The third voice: the born free generation and the afterlife of protest in south african poetry

Abstract

This paper is the sequel to an earlier comparative study which established an essential unity between apartheid and post apartheid poetry in South Africa and argued that the racial logic of the old order had not ended but had mutated into a class logic administered by a black political elite (Oluwatoyin, 2026). The present study carries that argument into the generation born at or after the political transition, the cohort popularly described as born free, and asks what becomes of protest when t