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Es'kia Mphahlele (17 December 1919 – 27 October 2008) was a South African writer, teacher, and activist. He began his career as a teacher in South Africa in 1940, and lost his position when he and others protested the racist Bantu Education Act of 1953, which demanded racial segregation in the education system. He went into exile, first to Nigeria and then in France and Kenya. He held teaching positions and directed and founded cultural institutions in all those countries, and from 1966 to 1977 lived in the United States, where he taught at the University of Colorado while getting his Ph.D. He returned to South Africa in 1977, when the government was in the process of unbanning his books.

Mphahlele published his first book, a collection of stories, in 1946. An autobiography followed twelve years later, and another in 1984. His publications include short stories, novels, and collections of poetry; in addition, he published books on writing and on critical theory, discussing the position of Black writers, Négritude, poetry, and classroom techniques. From the 1950s on he forged bonds between African and African-American literatures, as a fiction editor for Drum, and then with Wole Soyinka on Black Orpheus'' and a variety of other magazines.

He was nominated in 1969 for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 1984 was awarded the Order of the Palm by the French government for his contribution to French Language and Culture. He received the 1998 World Economic Forum Crystal Award for Outstanding Service to the Arts and Education, and in 1998, former President Nelson Mandela awarded Mphahlele the Order of the Southern Cross, then the highest recognition granted by the South African Government). He is celebrated as one of the fathers of African Humanism and of modern African literature.

Youth and early academic career in South Africa
Ezekiel Mphahlele (he changed his name to Es'kia, explaining it as a Sesoth rendering ) was born in Marabastad, Pretoria, in 1919, and from the age of five lived with his paternal grandmother (he remembered her as harsh) in Maupaneng village, Limpopo, where he herded cattle and goats. On his return to Pretoria he had to "live a tough ghetto life". He attended St. Peter's College in Rosettenville, and got a Teacher's Certificate from Adams College, Natal (1940), and matriculated via correspondence two years later, while working at Ezenzeleni Blind Institute as a teacher and a shorthand-typist from 1941 to 1945.

He married Rebecca Nnana Mochedibane (whose family was a victim of forced removals in Vrededorp, Gauteng) in 1945, the same year his mother died. A qualified social worker with a diploma from Jan Hofmeyer School in Johannesburg, she and Mphahlele would have five children. He and his wife had moved their family to Orlando East, and he worked at the historic Orlando High School from 1945 on as an English and Afrikaans teacher. There, in the company of many freshly-minted from Fort Hare young teachers, he became active in the Transvaal African Teachers Association (TATA). Mphahlele obtained, via correpondence, his B.A. in 1949 from the University of South Africa (UNISA), then a B.A. with honors in English in 1955 and a Master's in English, cum laude, in 1956. He was the first Black person to graduate with a M.A. cum laude at UNISA, forcing the authorities to have a special ceremony for him, given the mandated segregation.

In 1952, Mphahlele's teaching career had come to a halt due to his protest against the Bantu Education Act, which mandated the segregation of the educational system. He moved into journalism, and in 1955 took a position as the fiction editor at Drum magazine, starting in 1955, He was, at that time, a central character in the Sophiatown Renaissance, to which he brought the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, in particular Langston Hughes.

Nigeria (1957–61)
Mphahlele begin a twenty-year exile from South Africa by moving to Nigeria, and taught English at the University of Ibadan. He collaborated with some of the foremost artists in Nigeria, particularly playwright, poet, and novelist Wole Soyinka with whom he co-edited the journal Black Orpheus: A Journal of Africa and Afro-American Literature, in which the South African and Nigerian literary literatures were brought into contact. In 1959 he published Down Second Avenue, the autobiography that became his best-known work.

France (1961–63)
Mphahlele moved his family to France in August 1961. In that year he published The Living and Dead and Other Stories, a collection of short stories, and in 1962 The African Image, a work of critical theory based on his Master's thesis. He was appointed director of the African Program of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and lived in Paris, on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, where their apartment became a meeting place for writers and artists: Ethiopian artist Skunder Boghossian, Nigerian playwright and critic Wole Soyinka, Gambian poet Lenrie Peters, South African poet in exile Mazisi Kunene and artist Gerard Sekoto, and Ghanaian poet J. P. Clark were among the many regulars. Ulli Beier and others invited him to help form the Mbari Writers and Artists Club in Ibadan. They raised money from Merrill Foundation in New York to finance Mbari Publications, which became a publishing outlet for many African writers that allowed them a way to finding commercial publishers. He edited and contributed to Black Orpheus, the Ibadan-based literary journal.

Mphahlele set up a Mbari Centre in Enugu, Nigeria, under the directorship of John Enekwe. In 1962, at Makerere University, in Kampala, Uganda, they organised the first African Writers Conference, attended also by fellow South Africans Bob Leshoai, who was on tour, and Neville Rubin, who was editing a journal of political comment in South Africa. Two conferences, one in Dakar and another in Freetown, were held in 1963. Their aim was to throw into open debate the place of African literature in the university curriculum. They wanted to drum support up for the inclusion of African literature as a substantive area of study at university, where traditionally it was being pushed into extramural departments and institutes of African Studies.

Kenya (1963–66)
John Hunt, the Executive Director of the Congress for Cultural Freedom suggested that Mphahlele establish a centre like the Nigerian Mbari in Nairobi. Mphahlele arrived in Nairobi in August 1963, and December had been set for Kenya's independence. He had been housed by Elimo Njau, a Tanzanian painter, who suggested the name Chemchemi, Kiswahili for "fountain", for the centre. Within a few months, they had converted a warehouse into a space with offices, a small auditorium for theatre and music performances, and an art gallery, the latter run by Njau, who mounted successful exhibitions of Ugandan artists Kyeyune and Msango, and of his own work. Mphahlele also supported Taban Lo Liyong in setting up a writers' workshop at the University of Nairobi.

Participant for Chemchemi came from the townships and locations strongly influenced by colonialism. Mphahlele traveled to run writers' workshops in schools that invited him, accompanied by the centre's drama group. Their travels were captured in journal articles in Busara (by Ngugi wa Thiong’o) and Zuka (by Kariara). When the Alliance High School for Girls (just outside Nairobi) asked him to write a play for its annual drama festival, in place of the routine Shakespeare play, Mphahlele adapted Grace Ogot's short story "The Rain Came", and called it Oganda's Journey. He left the position after two years, as he had stipulated before, and turned down a lecturing post at the University College of Nairobi because they could only offer him a one-year contract.

Colorado, US (1966–74)
In May 1966 Mphahlele moved his family to Colorado, where he was joining the University of Denver's English Department. From 1966 to 1968, under the sponsorship of the Farfield Foundation, Mphahlele became a Teaching Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Denver, Colorado, where he earned his Ph.D. in Creative Writing. As a dissertation, he wrote the novel The Wanderers. He was subsequently awarded First Prize for the best African novel (1968–69) by African Arts magazine at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Philadelphia (1974–77)
The Mphahlele family arrived in Philadelphia in May 1974. Mphahlele was about to begin a lecturing career at the University of Pennsylvania in September of that year. They had bought a house in Wayne, some 24 kilometres from Philadelphia, on the Western Mainline.

Mphahlele spent his time in Philadelphia teaching, writing and never stopped thinking about going back home to South Africa. He recalled how since their days in Denver, he and Rebecca had longed to be in Africa again, and it had to be South Africa. They felt anything else would just be an adventure. They longed for community, a cultural milieu in which their work could be relevant. They were considered to have become British nationals, and had to approach the South African government through a single person in authority, Dr. C. N. Phatudi, the then Chief Minister of Lebowa, who had agreed to make representations on their behalf. As their application was being processed, which took more than five years, his books were still being banned in South Africa.

Return to South Africa
Mphahlele returned to South Africa on 3 July 1976. He had been invited by the Black Studies Institute in Johannesburg to read a paper at its inaugural conference. He recalled: "I was emerging on to the concourse when I was startled by a tremendous shout. And they were on top of me - some one hundred Africans, screaming and jostling to embrace me, kiss me. Relatives, friends and pressmen from my two home cities - Johannesburg and Pretoria. I was bounced hither and thither and would most probably not have noticed if an arm or legs were torn off of me, or my neck was being wrung. Such an overwhelming ecstasy of that reunion. The police had to come and disperse the crowd as it had now taken over the concourse."

Mphahlele returned to Philadelphia on 27 July 1976, after three stimulating weeks in South Africa, and back to South Africa permanently in 1977. "When I came back, things were much worse. People were resisting what had become a more and more oppressive government. We came back at a dangerous time. It was a time when we knew we would not be alone, and that we would be among our people" (Mphahlele, 2002). Mphahlele waited for six months for the then University of the North to inform him whether he would get the post of English professor which was still vacant. The answer was "no". The government service of Lebowa offered him a job as an inspector of schools for English teaching. Rebecca had found a job as a social worker. In his autobiography Afrika My Music, he describes how the ten months of being an inspector were like. "I had the opportunity to of travelling the length and breadth of the territory visiting schools and demonstrating aspects of English teaching. I saw for myself the damage of Bantu Education had wrought in our schooling system over the last twenty-five years. Some teachers could not even express themselves fluently or correctly in front of a class, and others spelled words wrongly on the blackboard".

In 1979, he joined the University of the Witwatersrand, where in 1983 he founded the department of African literature, and became the institution's first professor of African literature. He was permitted to honour an invitation from the then Institute for Study of English in Africa at Rhodes University. It was a two-month research fellowship where his proposal of finishing his memoir Afrika My Music, which he had begun in Philadelphia, was accepted.

After his retirement from Wits University in 1987, Mphahlele was appointed as the Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors at Funda Centre for Community Education. He continued visiting other universities as a visiting professor teaching mostly African Literature. He spent two months at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education teaching a module on secondary-school education in South Africa. With the end of apartheid, he emerged as an eloquent proponent of the need to nurture the arts to feed a culture traumatized by colonization and oppression. The Es'kia Institute is named after him, honouring his life, teachings and philosophies. His return home and contribution towards the development of the country and continent's literary development is still being celebrated in many forms, with some towns choosing to name significant streets after him.

Literary career and legacy
As a young student, Mphahlele read voraciously, with Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote as a favorite. His 1959 autobiographical novel Down Second Avenue, his "landmark work" and an important literary experiment, drew a worldwide readership and helped put South African autobiographical writing on the map. Mphahlele's second novel, The Wanderers, a story chronicling the experience of exiles in Africa, was his dissertation for the University of Colorado, also had an "undertow of biographical reflection" and earned him a nomination for the Nobel Prize in literature in 1969.

While in Paris, he published The Living and the Dead, in 1961. Six years later, in East Africa, he published In Corner B. The contents of both collections of short stories are included in The Unbroken Song (1986), which also contains some of Mphahlele’s poems.

Collections of his critical essays were published as Es'kia (2002) and Es'kia Continued (2005). His correspondence with dozens of critics and writers including Langston Hughes, a correspondence that came to an "abrupt halt"), was published in 2010. A Festschrift for his seventieth birthday, Footprints Along the Way (1989), was edited by his protégé Peter Thuynsma and contained essays, poetry, and praise; a second Festschrift, called Es'kia May You Grow as Big as an Elephant was published in 2006.

Importance and legacy
Mphahlele was very influential as an editor and a member of various cultural organizations. As an editor of Black Orpheus, he furthered the career of South African writers who could not otherwise find a publishing outlet (Dennis Brutus, Alex la Guma), and with The Mbari Club (which was closely tied to Black Orpheus) and as director of the African division of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, he was instrumental in financing various cultural initiatives across Africa. His exile connected the Sophiatown Renaissance to the Harlem Renaissance, and with Drum and Black Orpheus he helped link that to the contemporary literature of Nigeria and, in the end, to the Négritude movement taking place in French-speaking parts of Africa. During his stay in Kenya and his work at the Chemichemi Cultural Center, he helped facilitate the growth of a Kenyan national literature. He also participated (with Wole Soyinka) in Houston A. Baker Jr.'s important conference "The Function of Black Criticism at the Present Time", the proceedings of which were published as Reading Black: Essays in the Criticism of African, Caribbean, and Black-American Literature.

When he died, in 2008, he was hailed as one of the fathers of African Humanism and of modern African literature. He was praised for reaffirming Black identity in the face of South African apartheid and for the "sheer intellectual output" of his writing in influential academic journals. The journal English in Africa devoted a special issue to his memory, consisting of papers presented at a special colloquium at the University of the Witswatersrand; the editors called him "one of the last renaissance figures of his generation".

As part of his Master's thesis, in 1962 he published The African Image, which provides a historical perspective of South African literature. He called "The Year of My African Tour". This, he juxtaposed with the way European writers often dealt with African subjects in their texts. He later revised the book and a second edition appeared in 1974. During his Ph.D., he produced The Wanderers, a novel of exile originally submitted as a dissertation for his Ph.D. in creative writing. Down Second Avenue was doing so well such that it was translated into French and German in 1964. In December 1978, the Minister of Justice took Mphahlele's name off the list of writers who may be quoted, and whose works may not be circulated in the country. Only Down Second Avenue, Voices in the Whirlwind and Modern African Stories, which he had co-edited, could then be read in the country. Other publications remained banned.

Autobiography

 * Down Second Avenue (1959)
 * Afrika My Music (1984)

Short stories and poetry

 * Man Must Live and Other Stories (1946)
 * The Living and the Dead and Other Stories (1961)
 * In Corner B & Other Stories (1967)
 * The Unbroken Song: Selected Writings (poems and short stories, 1981)
 * Renewal Time (short stories, 1988)

Novels

 * The Wanderers (1971)
 * Chirundu (1980)
 * Father Come Home (1984)

Critical essays, educational texts, and collections

 * The African Image (1962)
 * A Guide to Creative Writing (pamphlet, 1966)
 * Voices in the Whirlwind and Other Essays (1971)
 * Let's Write a Novel: A Guide (1981)
 * Let's Talk Writing: Prose (1987)
 * Let's Talk Writing: Poetry (1987)
 * Es'kia (2001)
 * Es'kia Continued (2004)