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The Passing of South
African Writer Ezekiel Es’kia Mphahlele
Excerpts compiled by Rudolph Lewis
Ezekiel
Mphahlele (Es'kia Mphahlele), writer and teacher:
born Marabastad, South Africa 17 December 1919;
Professor of African Literature, University of
Witwatersrand 1979-88 (Emeritus), Head of African
Literature 1983-88; married 1945 Rebecca Nnana
Mochedibane (died 2004; four sons, and one daughter
deceased); died Lebowakgomo, South Africa 27 October
2008.
Independent
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1957: He
went into exile when the government banned him because
of his stand against apartheid.
1968: He
received a PhD from the University of Denver in the US
and left a full professorship at the University of
Pennsylvania to return to South Africa in 1977.
1978: He
became a professor at the University of the Witwaters-rand.
His Down Second
Avenue (1959) is a moving, vivid account of growing
up in South Africa. Of his novels, The Wanderers (1969)
was banned for many years . Another novel, Chirundu
(1980), takes place in an imaginary African country.
Sowetan
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Mphahlele was born
on December 17, 1919, in Marabastad, a ghetto in
Pretoria that was mainly populated by blacks alongside
some poor Indians and people of mixed blood. His father
Moses was an alcoholic who abused his own mother and
wife. Mphahlele’s mother was Eva Mogale, the daughter of
a cobbler cum minister of the Lutheran Church.
Since his father
took no interest in their education, it fell on his
mother and grandparents to raise the young Mphahlele and
his siblings. Working several jobs, they found the money
to send Mphahlele to a good local school. The pressure
of expectation led to a nervous breakdown just before
his final high school examinations.
He passed easily
however, and after working as a messenger for a year
enrolled at Adams College, a teacher training college in
Natal. It was during this period that he discovered his
creative streak, managing to start work on a collection
of short stories while studying and doing odd jobs at
the same time.
After several
rejections, the book, Man Must Live, was
published in 1946 by African Bookman, the only black
publishers at the time. The book not only brought
Mphahlele to the limelight with mixed reviews from major
newspapers, it was also the first published collection
of short stories by a black South African.
These were
tumultuous times in South Africa, Mphahlele had just
completed a correspondence degree from the University of
South Africa and the architect of apartheid D.F. Malan,
had just being elected Prime Minister.
In 1952, just when
he was settling to life as a secondary school teacher at
Orlando, a Johannesburg Township, the government
introduced the segregationist Bantu Education Act.
Mphahlele, now one of the senior members of the local
teaching union joined the protest against the law, he
was arrested, jailed and on released was banned from
teaching at government-controlled schools.
Initially, he was
unable to find stable means of income, until he joined
Drum magazine, South Africa’s most prominent radical
publication at the time, as a reporter and sub-editor.
Drum published some of Mphahlele’s short stories and his
activism and literary bent at this period also brought
him into contact with other up-and-coming South African
artists and writers, including the young Nadine Gordimer.
Mphahlele’s banning
and his disillusionment with political developments in
South Africa made him decided to leave South Africa for
Nigeria in 1957. He taught briefly at C.M.S Grammar
School in Lagos, before joining the University of Ibadan,
where he not only made friends with such rising literary
talent as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Christopher
Okigbo, but he helped launched two literary magazines.
From 1957 to 1977,
Mphahlele was a restless man in self-imposed exile. The
present, he told his biographer N. Chabani Mangayi, was
an ephemeral place to be. He renounced his South African
passport for a British passport and he often referred to
the “itch to move”. He was a teacher at the University
of Denver, Colorado, where he earned his PhD in 1968,
and later at the University of Pennsylvania. He also
worked in several universities in Africa and served as
an artistic director in Paris.
TheNewbBackMagazine
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Mphahlele's main
published works often draw from autobiographical
experience. Down Second Avenue is one of the classic
African expositions of growing up in hardship. His third
book of stories, In Corner B (1967), reflected some of
his experiences and encounters before and after exile,
including the final tale, "Mrs Plum", one of the most
damning indictments of white liberalism in South Africa;
a revised edition appeared as a Penguin Modern Classic
in 2006. The 1971 novel The Wanderers reflects his own
nomadic life at the time. Another novel, Chirundu
(1979), drew from his observation of the dynamics of
politics in Zambia, though it purports to be set in an
imagined country. Mphahlele was also a trenchant
literary critic. The African Image (1962) wrestled with
issues of African identity, countering the Francophone
concept of "negritude". Voices in the Whirlwind and
Other Essays (1972) was a bold collection of six pieces
positioning himself in relation to the burgeoning
discourse of African aesthetics.
Independent
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Mphahlele spent
twenty years in exile: first in Nigeria, and
subsequently in
Kenya, where he was director of the Chemchemi
Cultural Centre;
Zambia; France and the
United States, where he earned a doctoral degree
from the
University of Denver and taught at the
University of Pennsylvania. Mphahlele returned to
South Africa in 1977 and joined the faculty of the
University of the Witwatersrand.
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The White Masters of the
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From
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W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
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Ancient African Nations
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