Pretoria literacy giant Mphahlele remembered

Mphahlele wrote a series of stories published in Drum.

Thato Mahlangu

December 14, 2017

Sunday would have marked the 98th birthday of one of the country’s best writers, Dr Es’kia (Ezekiel Zeke) Mphahlele.

Mphahlele was born in Marabastad on 10 December in 1919.

He was a writer, academic, arts activist and African humanist who spent most of his life writing, teaching and mentoring upcoming writers.

One of them was Mmatshilo Motsei, one of the respected woman writers from Hammanskraal.

“Dr Mphahlele was the illustrious author of two autobiographies, more than 30 short stories, two verse plays and a fair number of poems,” according to South African History Online (SAHO).

“Add to these, two anthologies edited, essay collections, innumerable single essays, addresses, awards and a Nobel Prize nomination for literature, and what emerges is to many, the dean of African letters,” said Peter Thuynsma, a leading Dr Mphahlele scholar, in Perspectives on South African English Literature.

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Mphahlele received a BA degree in 1949, followed in 1956 by a BA Hon degree and in 1957 by an MA degree (with distinction).

He studied for his three degrees by correspondence with the University of South Africa.

In 1968, he received his doctorate from the University of Denver in the USA.

His parents sent him to Maupaneng, near Polokwane, to go and live with his paternal grandmother.

Mphahlele came back to Marabastad to start school and received his high school education at St Peter’s College, Rosettenville.

“It was there that he encountered personalities whose lives would run a close parallel to his,” Thuynsma said.

Mphahlele was among the group that formed the ANC Youth League.

“He was asked by Dr AB Xuma to join the league, at the time he was part of a group of African opinion leaders and thinkers. They drafted an African response to the Atlantic Charter, authored by Roosevelt and Churchill.

“With all these events swirling around him Dr Mphahlele’s passion remained education rather than politics, however, and his talents were better suited to the classroom than the soapbox or newsroom.”

He took up the post of English and Afrikaans teacher at Orlando High School.

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The 1949 Eislen commission on native education, inspired by Dr HF Verwoerd, the recently elected National Party’s minister of native affairs, had recommended a radically new system of education for Africans, said SAHO.

“In December 1952 Eskia Mphahlele, Isaac Matlare and Zephaniah Mothopeng were dismissed from their posts and permanently banned from teaching for opposing Bantu education.

“In 1954 he left to teach at Basutoland (later, Lesotho) High School in Maseru.

“Returning to South Africa a year later, he found work with Drum magazine, where at various stages he held the posts of a political reporter, sub-editor and fiction editor.

“Dr Mphahlele was something of a misfit there and, yearning to teach, he sought other outlets for his talent,” SAHO said.

He later launched his literary career with the publication of Man Must Live in 1946.

“It was the second collection of short stories in English by an African writer after Dark Testament by Peter Abrahams, who had been Mphahlele’s classmate at St Peter’s.”

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In the 1950s, Mphahlele wrote a series of stories published in Drum.

The Lesane stories helped consolidate the short story tradition in South African literature that stands among the best in the world.

The Drum era produced, in quick succession, Bessie Head, Arthur Maimane, Todd Matshikiza, James Matthews, Bloke Modisane, Casey Motsisi, Lewis Nkosi, Richard Rive, and Can Themba.

The autobiographical Down Second Avenue (in 1957), Mphahlele’s crowning achievement, has been translated into several foreign languages but not a single African language indigenous to South Africa.

Mphahlele has received some recognition in the city, with Es’kia Mphahlele Drive, Es’kia Mphahlele hall at Unisa, and Es’kia Mpahlele library in the CBD named after him.