Bird-Monk Seding - Tapa blanda

Rampolokeng’s third novel is a stark portrait of a Groot Marico township two decades into South Africa’s democracy. Innovative and violently sensory, one judge noted that he “brandishes his scatting be-bop voice like a fearsome weapon” as he renders the resilience of people marked by apartheid. - Sunday Times Barry Ronge Prize Citation

Lesego Rampolokeng’s latest novel, Bird-Monk Seding, if one can call it a novel, is a rampaging, fast-talking, spontaneous and often opaque window into a dark, dangerous world; a world filled with injustice, suffering and copious amounts of bodily fluids. To try to describe this book in traditional terms is almost futile, given that Rampolokeng cares little for established literary forms. - Russell Grant, Mail & Guardian, South Africa

Lesego Rampolokeng's third novel Bird-Monk Seding was awarded the 2017 University of Johannesburg Prize for South African Writing in English. It was also shortlisted for the prestigious Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize in 2018.

This place is called SEDING, short for Leseding, place of light. Quite ironic given the darkness throbbing at its core and spilling out bubbling in the blackest rage when least expected. Surrounded by farmland in all directions, it is a settlement of about 700 households crammed in tiny structures. Average 7 souls per hovel. It used to be made up of ramshackle corrugated iron shacks that seemed tossed down regardless of aesthetics. Then the new administration’s housing programme kicked in.

Man in the bush in quest of Bosman’s ghost. Finding AWB rabidity. Tranquility so deep it kills. Hate hounds. Beneath the surface quiet, such racist rotten-heartedness. & children dying. Starvation abounds. Raw sewage in the water supply. Crap in the taps. Skin matters. Ancient white beards sexing black teens for tins, food exchange. The soul’s impoverishment. The starved get their humanity halved. And weekends of sex-tourism. Alcoholic stares everywhere. Deep fear too.

Lesego Rampolokeng’s third novel Bird-Monk Seding is a stark picture of life in a rural township two decades into South Africa’s democracy. Listening and observing in the streets and taverns, Bavino Sekete, often feeling desperate himself, is thrown back to his own violent childhood in Soweto. To get through, he turns to his pantheon of jazz innovators and radical writers.