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Angifi Dladla is a Poet of No Sure Place. His poetry speaks for the marginalized and explores the otherwise unmentioned dynamics of South Africa's political and social landscape. In this article I explore how this label is demonstrated within his two collections of poetry, The Girl Who Then Feared to Sleep and Lament for Kofifi Machu. More specifically, my argument engages with the evolving meanings of freedom evoked by Dladla, first in his apartheid-era poetry and, second, in that of today's post-apartheid situation. I demonstrate how the black-on-black violence of the 1980s townships caused a sense of confinement that forced Dladla within himself. Only then was he able to understand freedom and chart a way forward. Following this, the article turns toward those poems that depict contemporary South Africa. My analysis suggests that when freedom, not oppression, is the official political environment of the day, the reality for many is only continued violence and despair. To chart a way out of this bleak malaise, Dladla exhorts others to write in the style of his own poetry.

South African poems on social issues are frequently driven by slogans, hashtags and ideological statements, using physical images as illustrations of concepts rather than trusting their imagistic power to penetrate even deeper to the core of actuality. \"The building, the weapon, the way\" (p.79), is in my view one of the crucial poems of South African literature; on the surface, a straightforward poem of social criticism: the building you occupy, belonged to the enemy that's where he wrote tragedies and farces for our people. his thought forms have formed you into his twin. the weapon you inherited, carries his impressions like a dog used to sodomy, always it will drive you to inhuman action the way you are, is the way he was growing blindly without shame; ignoring the rumbling under his feet This poem alerts those who would chronicle the contemporary to the reality that artistic activism is not rote repetition of issues or the dry realism of the obvious. In a time where so many poets meet social issues with wordiness and cliché, Dladla strips things to their devastating essence, such as in \"so turned a taxi\" (p.32): so turned a taxi into a lightning bird warming up but whirled in volume flames for failing to fly. we would later encounter an unidentified object; fused iron and bones. In \"peace initiatives (midnight shift)\" (p.45) he startlingly transforms an everyday (or rather every night) disco scene into a phantasmagoric nightmare scene, in which: swift. nightmare things pounce here and melt there as whirling rays and crystals. hi-tech hell of peace...