Kitso Seti

Hailing from Khayelitsha, a township in Cape Town, Kitso Seti is currently pursuing his Master’s degree in Politics at the University of Cape Town. His research is focused on how Black (Consciousness) theatre can be used to conscientize people and make sense of Black positionality in the world.

Outside of academia, he moonlights as an artist, from a rapper to a theatre maker. He began doing Hip Hop, Spaza, in 2007, when he was introduced into writing by a classmate. He released his very first project titled eKhayelitsha in 2018, later followed by Lot’s Wife: The Curse of Hoza & Ngxobongwana (2020). Both tapes are Black Conscious; addressing the love-and-hate relationship we have with the township as a whole and investigating on how we arrived to now, from the times of colonization, investigating all that entails Blackness and campaigning for Black unity. Recently, he released his live room session, From the Books of Jeremiah: A Young Black Laments (2020, on YouTube), and participated with a live band to produce the live concert, PHUMAN’EBHABHILONI (2021).

From 2014 he involved himself with theatre, beginning with a UCT competition called Res4Res Festival which takes place per year. He won an Innovative Play Award with his team in 2015. Currently, he is growing his 2-hander play titled Imbawula, which he took a co-part in its curation. The show has been shown at Baxter theatre in July and December 2019. He is finalizing the writing process of his new play, Four Fathers: Bananas for the Baboons under the Masambe Writing Residency at the Baxter Theatre, a project by Lara Foot, the CEO of the Baxter. Kitso is part of the cast of Dipalo which won the Bronze medal in the Standing Ovation awards of the 2021 National Arts Festival. He hopes to grow as a theatre-maker and a an art critic. His paper, The Land of Many Mothers (2020), a review of Nwabisa Plaatjie’s play When We Awake, (2020) can be found on iLiso Magazine. He runs a journal titled .ngaphakathi. where he writes theatre reviews.

For the next fifteen to twenty years, he plans to continue with his not so recent infusion of Spoken Word, Rap and Jazz. In his band - a solo artist (vocals) accompanied by Jazz instrumentalists - he plays with the likes of Thembelihle Dunjana, Tefo Mahola, Jed Peterson and Clayton Pretorious. They have performed in multiple venues of Cape Town and recently did a virtual concert titled 'PHUMAN'EBHABHILONI Live at Concept Records".