Earl Sweatshirt’s Father, Poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, Dead at 79

Keorapetse Kgositsile, South African poet laureate and the father of Earl Sweatshirt, has died, SABC News reports. He was 79 years old. Kgositsile’s writing career began at Johannesburg’s anti-apartheid newspaper New Age. He was also an active member of the African National Congress liberation movement, and in the early 1960s, was urged by party leadership to leave the country in exile. Kgositsile moved to the United States where he earned an MFA in poetry at Columbia University. In 1969, he published his first poetry collection, Spirits Unchained. He was named South Africa’s poet laureate in 2006.

Kgositsile was heavily influenced by jazz. His poem “Pro/Creation (for Pharoah Sanders)” appeared in the liner notes for Sanders’ 1971 record Thembi. He also referenced John Coltrane in his poem “The Gods Wrote”: “Don’t you know this is a love supreme!/John Coltrane, John Coltrane, tell the ancestors/We listened, we heard your message.”

Kgositsile was a complicated figure in Earl’s music. Earl mentioned his father in songs like “Blade,” “ Burgundy,” “Grown Ups,” “Off Top,” and “Chum.” In 2011, Kgositsile told The New Yorker that he had not listened to his son’s music. “When he feels that he’s got something to share with me, he’ll do that,” he said. “And until then I will not impose myself on him just because the world talks of him.” The day after his father’s death, Earl tweeted, “thank yall for your thoughts and love.” Find his tweet below.