It was in West Africa that he began to blossom as a literary figure. Having broken out of the constraints of apartheid racism he was able to rub shoulders with other African writers and intellectuals.
He had a brief association with Ulli Beier, a German Africanist whose literary journal, Black Orpheus , made a huge impact amongst African writers in the English language. Mphahlele launched his literary career with the publication of Man Must Live in The Lesane stories helped consolidate the short story tradition in South African literature that stands among the best in the world.
Two collections of short stories followed Man Must Live. The Living and the Dead appeared from West Africa in Turning to scholarship, in he published The African Image , based on his MA thesis in which he provides a history of African literature in South Africa, which he juxtaposes with an examination of the African character in literature by writers of European ancestry.
A second and revised edition appeared twelve years later. His engagement with literary and cultural production in the African Diaspora finds expression in Voices in the Whirlwind and Other Essays , which examines African and African-American literature in relation to the Western tradition. His career as a novelist produced The Wanderers , a novel of exile originally submitted as a dissertation for his PhD in creative writing.
Written after his return from exile, it also seems to rationalise his decision to return to South Africa at the height of apartheid repression. For a while Mphahlele worked with the Paris based Congress for Cultural Freedom, organising conferences and workshops on education, literature, arts and culture.
I want to reconnect with my ancestors while I am still active. I am also a captive of place, of setting. As long as I was abroad I continued to write on the South African scene. There is a force I call the tyranny of place; the kind of unrelenting hold a place has on a person that gives him the motivation to write and a style. The American setting in which I lived for nine years was too fragmented to give me these. I could only identify emotionally and intellectually with the African-American segment, which was not enough.
Here I can feel the ancestral Presence. I know now what Vinoba Bhave of India meant when he said: 'Though action rages without, the heart can be tuned to produce unbroken music,' at this very hour when pain is raging and throbbing everywhere in African communities living in this country.
His publication Renewal Time, contains stories he published previously as well as an autobiographical afterword on his return to South Africa and a section from Afrika My Music, his autobiography. Stories like "Mrs. Plum" and "The Living and the Dead" have received praise by critics reviewing Mphahlele's work. His return to South Africa led to other critically acclaimed work such as Chirundu , based on experiences during a brief appointment in Lusaka, Zambia, and more autobiography, notably Afrika My Music He spent his remaining years writing and teaching at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Despite his fame, Mphahlele, or "Uncle Zeke" as he was fondly called, lived a life of simple means. He adored music, classical as well as jazz, European and African, and was often seen in faded denim. His wife, Rebecca Mochedibane, whom he married in , died in They had five children, four of whom survive him.
David Attwell writes: Es'kia Mphahlele's work was at its best in his short stories and autobiographies, while his essays wrestle with ideas in a creatively argumentative spirit. His humanity, however, comes over in his letters: the networks of Mphahlele's extraordinary life are documented there.
He gives of himself freely to all his correspondents, no matter what their colour, backgrounds or position. The humanism of an African survival culture that he sought to define in his work is reflected in the way he conducted his relationships, whether he was writing to a former missionary teacher or to the writer Langston Hughes. Mphahlele is justly revered in South Africa, having found in a life of teaching and writing a means both to endure the hardship that history dealt him, and to transform it for the good of all who came within his circle of magnanimity.
Es'kia Mphahlele. Sheer romanticism that fails to see the large landscape of the personality of the African makes bad poetry. The omission of these elements of a continent in turmoil reflects a defective poetic vision. The greatest of Leopold Sedar Senghor is that which portrays in himself the meeting point of Europe and Africa. This is realistic and honest and a most meaningful symbol of Africa: an ambivalent continent searching for equilibrium.
This synthesis of Europe and Africa does not necessarily reject the negro-ness of the African. Let me italicize again: an image of Africa that glosses over or dismisses these things is not a faithfully-conceived one; it restricts or emotional and intellectual response. When I asked the question, at the Accra Congress of Africanists last December, how long our poets are going to continue to bleat like a goat in the act of giving birth, I was suggesting that Ghanaian poets should start looking inwards into themselves.
Surely meaningful art has social significance or relevance and this very fact implies social criticism-protest in the broadest form of the word. Gorky, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens, and so on did this, but they were no less Russian or English; certainly they were much more committed than negritude poets. They are concerned in portraying the black-white encounter, and they do this, notwithstanding, with devastating poetic sense of irony unmatched by any that one sees in the English novel by Africans.
There are fascinating works in the three main Bantu languages in South Africa which are of the same standard. I am suggesting here that we as writers need to be emancipated from ourselves. Negritude, while a valuable slogan politically, can, because its apostles have set it up as a principle of art, amount to self-enslavement-autocolonization, to quote a French writer speaking of African politics and economics.
We should not allow ourselves to be bullied at gunpoint into producing literature that is supposed to contain a negritude theme and style. For now we are told, also, that there is a style negro-African and that therefore we have to sloganize and write to a march. We are told that negritude is less a matter of theme than style. Let it not be forgotten, too, that negritude has an overlap of nineteenth century European protest against machines and cannons.
In the place of the cuckoo, the nightingale, the daffodil, Africa has been dragged to the alter of Europe. Negritude men should not pretend that this is an entirely African concept. Notice also that while Negritude poetry evokes images of ritual, animals letting out blood for the sacrifice, naked feet and breasts, these are only outward trappings: the poet still does not and perhaps cannot as an uprooted person, penetrate the essence of tradition. Several of us, as a result of the physical and mental agony we have been going through in South Africa, have rejected Christianity or any other religion as a cure for human ills.
But if I wrote a poem or novel expressly to preach against religion without my seeing the irony of the good and bad in things done in the name of religion; if omitted the irony of Christians and educated Africans who still revere ancestral spirits and several other ironies and paradoxes, then it would not be a lasting work of art.
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