Es'kia Mphahlele - University of Pretoria

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I Es'kia Mphahlele /9/9- ES'KIA MPHAHLELE published under the name Ezekiel Mphahlele prior to 1979, but the name change upon returning to South Africa from a twenty-year exile did nothing to suppress an unusually heavy dependence on personal experience, a strong folk sensitivity, and a constant wrangling over the condition of exile. It is not only exile on alien soil that dominates his work, but also exile on ancestral soil. These features characterize his personality and his writing, and out of this vortex he has created two autobiographies, three novels, more than twenty-five short stories, two verse plays, and a number of poems. Add to these two edited anthologies, essay collections, individual essays, public addresses, awards, and a Nobel Prize nomination in literature in 1969, and what emerges is a dean of African letters. As a young reader Mphahlele seized upon the maxim that a story had to be well told, which became the credo that drove his work. This belief is reflected in his critical criteria and his creative writing. He views life as framed experience, ordered and patterned into a story. This may not be an extraordinary trait in a writer, but as Mphahlele's mainstay it is of major critical consequence. Personal experience, whether real or imagined, formed his creative impulse. Its simplicities and complexities determine the lives of his PETER N. THUYNSMA 495 characters and become microcosms of the South African experience and of the more specific black South African experience. He treats his critical and creative work as a forum in which to examine himself and feel experience spinning around him and dancing past. As Ursula Barnett argues, his writing "is less successful when he cannot feel an incident as real, or identify with a situation emotionally" (p. 54). He is, in fact, in a constant discourse with the experiences of his own life. BIOGRAPHY A basic familiarity with Mphahlele's background is imperative to understanding the fabric and texture of his writing, to touching the "felt thought" so characteristic of an African writer. His is a story of a goatherd, office clerk, teacher, acclaimed academic, and award-winning writer. Little is private about his life, which has moved from his native South Africa, to exile abroad, and back home again. His poetry is intensely personal, and his large body of fiction is almost an extension of his own life. Even his criticism betrays his restless consciousness in exile, which continues after his return to home soil. Mphahlele was born in Marabastad, outside Pretoria, on 17 December 1919, but was Digitised by the University of Pretoria, Library Services, 2011
soon taken to live with his paternal grandmother in rural northern Transvaal near Pieters burg, at the village of Maupaneng. These were less than happy childhood years under the tyrannical grandmother, and his first autobiography, Down Second Avenue (1959), records her harshness alongside images of fearsome, towering mountains. It is a period of fear, loss, bewilderment, displacement, and, to a minor extent, alienation. But during these years he also developed a sense of storytelling and of the need to shape experience: Looking back to those first fifteen years of my life-as much of it as I can remember- I cannot help thinking that it was time wasted. I had nobody to shape them into a definite pattern. Searching through the confused threads of that pattern a few things keep imposing themselves on my whole judgement. My grandmother; the mountain; the tropical darkness which glowworms seemed to try in vain to scatter; long black tropical snakes; the brutal Leshoana river carrying ... cattle, boulders; world of torrential rains; the solid shimmering heat beating down on yearning earth; the romantic picture of a woman with a child on her back and an earthen pot on her head, silhouetted against the mirage. . (p. 18) He had also learned how to make it through each day, how to survive, which was a valuable lesson, for when the country boy returned to Pretoria, a tough ghetto life lay in wait. Some of the early obstacles came at school, for in the fifth grade he was told he was "backward": "The principal said I was backward. My aunt said I was backward. So said everybody. Mother didn't know. I had no choice but to acknowledge it" (p. 47). Despite it all, there emerged a boy who ferociously consumed anything he could learn. His determination resulted in a teachers' certificate from Adams College, Natal, in 1940 and a matriculation by correspondence studies two years later while he worked as a teacher and 496 / AFRICAN WRITERS shorthand typist at the Ezenzeleni Institute for the Blind in Roodepoort, west of the Johannesburg city center. He went on to teach English and Afrikaans a t Orlando High School in what is today Soweto until he was banned from teaching in 1952 for campaigning against the Bantu Education Act. From 1952 to 1953 he returned to Ezenzeleni as secretary, and in 1954 he entered his first brief exile in what was then Basutoland as a teacher in Maseru. Academic honors began when a bachelor of arts degree was awarded him in 1949. A bachelor of arts with honors degree followed in 1955 and a master's degree with distinction in 1956, both in English literature. All three degrees were awarded by the University of South Africa, and studies were conducted via correspondence. His master's was the first cum laude degree to be awarded to a black South African, and the official policy of apartheid obliged the University of South Africa to arrange a separate graduation ceremony. Mphahlele received his doctorate in 1968 from the University of Denver and an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982. An equivalent tribute came from the University of Colorado in 1994. Similar honors were accorded him in South Africa when he received honorary doctorates in literature from the University of Natal in 1983 and Rhodes University in 1986. In the same year he received the Ordre des Palmes medal from the French government in recognition of his contribution to French language and culture. Ghetto life in South Africa could hardly anticipate such academic accolades. Among the scant career options available after he was barred from teaching in 1952 was a post as a journalist, and his love for writing was strong enough to make him join the staff of Drum magazine in Johannesburg in 1955. In his short stay with this magazine, he held the posts of political reporter, copy editor, and fiction editor. Discontented with his role as a Digitised by the University of Pretoria, Library Services, 2011
Page 4 and 5: journalist and deeply disillusioned
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Es'kia Mphahlele - University of Pretoria

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