising in Soweto, was banned at first but released again later because the book could give white people a better impression of how the black population had to live.

Things have changed since then, but the townships still exist as does poverty and unemployment and discrimination. Not all aspects of apartheid have disappeared.