Sir Andrew Motion is an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009. During the period of his laureateship, Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work. In 2012, he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, taking over from Bill Bryson.
Gazankulu was a bantustan in South Africa, intended by the apartheid government to be a semi-independent homeland for the Tsonga people. It was located in both the Northern Transvaal, now Limpopo province and Eastern Transvaal, now Mpumalanga province.
Robert Berold is a South African poet, editor and author
Giyani is a town situated in the north-eastern part of Limpopo Province, South Africa. It is the administrative capital of the Mopani District Municipality and a former capital of the defunct Gazankulu Bantustan. The town of Giyani has seven sections: Section A, Section D1, Section D2, Section E, Section F, Kremetart, and Giyani CBD. Risinga View and Church View are new residential areas in Giyani,but they fall under the local traditional leaders. The Giyani CBD is nicknamed Benstore, and this name is commonly used by residents of the region. Giyani is surrounded by a number of villages with rich Tsonga cultural activities, administered by the Greater Giyani Local Municipality.
Liesl Jobson is a South African poet and musician.
Nii Ayikwei Parkes, born in the United Kingdom to parents from Ghana, where he was raised, is a performance poet, writer, publisher and sociocultural commentator. He is one of 39 writers aged under 40 from sub-Saharan Africa who in April 2014 were named as part of the Hay Festival's prestigious Africa39 project. He writes for children under the name K.P. Kojo.
The Chopi are an ethnic group of Mozambique. They have lived primarily in the Zavala region of southern Mozambique, in the Inhambane Province. They traditionally lived a life of subsistence agriculture, traditionally living a rural existence, although many were displaced or killed in the civil war that followed Mozambique's liberation from Portuguese colonial rule in 1975. In addition, drought forced many away from their homeland and into the nation's cities.
Mbongeni Khumalo is a South African performance poet, poet and writer. He was born in Soweto. His poems and short stories have appeared in New Coin, Global Fire, Tribute, Timbila and Botsotso. In 1999 he won a merit award from the English Academy of South Africa.
Makhosazana Xaba is a South African poet and short-story writer. She trained as a nurse and has worked a women's health specialist in NGOs, as well as writing on gender and health. She is Associate Professor of Practice in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg.
Nigel McLoughlin is a poet, editor and teacher.
Waterval is a residential township in front of Elim Hospital, it is situated in the Hlanganani district of the former Tsonga homeland of Gazankulu, alongside the R578 road to Giyani in the Limpopo province of South Africa. Waterval includes Njhakanjhaka, Lemana, Elim Hospital, Elim Mall, Hubyeni Shopping centre, Magangeni but excludes Shirley village, which is a separate and stand alone farm, sharing a legal boundary with Waterval and Mbhokota village to the east.
Hlanganani, also known as Spelonken, is an amalgamation of various large villages which are situated in the north western portion of the former Tsonga homeland of Gazankulu, South Africa. Hlanganani is situated alongside the R578 road to Giyani and Elim.
The International Institute of Modern Letters is a centre of creative writing based within Victoria University of Wellington. Founded in 2001, the IIML offers undergraduate and postgraduate courses and has taught many leading New Zealand writers. It publishes the annual Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems anthology and an online journal, and offers several writing residencies. Until 2013 the IIML was led by the poet Bill Manhire, who had headed Victoria's creative writing programme since 1975; since his retirement, Damien Wilkins has taken over as the IIML's director.
Phillippa Yaa de Villiers is a South African writer and performance artist who performs her work nationally and internationally. She is noted for her poetry, which has been published in collections and in many magazines and anthologies, as well as for her autobiographical one-woman show, Original Skin, which centres on her confusion about her identity at a young age, as the biracial daughter of an Australian mother and a Ghanaian father who was adopted and raised by a white family in apartheid South Africa. She has written: "I became Phillippa Yaa when I found my biological father, who told me that if he had been there when I was born, the first name I'd have been given would be a day name like all Ghanaian babies, and all Thursday girls are Yaa, Yawo, or Yaya. So by changing my name I intended to inscribe a feeling of belonging and also one of pride on my African side. After growing up black in white South Africa, internalising so many negative 'truths' of what black people are like, I needed to reclaim my humanity and myself from the toxic dance of objectification." She has also said: "Because I wasn't told that I was adopted until I was twenty, I lacked a vocabulary to describe who I am and where I come from, so performing and writing became ways to make myself up." As Tishani Doshi observes in the New Indian Express: "Much of her work is concerned with race, sexuality, class and gender within the South African context."
Valdezia is a sprawling rural settlement situated at the foothills of the Soutpansberg mountain range in Louis Trichardt, Limpopo Province, South Africa. It was formerly known as Albasini before Swiss Missionaries renamed it Valdezia in 1875. The village itself was formally established in 1820 by Tsonga refugees who were fleeing despotic rule from Soshangane. It is roughly 10 km east of Elim Hospital in the Hlanganani district in the former Gazankulu homeland, South Africa. It was the site of a Swiss mission station, and it was named after the Swiss canton of Vaud. Valdezia's population, according to the official census of 2011, currently stands at between 7,600 and 8,000 people. It is considered the birthplace of the written Tsonga language in South Africa.
Henri-Alexandre Junod was a Swiss-born South African missionary, ethnographer, anthropologist, linguist and naturalist, stationed for much of his career at Shiluvane Mission Station outside Tzaneen in Limpopo Province. He received an early training in Protestant ministry at Neuchâtel, Basel and Berlin. He was one of the founding members of the Lemana Training College at Njhakanjhaka village near the Township of Waterval at Elim in 1906. Together with Reverend Creux of Valdezia Mission Station, he codified the language of the Tsonga people, which they called 'Thonga', but later renamed Xitsonga. Together with a group of Swiss Missionaries, such as Georges Liengme, he helped in the establishment of Elim Hospital in 1899.
Robert Perkins is an American artist, filmmaker and writer.
Maya Christinah Xichavo Wegerif, known professionally as Sho Madjozi, is a South African rapper, singer, songwriter, actress and poet. Madjozi incorporates the Tsonga culture through her music and public image. In 2019, Madjozi was named as one of Forbes Africa's 30 Under 30 for her contribution in the music and entertainment sector.
Charles Daniel Marivate was a black South African physician who was active in the Ga-Rankuwa and Valdezia areas. He is known as the first medical practitioner in Ga-Rankuwa, serving surrounding areas, at a time where there were no medical services by the then Apartheid government, and few black physicians. He was a member of the first class of black medical students at the Durban medical school, University of Natal. For his service to the medical profession, he received an honorary doctorate from the Medical University of South Africa, where he had been a part-time lecturer and chair of council as well.
