You may have first met the poet Botlhale Boikanyo with the rest of the country as the impossibly self-possessed 11-year-old who became the first spoken-word artist to compete on South Africa’s Got Talent.
The standing ovations, cameras and international travel all came before adolescence and matric and before most teenagers ever board their first plane.
Chatting to the sparkly, considered 25-year-old I meet now, I am struck with the thought that the clichéd outcomes for child prodigy evolution would have them spending their lives trying to escape the shadow of their younger selves.
“I think I’ve just become the dreams the six-year-old and 11-year-old me already had,” she says.
We meet over lunch at a Joburg classic, the Red Chamber in Hyde Park Corner, where we happily sample all the wonders: three-flavoured chicken with steamed rice, prawn dumplings, a restorative seafood tom yum soup and my go-to cucumber salad.
She arrives fresh from submitting her work for a master’s degree at Wits University, with a new pan-African television series in production, a book under way and another international appointment about to be announced.
“I think stories were always embedded in who I was,” she says. “Even before I understood what storytelling meant, I was always making things up in my head, imagining different worlds, different versions of myself. Storytelling allowed me to dream in a way that felt limitless. It gave me permission to be curious, to explore, to become anyone I wanted to be, even if just for a moment.”
Dreaming has become a through-line in her life.
Growing up in a township outside Mahikeng, in her grandmother’s bustling home filled with cousins, aunts and uncles, she discovered poetry almost by accident. A teacher asked grade 7 pupils to perform a poem about HIV and Aids for a school concert. She was the only child who arrived on Monday having memorised it.
“I just wanted to be on stage,” she says with a laugh. “At that age, it wasn’t even about the poetry itself. I loved the feeling of being seen, of having people listen to me, of being the centre of attention. There was something about that moment of connection with an audience that felt really powerful, even though I didn’t fully understand it yet.”
The applause proved addictive, but storytelling endured. Soon she was performing wherever her parents could find an audience: churches, birthday parties, funerals and community events. Writing became her way of navigating the world.
“I wanted a bigger life,” she says. “Not in a material sense, but in the sense of possibility. I wanted to see more, to experience more, to understand more about the world beyond what I knew. Writing and performing felt like the doorway into that bigger life.”
That bigger life arrived with South Africa’s Got Talent. She queued in the Johannesburg winter with hundreds of hopeful contestants, carrying nothing more than a poem and an audacious belief that the spoken word belonged on national television. The producers had never featured poetry before. They took a chance on the 11-year-old from Mahikeng.
South Africa did too. Invitations multiplied: a scholarship to St Stithians, acting roles, international travel, a performance at a presidential inauguration and involvement in initiatives linked to the Nelson Mandela Children’s Hospital. Each opportunity expanded her world while somehow keeping her grounded.
“I’ve always stayed rooted in the art,” she says. “No matter what opportunities came my way, I always came back to the writing, to the performance, to the reason I started in the first place. The six-year-old and the 11-year-old versions of me were already so brave, already dreaming so boldly.”
Faith surfaces often in her reflections. She describes poetry as both a God-given gift and an ancestral inheritance.
“Storytelling has always been who we are as African people,” she says. “Long before we had written records, we had stories. That’s how we remembered, how we taught, how we preserved ourselves.”
Our conversation drifts to artificial intelligence, creativity and whether machines threaten artists.
“I don’t think AI will ever replace our essence as human beings,” she says. “It can be a tool, and I think it’s important to acknowledge that. It can help us work faster, help us research, help us organise our thoughts. But it can’t replace your lived experience.”
Her master’s research explored the dilution of Sesotho representation in South African television and the quiet disappearance of indigenous languages through code-switching, urbanisation and globalisation.
Our photographer, Mukovhe, wonders whether great poetry must come from pain. Boikanyo pauses.
“I think poetry is everywhere,” she says. “It’s in the smallest, most ordinary moments. It’s in tasting this cucumber for the first time and noticing something new about it. It’s in this conversation we’re having right now. It’s in that bag sitting over there. Stories are constantly unfolding around us. We don’t always have to reach for pain to create something meaningful.”
As we prepare to leave, I ask what she would tell the little girl who first stepped onto that national stage all those years ago.
“I’d tell her to keep dreaming,” she says. “To dream dreams that scare you, that feel bigger than you, that feel almost impossible. Because those are the dreams that stretch you, that grow you. And if your dreams don’t scare you a little bit, then maybe they’re not big enough.”
Sunday Times Lifestyle
