Koleka Putuma is one of the most fearless and compelling voices in contemporary African poetry. Born in 1993 in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, she is part of a generation of writers who do not merely create art for art's sake but use it as a sharp instrument for truth-telling. Her poetry interrogates race, gender, sexuality, politics, and religion with an unflinching gaze, often unsettling those who would rather look away.
Her debut collection, Collective Amnesia (2017), was a literary earthquake. It broke records in South Africa, won awards, and resonated far beyond the continent. With raw honesty and lyricism, she spoke about Black womanhood, queerness, memory, and the silences imposed by history and society. She did not shy away from uncomfortable truths, using performance and page to dismantle taboos.
Putuma's work is not just to be read; it is to be experienced. In her performances, her words are fire and water, sometimes burning, sometimes cleansing, always moving. She invites us to confront the violences that are normalised in everyday life and to imagine new possibilities of freedom.
One of her most circulated poems, Water, challenges us to reconsider something as ordinary as the sea, revealing it as a site of history, trauma, and resistance.
From Water
Our mothers were not
taught how to swim.
We were raised near oceans,
but never taught how to swim.
You see, water has always
been the thing
that carries our people away.
It is difficult to love the ocean
when it has swallowed your people.
Koleka Putuma's poetry is a reminder that the poet's role is not to comfort the comfortable, but to provoke, challenge, and awaken. She is not only writing for this moment, she is writing for the future, so that memory does not drown
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