Mphahlele: Tribute to a master of words

By John Mwazemba

Ezekiel Mphahlele grew up at a time when South Africa was on edge during the Apartheid regime; shattering from within and at war with itself.

He found himself under unrelenting sniper fire from the Apartheid government; both terribly outnumbered and outgunned. However, he took up his pen and used it as a weapon.

It was, therefore, with great sadness to learn of the death of the great novelist, autobiographer, essayist, short story writer, editor, poet and critic (famously known as Es’kia Mphahlele). He died on October 27.

Mphahlele was in constant trouble with the authorities of Apartheid South Africa. Lewis Nkosi recalls in Home and Exile and Other Selections that Mphahlele was always bold to challenge Apartheid. While working for Drum in the 1950s, he teamed up with others and formed "an exciting bunch of young writers who considered it, or at least gave the impression of considering it, a mark of great honour to get into trouble with the authorities as often as possible while in pursuit of fact and photograph…their heads were clubbed more often than any group of people".

It was a taboo at the time for black and white people to worship in one church. Drum journalists tried to challenge this colour-bar status quo and set off a serious meltdown.

White Churches

Drum had "detailed its black reporters to attend white churches in order to test the white Christians’ adherence to the principle of ‘brotherhood in Christ’ — an interesting, if extremely hazardous idea to execute. Predictably several things happened to reporters, including a hot chase of a photographer down a street by a group of angry churchmen. Simultaneously the Johannesburg Security Police were called out to defend besieged Christendom. They rounded up Can Themba, Drum’s wiliest, most mischievous reporter" who they charged with ‘vagrancy and trespassing’.

In the following issue of Drum, Themba complained that "he had been manhandled, sworn at, prosecuted and reviled: all because an African wanted to pray!"

On another day, Mphahlele was working on a bus boycott story with serious political consequences. "In the middle of punching his typewriter Zeke Mphahlele could be heard solemnly muttering abuse at everyone connected with the story, including the editor who had just blue-penciled some strong paragraphs out of the piece for fear of provoking prosecution under South Africa’s strict incitement laws".

Mphahlele is especially known for his autobiography, Down Second Avenue (Faber & Faber, 1959) and the novel, The Wanderers (Macmillan, 1971). As a critic wrote, "His writing has been marked by the alienation and pain he experienced during three distinct periods of his life: living in South Africa from birth through early middle age; a self-imposed twenty-year exile from South Africa; and his ultimate return to that nation in 1977".

Mphahlele’s life, like his works was full of alienation and sojourning.

It was aptly said, "He moved on to Paris in 1961, to Nairobi, in 1963, to Denver, Colorado, in 1966 (where Mphahlele earned a PhD degree), and to Lusaka, Zambia, in 1968, where he taught English at the University of Zambia.

In 1967 his short-story collection In Corner B was published in Nairobi; it contained Mrs. Plum, a widely admired story of a white South African woman who displays liberal attitudes but is nevertheless incapable of treating blacks as individuals".

Critics

Mphahlele was a master with words. He narrates his childhood experiences while at Maupaneng — a village 70 miles from the town of Pietersburg — with relish. Then, he stayed with his grandmother whom he described as having been "as big as fate, as forbidding as a mountain, stern as a mimosa tree". There was a mountain close-by and when the darkness settled, it was dark, solid and dense. He said: "And my grandmother seemed to conspire with the mountain and the dark to frighten us".

Mphahlele undoubtedly contributed to the growth of African literature by giving us other works like Man Must Live and Other Stories, The Living and Dead and Other Stories, In Corner B, Chirundu, Afrika My Music, Renewal Time and Mandela: Echoes of an Era among other works.

Critics, however, accuse Mphahlele of "the absence of the sociological imagination and the presence of a skewed historical sensibility". Others accuse him of cynicism and lack of belief in African humanism.

All in all, Mphahlele will be mourned by all those who love well written words. Consolingly, though dead, ‘he speaketh’ through his works.

—The writer (johnmwazemba@yahoo.co.uk) is the publishing manager of Macmillan
Kenya Publishers.