ABSTRACT
This study examines the use of symbols and images as poetic techniques in South African poetic writing. The poems seek to address the issues of socio-political injustice, apartheid, oppression and man’s inhumanity to man in the society, a kind of counter – attacking the apartheid system of the South African society, which allows for inequalities and abject poverty of a section of the society while the other section thrives in affluence. At the end we discover how Dennis Brutus and Oswald Mtshali expose the terrible state of affairs in South Africa through their revolutionary implantation of symbols and images.