Ahead of his inaugural lecture, award-winning poet and renowned author, Professor Kobus Moolman, reflected back on his life, divulging that his love and appreciation of the written word started as a teenager at high school. Inaugural lectures are a significant milestone in UWC academic life, held to celebrate the formal appointment of an academic to full professorship.

“I read very widely as a student, and it has followed me throughout my life. I spent money on books rather than clothes, or anything else,” he said, recounting his younger self.

Prof Moolman, 61, lived most of his life in Pietermaritzburg -  the first from his working-class family to have attended university.

“Both my parents left school when they were very young. My father might have left in Standard 5 or Standard 3. That’s what happened, in those days.” 

Prof Kobus Moolman. Image: Shelley Christians/UWC

A vocal advocate for the rights of the disabled, he was born with spina bifida, which, he said, has had a deep impact on his writing.

“The way in which I've begun to understand the body and the relationship between the body and language, and different bodies using language differently, and how language can be used to show the body in its differentness.” 

He has been teaching at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) since 2016. At his inaugural lecture, on August 6, he will delve into the way he has taught the writing of poetry.

“I teach students how to write a poem, and that seems like a very weird thing. (A) small thing, at the time, maybe a simple thing, maybe an impractical thing, maybe an unrelated-to-the-world type thing. But I do fundamentally believe that it's in fact all of the opposite. It is the very thing that makes…the human being human. It's the very thing that restores a sense of self,” said Prof Moolman.

He studied at the University of Natal, since renamed to the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where he first got his BA, majoring in English and Drama in 1984. The following year, he did his Honours in Drama Studies and in 1986 did his second Honours degree, this time in English, specialising in African Literature. 

Before returning to university to complete his Master’s degree in 2004, he spent stints working as an English teacher and a sub-editor at the Natal Witness newspaper, based in Pietermaritzburg.

He attained his PhD in 2011, with a special focus on creative writing. His dissertation was titled, “Autobiography of Bone: An Original Cycle of Dramatic Poems Researching the Problematics of a Reconceptualisation of the Formal Boundaries between the Genres of Poetry and Drama”.

Prof Moolman said writing poetry is not simply about “digging deep” in the hopes that “it will come out”.

“There's something about language that I'm very interested in, in the way in which language is used, particularly in poetry, or in an expressive format. And I'm interested in ways in which that language can be activated and can be taught. You can teach somebody, you can show them what this language can do, what to do with language, how to do it. Not in a straightforward way; it's actually very circuitous, it goes round and round and round. It keeps coming back to itself, kind of asking questions. So questioning is an important element.”