Bury Me at the Marketplace: Es'kia Mphahlele and Company. Letters 1943-2006

By Wits University Press

When Chabani Manganyi published the first edition of selected letters twenty-five years ago as a companion volume to Exiles and Homecomings: A Biography of Es’kia Mphahlele, the idea of Mphahlele’s death was remote and poetic. The title, Bury Me at the Marketplace, suggested that immortality of a kind awaited Mphahlele, in the very coming and going of those who remember him and whose lives he touched. It suggested, too, the energy and magnanimity of Mphahlele, the man, whose personality and intellect as a writer and educator would carve an indelible place for him in South Africa’s public sphere.
That death has now come and we mourn it. Manganyi’s words at the time have acquired a new significance: in the symbolic marketplace, he noted, ‘the drama of life continues relentlessly and the silence of death is unmasked for all time’. The silence of death is certainly unmasked in this volume, in its record of Mphahlele’s rich and varied life: his private words, his passions and obsessions, his arguments, his loves, hopes, achievements, and yes, even some of his failures. Here the reader will find many facets of the private man translated back into the marketplace of public memory.
Despite the personal nature of the letters, the further horizons of this volume are the contours of South Africa’s literary and cultural history, the international affiliations out of which it has been formed, particularly in the diaspora that connects South Africa to the rest of the African continent and to the black presence in Europe and the United States.
This selection of Mphahlele’s own letters has been greatly expanded; it has also been augmented by the addition of letters from Mphahlele’s correspondents, among them such luminaries as Langston Hughes and Nadine Gordimer. It seeks to illustrate the networks that shaped Mphahlele’s personal and intellectual life, the circuits of intimacy, intellectual inquiry, of friendship, scholarship and solidarity that he created and nurtured over
the years. The letters cover the period from November 1943 to April 1987, forty-four of Mphahlele’s mature years and most of his active professional life. The correspondence is supplemented by introductory essays from the two editors, by two interviews conducted with Mphahlele by Manganyi and by Attwell’s insightful explanatory notes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781776142927

Book preview

BURY ME AT THE

MARKETPLACE

ES’KIA MPHAHLELE AND

COMPANY

LETTERS 1943-2006

Edited by N Chabani Manganyi and David Attwell

Wits University Press

1 Jan Smuts Avenue

Johannesburg

South Africa

http://witspress.wits.ac.za

First published 2010.

Reprinted 2018.

Preface, introduction and notes ©N Chabani Manganyi and David Attwell, 2010

Letters ©individual authors as indicated, 2010

ISBN: 978 1 86814 489 1

ISBN: 978 1 77614 292 7 (EPUB)

ISBN: 978 1 77614 293 4 (MOBI)

Excerpts from ‘Looking In: In Search of Ezekiel Mphahlele’ originally appeared in Exiles and Homecomings: A Biography of Es’kia Mphahlele by Chabani Manganyi, Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1981. Copyright © Chabani Manganyi, 1981. Reprinted with permission.

Excerpts from ‘Metaphors of Self ’ originally appeared in Selves in Question: Interviews on Southern African Auto/Biography, edited by Judith Lütge Coullie, Stephan Meyer, Thengani Ngwenya and Thomas Olver, Honolulu, HA: University of Hawaii Press, 2006. Copyright © University of Hawaii Press, 2006. Reprinted with permission.

The poem ‘Death’ by Kuba originally appeared in African Poetry: An Anthology of Traditional African Poems, compiled and edited by Ulli Beier, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.

Wits University Press has made every reasonable effort to locate, contact and acknowledge copyright owners. Please notify us should copyright not have been properly identified and acknowledged. Any corrections will be incorporated in subsequent editions of the book.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

Edit by Pat Tucker

Design, layout and typesetting by Crazy Cat Designs

Cover image by George Mnyalaza Milwa Pemba, courtesy of N Chabani Manganyi

When I die, don’t bury me under forest trees.

I fear the dripping water.

Bury me under the great shade trees in the market,

I want to hear the drums beating

I want to feel the dancers’ feet.

Taken from the poem ‘Death’ by Kuba

CONTENTS

PREFACE

In his own voice

N Chabani Manganyi

INTRODUCTION

Reading in the company of Es’kia Mphahlele

David Attwell

CORRESPONDENTS

LETTERS 1943-2006

INTERVIEWS

Looking in: In search of Es’kia Mphahlele

Metaphors of self

Interview references

Index

The editors have compiled footnotes to place the letters in this volume in context. The footnotes include information about correspondents, information about the historical, political or social context surrounding the time of writing, translations into English from other languages, as well as other useful information. For ease of reading the notes in each letter start at 1 and appear directly below the letter in which they appear.

THE EDITORS

N CHABANI MANGANYI

N Chabani Manganyi is a Senior Research Fellow in the Unit for Advanced Studies at the University of Pretoria. A retired clinical psychologist, his professional writings have appeared in academic journals and in collections of essays such as Treachery and Innocence: Psychology and Racial Difference in South Africa (1991). A long-standing interest in life writing dating back to the late 1970s resulted in the publication of the biographies of Es’kia Mphahlele (1983) and the late South African artist, Gerard Sekoto (2004). In 2008 Chabani Manganyi was honoured by the universities of the Witwatersrand, South Africa and Rhodes in recognition of his contribution to psychology and social change in South Africa.

DAVID ATTWELL

South African by birth, David Attwell is Chair of Modern Literature at the University of York (UK), having held positions at the universities of the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Witwatersrand. He collaborated with J M Coetzee on a series of dialogues which were collected, with Coetzee’s non-fiction, as Doubling the Point (1992), and later wrote J M Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (1993). His interest in African literature dates from the late 1970s and has led to essays on Wole Soyinka’s uses of Yoruba mythology, on Thomas Mofolo’s historical fiction, and on theoretical formations in African criticism. His most recent book is Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History (2005).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We dedicate our book to the memory of Es’kia Mphahlele, who, in 2005, graciously entrusted us with the task of researching and editing this expanded edition of letters and interviews. We pay homage to him and are grateful to his family, and to South African and international correspondents for enriching our lives and those of future generations of fellow South Africans.

Funding for the Life Writing Project at the Unit for Advanced Study of the University of Pretoria was provided by the university and by the Department of Arts and Culture of the Republic of South Africa.

We are grateful for the cooperation we have received from the staff of the National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library at Yale University, the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Borthwick Institute at the University of York. Our particular thanks are due to Bernth Lindfors who generously transcribed a group of letters in the HRHRC in Austin.

Pat Tucker undertook the technical editing of the manuscript through its final stages of preparation. Her professional rigour and approach have added considerable value to our work.

Throughout the development of this book, we benefited from the unfailing support of the office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) of the University of Pretoria, Professor Robin Crewe. Special thanks are due to Mrs Alta Scheepers, who ensured that administrative, financial and other research related matters were attended to.

As editors, we could not have wished for a better publisher than Wits University Press under the leadership of Veronica Klipp and her colleagues. We thank them most heartily.

Ezekiel Mphahlele at home in 2005.

Photograph taken by N Chabani Manganyi

PREFACE

IN HIS OWN VOICE

The first edition of this book was a companion volume to my biography of Es’kia Mphahlele entitled Exiles and Homecomings.¹ At the time the books were published there was a small group of enterprising and progressive alternative publishers in Johannesburg, among them, Ravan Press and Skotaville Publishers, who supported the anti-establishment voices of the day. In my introduction to the first edition of Bury Me at the Marketplace I wrote that from a biographer’s point of view the letters were a worthy companion to Exiles and Homecomings, a standpoint I maintain today.²

I wrote, too, that Mphahlele’s letters told the ‘story of a life lived’ to the fullest possible extent and were an invitation to enter into ‘a privileged inner circle of intimacy, humour, compassion, love and pain’. Significantly, at that time, I raised the prospect of a future edition of letters from and to Es’kia Mphahlele, a hope that has been realised with the publication of this edition. Work on this book has been in progress for a number of years and I have been privileged during that time to collaborate with David Attwell, an eminent scholar with a well-established understanding and knowledge of Mphahlele’s literary oeuvre within the broader context of South African literature as a whole.³

While working on the manuscript of this collection I felt as challenged as I was in the early 1980s when I engaged with and responded to the many faces of Es’kia Mphahlele as he took centre stage in different situations, countries and in relationships with a cast of illustrious writers, academics, friends and family coupled with his emergence as a world figure – a literary and cultural critic and significant writer in his own right.

One of the most important lessons I learnt is that memorable moments in letter writing come to light whenever a letter or set of letters gives the reader as much pleasure as it did the writer at the time of its composition. I have come to the conclusion, following a close reading of Mphahlele’s letters, that a well-written letter makes demands on the writer that are similar to those normally associated with short-story writing. Letters which are to command the reader’s undivided attention must feel self-contained, reflect a moment of cognitive and affective concentration and confirm the importance of an ability to create an atmosphere similar to that found in good short stories.

One example that comes to mind, among several others, is the letter written on 11 November 1980 by Mphahlele to his daughter. In it he tells the story of the ‘visitor’ who turned out to be a closet alcoholic. The style is conversational and is coupled with Mphahlele’s unobtrusive, yet potent and explosive sense of humour, used to good effect in dealing with the grotesque in everyday life. This ‘mission’ to be a storyteller is prophetically expressed in a letter dated 24 December 1943 to his lifelong friend and confidante, Norah Taylor, in which he writes of ‘the passion of one who desires to tell a story’.

Author and academic James Olney, in a letter dated 12 March 1974, recognised Mphahlele’s ability to engage his readers when he wrote:

I enjoyed very much and was deeply touched by your letter received yesterday. Thank you. All the qualities that have always distinguished your writing were there on that single sheet – intelligence, sensitivity, creative vitality and energy – and, in addition, what one could only guess at in the published work: personal courtesy and kindness. There are few men, – especially few of your literary and human achievements – from whom one could expect such a gesture of selfless generosity.

What we find in Mphahlele’s letters is the profile of an open-minded, fearless, intellectually engaging personality, writer and scholar in one compact bundle of unremitting energy and radiating humour.

Today I marvel at the fact that my earliest exposure to a collection of published letters was in the early 1970s when I was a post-doctoral fellow in Clinical Psychology at Yale University. The book in question was Letters From Jenny by the psychologist Gordon Allport.⁴ I read it at a time when I was researching the interface between psychology and biography. I found the following statement of special interest:

Intimate letters, gushing forth from raw personal experience, have a unique fascination. Often better than fiction or biography, even than autobiography, they tell us what a particular concrete human life is like. The fascination is greater if the letters are written over a considerable period of time, presenting consecutively the inner narrative of a life as it unfolds.

Granted Allport was writing during the late 1960s before the flourishing of more contemporary ideas about biography and autobiography. Today we are able to be more explicit and say that letters are first-person ‘utterances’ and that very fact makes them, according to one view, autobiographical narratives. In the two decades since the publication of the Mphahlele letters the chorus hailing letters as autobiography, as ‘real and best biography’, as ‘giving first place to the writer’s own words’ has grown louder and more persistent.⁵

In this collection we amplify Mphahlele’s epistolary voice with edited versions of two interviews I conducted and published some years ago. Like the letters in the earlier edition, the first interview, ‘Looking In: In Search of Es’kia Mphahlele’, is part of a larger series of biographical interviews I conducted with Mphahlele and several informants as a forerunner to the publication of Exiles and Homecomings in 1983.⁶ ‘Metaphors of Self ’ was part of a more recent large-scale South African study of auto/biography published as Selves in Question: Interviews on Southern African Auto/Biography.⁷

‘Looking In’ (conducted in 1979) covers a broad autobiographical sweep, confirming, in important respects, the life story that emerges through the letters. It is worth noting that the piece was published many years before the interview as ‘autobiographical essay’ or as ‘book of conversations’ became an established ‘autobiographical’ genre.⁸ In the 1979 interview we meet Mphahlele, the child, in rural South Africa; the schoolboy and student in the black ghetto of Marabastad; the high-school teacher of the early 1950s; the Drum fiction editor and the writer and scholar of the exile years.

Today there is no need to search far and wide for published book-length interview volumes since there are numerous examples of such publications. In these texts, as in the case of composite collections of letters, the most vocal claims concern the authenticity of the ‘voice’ of the writer and subject of the interview. As one writer put it, an interview ‘preserves the voice of the speaker’, while Edward Said once said, ‘In many ways, interviews are sustained acts of discovery’.⁹

‘Metaphors of Self ’ is an autobiographical statement concerned with Mphahlele’s ideas about the craft of writing autobiographies. The interview is loaded with his pithy, penetrating and thought-provoking observations, including the place of the imagination in autobiography, fiction, short fiction and expository writing. What we learn is made more remarkable by the ease and simplicity with which his wisdom and insights are laid bare. While Mphahlele’s voice is paramount in this collection, the book is enormously enhanced by the addition of the voices of the famous and not so famous, of colleagues, fellow writers and lifelong friends.

Es’kia Mphahlele’s sudden death in the late spring of 2008 was a poignant moment, not only for members of his family, but for his friends and his many admirers, both in South Africa and abroad. It was particularly poignant for the people of South Africa, his native land, for Mphahlele was a man who towered above so many of his national and international literary and academic peers. His spirited public rejection of the introduction of the infamous ‘Bantu Education’ system in the early 1950s earned him and two of his colleagues at the time the wrath of the apartheid regime and they were ‘banned’ from teaching in any school in South Africa.

Mphahlele had taken a moral and political stand against a perceived injustice. From then on, making difficult and painful choices while speaking his mind became the hallmark of Mphahlele the literary and cultural crusader, the writer and academic. The range of his intellectual and literary pursuits throughout his long exile in Nigeria, Paris, Nairobi, Zambia and the United States of America was wide, deep and, in some cases, path-breaking. His literary, cultural and scholarly legacy is substantial. One is reminded, for example, of the fact that in the late 1950s and 1970s he, together with other prominent African and African-American writers and scholars, took a commanding lead in the lively, and at times acrimonious, debates about Negritude, the ‘African Personality’ and the Harlem Renaissance.

In the words of my co-editor, David Attwell, who has written eloquently about Mphahlele’s legacy:

In Es’kia Mphahlele we have arguably the most sustained record in South African literature of the encounter between a South African writer and the cultures of the wider diaspora …. Between 1957 and 1977, he engaged with each of the major centres of intellectual ferment in the black world, in West and East Africa, with exiled Francophone Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States.¹⁰

Need I say more?

N Chabani Manganyi

---

¹ N Chabani Manganyi. 1983. Exiles and Homecomings: A Biography of Es’kia Mphahlele . Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

² N Chabani Manganyi (ed). 1984. Bury Me at the Marketplace: Selected Letters of Es’kia Mphahlele 1943-1980 . Johannesburg: Skotaville Publishers.

³ See D Attwell. 2006. Rewriting Modernity . Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, p 111

⁴ G W Allport (ed). 1965. Letters from Jenny . New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

⁵ See, eg, Philip Horne (ed). 1999. Henry James: A Life in Letters . London: Penguin Books, p xvi.

⁶ N Chabani Manganyi. 1981. Looking Through the Keyhole: Dissenting Essays on the Black Experience . Johannesburg: Ravan Press, pp 4-50.

⁷ N Chabani Manganyi. 2006. ‘Metaphors of Self: Es’kia Mphahlele’. In Judith Lütge Coullie , Stephan Meyer, Thengani Ngwenya and Thomas Olver (eds). Selves in Question : Interviews on Southern African Auto/Biography . Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp 243-253.

⁸ See, eg, D O’Driscoll (ed). 2008. Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney . London: Faber and Faber.

⁹ G Viswanathan (ed). 2004. Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said . London: Bloomsbury, p xx.

¹⁰ Attwell. Rewriting Modernity , op cit.

INTRODUCTION

READING IN THE COMPANY OF ES’KIA MPHAHLELE

Es’kia Mphahlele died on 28 October 2008, in his eighty-ninth year. His passing gives to this collection – and its title – a special, if poignant, relevance. When Chabani Manganyi published the first edition of selected letters twenty-five years ago (1984) as a companion volume to Exiles and Homecomings: A Biography of Es’kia Mphahlele (1983), the idea of Mphahlele’s death was remote and poetic. The title, Bury Me at the Marketplace, suggested that immortality of a kind awaited Mphahlele, in the very coming and going of those who remember him and whose lives he touched. It suggested, too, the energy and magnanimity of Mphahlele, the man, whose personality and intellect as a writer and educator would carve an indelible place for him in South Africa’s public sphere.

That death has now come and we mourn it. Manganyi’s words at the time have acquired a new significance: in the symbolic marketplace, he noted, ‘the drama of life continues relentlessly and the silence of death is unmasked for all time’.¹ The silence of death is certainly unmasked in this volume, in its record of Mphahlele’s rich and varied life: his private words, his passions and obsessions, his arguments, his loves, hopes, achievements, and yes, even some of his failures. Here the reader will find many facets of the private man translated back into the marketplace of public memory.

When the first edition was published Manganyi envisaged this expanded volume: ‘a promising enterprise for future scholarship would be a collection of letters from and to Es’kia Mphahlele of which there is already an extensive collection’, and ‘a later edition of this work will probably include many more letters than are included in this collection. The gaps are now well known and it will be the task of future research to plug them.’ In this second edition these hopes have largely been realised.

This selection of Mphahlele’s own letters has indeed been greatly expanded; it has also been augmented by the addition of a large number of letters from Mphahlele’s correspondents. The reasons for these decisions are, firstly, that the reader will be afforded a more complete record of the growth and development of Mphahlele’s life and career; secondly, that the present volume seeks to illustrate the networks that shaped Mphahlele’s personal and intellectual life, the circuits of intimacy and intellectual inquiry, of friendship, scholarship and solidarity that he created and nurtured over the years.

Despite the personal nature of the letters, the further horizons of this volume are also the contours of South Africa’s literary and cultural history, the international affiliations out of which it has been formed, particularly in the diaspora that connects South Africa to the rest of the African continent and to the black presence in Europe and the United States.

The letters included in this volume cover the period from November 1943 to February 2006, sixty-three of Mphahlele’s mature years and most of his active professional life. It is not our intention to recount his biography here. Readers are referred to the interviews published in this volume, to the many critical studies of Mphahlele’s life and work, to the biography, Exiles and Homecomings (1983) and to the autobiographies, especially Down Second Avenue (1959) and Afrika My Music (1984). But for the benefit of readers who might not be familiar with the outlines of Mphahlele’s life, let us take stock, albeit schematically, of the larger historical patterns that shaped him in the years covered by these letters. In the correspondence published in these pages readers will find these historical patterns felt on the bone.

In his early intellectual life Mphahlele lived through the 1940s when the political debates in the public sphere of the time, dominated by white politicians and planners, were about the consequences of urbanisation and the place of Africans at the centre of South Africa’s modernity. This question was the elephant in the room of a myopic settler-colonial politics. The result was the hardening of segregation into apartheid by the end of the decade, following the electoral victory of the National Party in 1948.

It was in these years that Mphahlele’s vocation was developing, when the aspirant teacher, writer and intellectual was beginning to find his place in the world. For an idealist, a young man with a generous spirit and wide sympathies – attributes that were hard won after a difficult childhood and upbringing in Marabastad and Maupaneng – this was an inauspicious time, to say the least. He was set on a life course that was bound to be conflicted. The teacher in Mphahlele, in particular, would rebel against the Verwoerdian principles inherent in Bantu Education, as an affront to personal liberty, social well-being and democratic citizenship, and the consequences involved his being banned from his chosen profession.

At the same time his artistic ambitions were beginning to develop and he published his first collection of stories, Man Must Live, with the African Bookman in Cape Town (1947). The correspondence with Norah Taylor, where matters turn frequently on Mphahlele’s relationship with the theatre, is unusual for the time; at least, it is an especially personal instance of the non-racial activism that flowered in the 1950s. Mphahlele was more than conscious of its implications, remarking how important it was in ‘this cauldron of suspicious, petty and often snobbish humanity’. Over time this friendship only deepened, the letters continuing well into the difficult years of Mphahlele’s exile.

How different was the other major correspondence that began in the 1950s, this time with Langston Hughes. That Mphahlele was writing to Taylor and to Hughes almost simultaneously reveals something of his breadth and ability to give himself to different universes; a point that will be taken up at the end of this introduction. By now, Mphahlele had moved to the offices of Drum where he worked as fiction editor. Hughes was reaching out to Africans in a spirit of diasporic community; Mphahlele was reaching out to the Harlem Renaisssance and to the confident self-definition that was part and parcel of African-American cultural politics and artistic expression.

Mphahlele’s worlds in the 1940s and early to mid-1950s both overlapped and collided: there was the vibrancy and edginess of the township as expressed in the ethos of Drum; the genteel liberalism of Norah Taylor (not to mention the anglocentric education of St Peters, Adams College and Unisa’s English Department, where he did most of his literary studies); and the world represented by Hughes. Hughes had written to Mphahlele after a story of his appeared in a New York anthology. Of this encounter, Mphahlele would later remark: ‘My systematic study of African American literature, thought and history actually began in 1955 – before my exile.’ He added that it was an instinctive connection, a result of the mind ‘reaching out across the frontiers of reference, seeking to know where it stands in relation to this or that. The act of knowing, the ways of consciousness, seem to me to be at the centre of human survival.’²

This instinctive reaching out, the crossing of boundaries as an investment in the self ’s survival, was to become a habit of mind and a lifelong moral and intellectual commitment. The letters reveal the extent to which these leaps of faith were a function of relationships with particular people in their specific circumstances.

Mphahlele left South Africa in September 1957 to take up a post teaching in a grammar school in Lagos. Although Drum was a literary and journalistic phenomenon and the camaraderie amongst its writers would prove legendary, it was a precarious base for a writer whose literary aspirations extended further than the commercial enterprise that Jim Bailey wanted his magazine to be. As its frustrated fiction editor, Mphahlele resolved to return to teaching, but he could not do so in South Africa. The horizon that presented itself was West Africa.

The resonance of this decision is striking: the great wave of decolonisation that began with Ghanaian independence in the same year (March 1957) was making its presence felt in South African political life even while the government of the day turned its back on it. In silky tones, Harold Macmillan would later warn against the consequences of its doing so when he addressed Parliament and spoke of the ‘winds of change’. Mphahlele joined what was, at this stage, still a small group of South African émigrés who embraced the continent (by the 1960s the trickle would become a flood). None, however, would become as closely associated with the continent’s cultural self-definition as Mphahlele.

Having edited the activist community newspaper, The Voice, in Orlando, and then worked at Drum, it is not surprising that over and above his teaching Mphahlele would quickly become involved in some of Nigeria’s pioneering literary ventures, in particular the journal Black Orpheus, which he co-edited with Ulli Beier. Nigeria was exhilarating – ‘there was the scintillating sense of freedom and daytime, after the South African nightmare’³ – but inevitably Mphahlele found himself reflecting on home: ‘you seemed to hear, still, the distant proclamations of law and order across the Congo, the Zambezi and the Limpopo, down in the painful south of the south’.⁴

Lagos seems to have provided not so much a new home and a sense of place as a conjunction of places, a joining of the continent’s south and west. It provided, firstly, the context in which he was able to bring to conclusion the book for which he is still best known, Down Second Avenue. Later, while working in Paris, through Black Orpheus and Mbari Publications – a project of the Mbari Club, with which he had become associated in Lagos and where he had rubbed shoulders with Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, John Pepper Clark, and Demas Nwoko – he facilitated a pan-African cultural traffic, notably bringing Alex La Guma (A Walk in the Night 1962) and Dennis Brutus (Sirens, Knuckles and Boots 1963) to an international readership.

While his creativity developed in Lagos as editor, autobiographer, poet, theatre practitioner and cultural organiser, he maintained a wide correspondence with South Africans at home and abroad: with Norah Taylor; Makhudu Rammopo (a lifelong friend who would join him in Nigeria, as did other teachers from South Africa); with Ursula Barnett, who had begun doctoral studies involving his writing; with Richard Rive and Jack Cope in Cape Town; with William Plomer in England. The reader will be struck by the generous energy and open-mindedness Mphahlele brings to each of these correspondences.

His life and work at this time were a conjunction of places and criss-crossing worlds. Mphahlele the teacher, however, was unhappy: having moved from CMS Grammar School to the Department of Extra-Mural Studies at the University of Ibadan, he had become ‘an extra-mural donkey’,⁵ travelling extensively and teaching too many students with utilitarian motives. A cable arrived from Paris: Mercer Cook, retiring Director of African Programmes at the Congress for Cultural Freedom, asking if Mphahlele would be interested in succeeding him. If so, would he come for an interview with the executive director, John Hunt? The Mphahleles moved to Paris in August 1961 and would remain there for two years.

We now know that the congress was funded in part by the CIA through its front organisation, the Farfield Foundation. Guided by the sociologist Edward Shils, the American administration’s Cold War reading of the situation was that the third world’s intelligentsia, as it saw matters, should be supported despite its aggressive cultural nationalism because in that way it would develop a taste for a free public sphere and remain within the United States’s orbit of influence. Whatever the motives behind this project, the outcomes would have been ambiguous for the American administration because the actors, Mphahlele included, made excellent use of the funding.

In addition to supporting Black Orpheus, Transition, and Encounter in Britain, the congress supported a number of South African periodicals, including Contrast, The New African, Africa South and The Classic.⁶ When the truth emerged in 1966, after Mphahlele had left the congress, he was furious: ‘the CIA stinks’, he wrote in a letter to Transition, defending the activity of the African programme on the grounds that it was best judged in its national contexts and insisting that he took the position on the strict assumption that the intellectuals it supported would not be expected to ‘develop with reference to the reflexes of the West’.⁷

Mphahlele certainly made hay as director: he co-organised some of the most seminal conferences in the development of African literary studies, including the famous conference of writers at Makerere University in Kampala in 1962, and he supported various publishing ventures and travelled extensively in Africa, Europe and the United States, facilitating projects and meetings of writers.

The Paris desk of the congress, but more directly, the Mphahlele apartment on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, became the median point for several diasporic cross-currents: South Africa’s relationship with the continent of Africa, writers from inside South Africa and the exiles, anglophone and francophone intellectuals. Through all this, the link with Hughes remained intact. The surviving correspondence does not do justice to this range, but it reveals Mphahlele the organiser, cultural activist and friend.

In 1962 Mphahlele’s stature as critic was established with the publication by Faber and Faber in London of the first edition of The African Image. The following year Mphahlele moved from Paris to Nairobi, initially to found Chemchemi, a cultural centre on the model of Mbari, later to teach at the University of Nairobi. The correspondence from the Nairobi years sees Mphahlele drawing some of his intimates, notably Makhudu Rammopo, closer to him. Surprisingly, since Mphahlele had worked for him many years earlier (between 1941 and 1945) at the Institute for the Blind at Ezenzeleni, Arthur Blaxall’s letters appear only at this stage. The exchanges with William Plomer continue. Dennis Brutus writes from house arrest, hoping for support to leave the country, sharing his thoughts about poetry and protest, and bringing news of Arthur Nortje at Oxford and Bessie Head in Botswana. He sends Mphahlele a remarkable poem written while he was awaiting trial at the Fort in Johannesburg in 1963.

Kenya proved to be another cul-de-sac, however, and Mphahlele began to feel that he needed to refurbish his intellectual resources. He made arrangements to return to literary studies and teaching, this time at the University of Denver in Colorado, where Gerald Chapman, the chair of the English Department, would become a key interlocutor. In the two years he spent at Denver he completed a PhD in Creative Writing, submitting as his thesis The Wanderers, which, after some delay, was published by Macmillan in 1971. An autobiographical fiction dealing in some measure with his relationship with his son, Anthony, The Wanderers begins to develop the motif of restlessness as a personal mythology.

Mphahlele’s wanderings were not entirely driven by the personal myth contained in his novel’s title. More substantially, his restlessness was a function of being a go-getter, an idealist who was unable to resist an opportunity to realise the next vision. Some of his movements also involved a combination of idealism and pragmatism: on completing his doctoral degree he had to leave the United States to satisfy the requirements of the Immigration and Naturalisation Service. He decided to take a senior lectureship in English at the University of Zambia. It was a risky decision, given the judgements made in The Wanderers about exile on the African continent for the South African émigré, but Lusaka was as far south as he could get – the earth would have smelt right to him.

Whatever he was seeking in Lusaka proved to be a mirage, however: ‘settling in has been harder in Zambia than anywhere where we’ve ever migrated’, he confesses to Rammopo. Almost immediately after his arrival, despite financial and legal obstacles over his visa status, with the help of Robert Richardson in Denver he begins to explore the possibility of a return to the United States. Just as the Kenyan experience was to be reinterpreted in The Wanderers, so the Zambian experience was eventually to surface, transmuted, in his last extended fiction and major exploration of postcolonial Africa, Chirundu (1980). The letters from the Lusaka years speak of the contradictory and largely unfulfilled pulls of literary aspiration and a desire for home.

As he prepared for the return to Denver to join the faculty, anticipating that he would teach South African literature he wrote to Plomer and Cope to flesh out his resources. It is interesting that he was determined to reflectall the traditions of South African literature in his teaching, including white English and Afrikaans writing, but the Denver years would see his horizons expanding to embrace diasporic and world literatures. In these years he prepared his major work on African-American literature, Voices in the Whirlwind and Other Essays (1972). Its publication led to a clash with Addison Gayle over the relationships between Black Aesthetics and the Western tradition. The larger implications of this exchange will have to remain unexplored in this brief introduction, but literary historians will be interested in what it reveals about positionality within the diaspora. Mphahlele also prepared the second edition of The African Image (1974) in these years. Some of the emphasis on the cross-cultural tradition of his early South African period is muted in the revised edition in favour of a deeper rootedness in black political and intellectual life.

In 1973 he was offered a full professorship at the ivy-league University of Pennsylvania. While they had been developing for some time it is in the mid-seventies that the signature themes of his mature years – what he calls ‘the tyranny of place’ and African Humanism – began to settle into focus. The correspondence from this period reveals his stature as writer-scholar and public figure, but equally his key intimates share his longings and insecurities: among them are Khabi Mngoma, another lifelong friend and collaborator from the 1940s and by then Professor of Music at the University of Zululand; Makhudu Rammopo, and his eldest child and only daughter, Teresa, to whom he signs off as Ntate, father. In the letters to Teresa, in particular, we see perhaps the most vulnerable side of Mphahlele: his and Rebecca’s worries about their children, especially the effects on them of their parents’ exile.

One would expect Mphahlele to have settled at Penn with the American academy more or less at his feet, but by then the two-year cycle of restlessness seemed to have established itself. By 1975, despite the opprobrium of his fellow exiles, he was thinking of a return to South Africa, with mortality and the fear of dying in the United States gnawing away at him. Readers will find the classic statement of the effects of exile in this period in ‘Portrait of a Man in a Glasshouse’.⁸ Remarkably, he was granted a temporary visa to attend a conference of the Black Studies Institute in Roodepoort in July 1976. With the events and consequences of the Soweto uprising on 16 June vividly around him he returned home; in the prevailing excitement it would have felt as if the end was in sight for the regime in South Africa, and the scene was set for a more permanent return.

What a fraught return it proved to be. Cabinet-level interference forced the homeland authorities and the University of the North to buckle, blocking his appointment to a chair in the Department of English and he was forced to become a school inspector in the ‘homeland’ of Lebowa. His desire to reintegrate with an African community as a scholar and teacher would be ruled by the politics of the ‘Bantustan’. Overtures from the liberal universities – Rhodes, Natal, Cape Town, and the Witwatersrand (Wits) – are attested to in the correspondence, but Mphahlele was not convinced that he should return to his country to teach in a predominantly white university.

In the end, Wits provided the most strategic option because from Johannesburg he was able to reach out to black constituencies close to his roots. One of his many achievements in this regard was to found the Council for Black Education, though he was unable to garner university support for his vision of the establishment of community colleges in or near Soweto. Especially telling in the letters’ account of his return and settlement back in South Africa is the extent to which Mphahlele, having established himself as a world citizen of culture and a major international figure in the black diaspora, had to negotiate his return with white scholars, writers, and officials. Many of them were courteous and well disposed – notably Guy Butler, Nadine Gordimer, and Tim Couzens – but it was largely on the terms of the white establishment that Mphahlele would have to re-establish himself. The position he eventually settled on, as Professor of African Literature in the Division of Comparative and African Literature at Wits (later the Department of African Literature) was the most suitable niche available to him.

The exchanges with Guy Butler in the 1980s are particularly revealing. There is mutual respect, even friendship (‘How are you?’, writes Butler; ‘retired, like me?’ ) but there is also a sense that in presiding over the institutionality of English-language South African literature Butler held a position that in another dispensation might have belonged to Mphahlele himself. Mphahlele’s resignation from the Council of the 1820 Foundation, which is the focus of attention in some of the late letters, expresses this tension. It reveals the extent to which, by the late 1980s and the end of his career, a properly national transformation in which Mphahlele could assume his rightful place as the academic figurehead of English-language literary studies in the country, had still failed to materialise. Meanwhile his interlocutors abroad would continue to position him at the centre of international diasporic literature. The contradiction between national compromise and international veneration is painful to witness.

What do we learn from Mphahlele’s letters that we do not already know from his other writings? There are two questions here: the first is that, like the autobiographies, the letters give us first-person utterance in which we might expect to hear directly from the man; to have his soul bared, as it were. But is this the case? Is the soul so readily available to representation? The second question is that although letters are, like autobiographies, a form of first-person utterance, their distinguishing feature is the presence of another, the addressee. What is the significance of this person-oriented quality of letters and of Mphahlele’s letters in particular? These questions would bear longer scrutiny than we can give them here, for they touch on the relationships between the self and language, between the one who speaks and the one who is spoken about, between autobiography and fiction, and between biography and autobiography.

Mphahlele’s oeuvre is fertile soil for exploring these matters. Chabani Manganyi recognises this in Exiles and Homecomings, which, apart from documenting the life of its subject, explores the question of voice and its relation to selfhood. From his background in psychology (and a particular interest in psychobiography) Manganyi writes the life of Mphahlele in the first person, interspersing his narrative with passages of fictionalised dialogue. These experiments would merit comparison with J M Coetzee’s where he does the opposite, writing autobiography in the third person (in Boyhood 1997 and Youth 2002). In a similar vein, in The Wanderers Mphahlele writes a largely autobiographical narrative through the third-person persona of Timi Tabane.

The common element in these experiments is their recognition that the ‘I’ is always to some degree a fiction: we use it to explain and to explore ourselves and to provide a point of focus for a narrative, the purpose of which is to search for the overarching meaning that lies buried in our experience.

What, then, is the ‘I’ of these letters and do we find here the real Mphahlele? The history of letters and their publication, and the scholarly debates about their relationship with biography, would caution us against this view. The publication of writers’ letters, as part of an attempt to understand what was called their genius, goes back to Europe’s eighteenth-century enlightenment. In that context, Samuel Johnson argued that letters were not the spontaneous expression of personality but a craft, as in any artistic form of expression in which the writer seeks to create a particular impression and adjusts to the expectations of the reader.⁹ In his introduction to this volume Manganyi compares letter writing to the short story: this insight is in keeping with Dr Johnson’s.

What, then, emerges as distinctive about Mphahlele from these pages? Firstly, he frequently wrote in order to reach someone whose presence to him was made especially difficult by circumstance: segregation, apartheid, cultural distance, political risk, family fragmentation, exile – these are the typical conditions which Mphahlele seeks to overcome in his correspondence. Under such conditions the act of letter writing is both a personal necessity and an ethical gesture, an expression of human solidarity.

The second distinctive feature of Mphahlele’s letters is their extraordinary openness, the generosity with which he gives himself to his interlocutor. The ability to identify with another and to inhabit several personae simultaneously has long been recognised as a gift of any good writer, but what Mphahlele brings to these encounters is a distinctive quality of trust: the person matters deeply to him. A measure of Mphahlele’s calibre in this regard is that he is seldom wrong-footed when it comes to tone, and the tone of Mphahlele’s letters is a direct result of the relationship and therefore an expression of his emotional and intellectual integrity.

Collections of letters are rare in South African literature. As Manganyi observed of the first edition, it may well have been the first published collection of the correspondence of a black South African writer. Since then, two collections of Bessie Head’s correspondence have been published.¹⁰ In this volume, we have a rare thing: the record of a complex human being – writer, friend, teacher, critic, public intellectual, father – in dialogue with others during the most difficult years of modern South Africa’s history, fashioning in these exchanges his unique testimony of an artist’s relationship to his times. If there ever was, or is, a republic of letters, one might begin looking for it here.

David Attwell

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¹ N Chabani Manganyi. 1984. ‘ Introduction’, Bury Me at the Marketplace: Selected Letters of Es’kia Mphahlele 1943-1980 . Johannesburg: Skotaville Publishers, p 1.

² ‘Your History Demands Your Heartbeat: Historical Survey of the Encounter Between Africans and African Americans’. In Es’kia Mphahlele, Es’kia (Johannesburg: Kwela Books, in association with Stainbank and Associates, 2002), p 173.

³ Mphahlele, E. 1984. Afrika My Music: An Autobiography 1957-1983 . Johannesburg: Ravan, 1984, p 20.

⁴ Ibid, pp 20-21.

⁵ Ibid, p 30.

⁶ Peter McDonald. 2009. The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences . Oxford: OUP, p 123.

⁷ Ibid, p 126.

⁸ Es’kia , pp 233-236.

⁹ James Biester. 1988. ‘ Samuel Johnson on Letters’. Rhetorica 6(2), Spring, p 146.

¹⁰ Randolph Vigne and Bessie Head. 1991. A Gesture of Belonging: Letters from Bessie Head, 1965-1979 . London: Heinemann; Patrick Cullinan, ed. 2005. Imaginative Trespasser: Letters between Bessie Head and Patrick and Wendy Cullinan, 19631977 . Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press.

CORRESPONDENTS

Please note that each correspondent in this volume does not appear in the list of correspondents. The editors have provided background information on correspondents that feature prominently. Some correspondents exchanged very few letters, and information about these people is provided briefly in a note after the letter concerned.

Lionel Abrahams (1928-2004), Johannesburg-based poet, novelist, essayist and mentor to countless young writers. He founded and edited the literary magazines Purple Renoster, Quarry and Sesame, publishing the work of Mphahlele among many other black writers. In 1971 he launched Renoster Books, which published the first works of Oswald Mtshali and Mongane Wally Serote. From 1975 he ran an influential writing workshop at the Johannesburg Art Foundation.

Chinua Achebe, Nigerian novelist, poet and essayist, best known for his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), which is the most widely read novel in modern African literature. He was the consulting editor for Heinemann for the African Writers Series. He is currently the Charles P Stevenson Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, in the USA.

Kofi Awoonor, Ghanaian poet, novelist, critic and commentator on African and global politics. He has held several ambassadorial positions, representing Ghana in Brazil, Cuba and at the UN, where he was Chairman of the Committee on Implementation of UN Resolutions Against Apartheid. In December 1975 he was arrested in Ghana on suspicion of being involved in a military coup, an experience he would later recount in two volumes of poems, House by the Sea and Until the Morning After (both published by the Greenfield Review 1978 and 1987).

Houston A Baker Jr, Professor of English and Director of the Afro-American Studies Programme at the University of Pennsylvania from 1974 to 1977. He and Mphahlele, who both joined the English department in the summer of 1974, maintained a long friendship (cf Exiles and Homecomings, pp 275-80). He is currently a distinguished professor in the English Department at Vanderbilt University.

Ursula A Barnett, independent scholar. Her critical biography of Mphahlele, Ezekiel Mphahlele, was published in 1976 and A Vision of Order: A Study of Black South African Literature in English appeared in 1983.

Arthur Blaxall (1891-1970), a clergyman who was born in Britain and came to South Africa in 1923, initially to work with the deaf. In 1939 he opened the first workshop for blind Africans in South Africa – Ezenzeleni, in Roodepoort – where he was superintendent until 1950. It is there that he met Mphahlele. A supporter of the struggle against apartheid, from the early 1960s he channelled funds to former political prisoners and their families who were in need. This led to his arrest in April 1963 and conviction under the Suppression of Communism Act. After spending a night and a day in prison he was paroled and the rest of his sentence suspended. He left soon afterwards for Britain. His autobiography, Suspended Sentence, was published in 1965.

Gunnar Boklund, former Professor of English at the University of Denver in Colorado. His close association with Mphahlele started during the latter’s student days in the mid-1960s and continued after Mphahlele’s return from Zambia in 1970 to join the English department as associate professor.

Edward Kamau Brathwaite, one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon, was co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement and is noted for his studies of black cultural life both in Africa and throughout the African diaspora.

Andre Brink, novelist, playwright and critic and Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Cape Town. He played a major role in the struggle against censorship after his Kennis van die Aand (1973) was the first Afrikaans novel to be banned. Many of his sixteen novels have been written in both English and Afrikaans. He has been honoured by the governments of France and post-apartheid South Africa.

Sonia Bronstein was, during the period covered by the correspondence, administrative secretary to the chair of the English department at the University of Denver. She became a family friend of the Mphahleles.

Dennis Brutus, teacher, political activist and poet, taught for fourteen years in South Africa, where he participated in many anti-apartheid campaigns, particularly those concerned with sport; activities which resulted in his being served with a banning order and subsequently to his being arrested for contravening the ban. After serving an eighteen month sentence on Robben Island he was permitted to leave South Africa on an exit permit. For a time he taught in London, then, in 1970, took a position as a visiting professor of English at the University of Denver, after which he moved to Northwestern University and later to the University of Pittsburgh.

Frederick Guy Butler (1918-2001), academic, poet and writer, lectured in English at the University of the Witwatersrand and later at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, where he was first senior lecturer then Professor and Head of English. He remained there until his retirement in 1987, when he was appointed emeritus professor and honorary research fellow. Butler was influential in achieving the recognition of South African English Literature as an accepted discipline.

Gwendolen Carter (1906-1991), one of the founders of African Studies in the United States and among the best-known scholars of African affairs in the twentieth century. She was born in Canada but moved to the United States, where she completed a master’s degree and a doctorate in political science. She taught political science at Smith College and later African Affairs at Northwestern University, Indiana University and the University of Florida. After a trip to South Africa in the 1940s, she became interested in African affairs and specialised in the politics and economy of Southern Africa, making many research trips to South Africa and detailing the dynamics of political change in Africa in several books, including the four-volume From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa 1882-1964.

Gerald Chapman was Professor of English at the University of Denver. In a letter dated 14 March 1966 Mphahlele was introduced to Chapman, then chairperson of the English department, by Herbert L Shore, then consultant in drama at University College (Dar es Salaam). Soon afterwards Mphahlele and Chapman started an exchange of letters relating to the former’s admission into the United States and the PhD programme in creative writing at the University of Denver.

Syl Cheney-Coker, journalist, writer and poet, was born in Sierra Leone. He studied literature at the University of Oregon, later spent time at UCLA and Wisconsin, was visiting professor of English at the University of the Philippines and senior lecturer at the University of Maiduguri, Nigeria. On his return to Freetown he became head of cultural affairs for Radio Sierra Leone. In 1991 his novel, The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Africa Region. In 1997 after a coup in Sierra Leone he returned to the USA and settled in Las Vegas.

Jack Cope (1913-1991), South African-born novelist, short-story writer, poet and editor, began his career on the Natal Mercury before going to London as political correspondent for South African newspapers. He returned to South Africa at the outbreak of the Second World War. Cope published eight novels, more than a hundred short stories and three collections of poetry, the last in association with C J Driver. From 1960 to 1980 he edited Contrast, a bilingual literary magazine. In 1980 he moved to England.

Timothy Couzens, literary and social historian and critic, is an honorary professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he originally taught English and later became a member of the African Studies Institute. His works include the study of the life and work of H I E Dhlomo referred to in his correspondence with Mphahlele. His most recent publication is the collaboration with former Robben Island prisoner Ahmed Kathrada on the story of Kathrada’s life. Couzens met Mphahlele for the first time at an African Literature conference at the University of Texas (Austin) in 1975. From then on the two maintained a steady correspondence up to and including the time of Mphahlele’s permanent return from exile in 1977.

Adriaan (Ad) Donker (1934-2002), born in The Netherlands and trained there and in the United States, was the founder of AD Donker (Johannesburg), a publishing company committed to nurturing andpublishing South African literature in English. His anthology Soweto Poetry: To Whom it May Concern introduced South Africans to the work of some of the country’s now iconic poets. Donker, who was awarded an honorary doctorate in literature by the University of Natal in 2000, was founding director of Durban’s Centre for Creative Arts.

CJ (Jonty) Driver was President of the National Union of South African Students in 1963 and again in 1964. After spending time in solitary confinement in 1964 he left for England, where he had a long and successful teaching career, for 23 years of which he was a headmaster. For more than 20 years the South African authorities prohibited him from returning to the country. His biography, Patrick Duncan, South African and Pan-African (referred to in his letter written in July 1976) was published in 1980 and immediately banned in South Africa.

Dennis Duerden (died 2007) began his career as an education officer in the Nigerian colonial service. He then became assistant curator at the Jos Museum in Nigeria in 1956 moving on to become director of the Hausa service of the BBC World Service in London. In the early 1960s he established the transcription centre, where he built up a tape archive of interviews with African writers, some of which are featured in the 1972 book, African Writers Talking, which he edited with Cosmo Pieterse. The centre also published the influential Cultural Events in Africa and introduced the work of African writers, artists and musicians to the London scene.

Patrick Duncan (1918-1967) was the son of a Governor-General of South Africa, born in Johannesburg, educated at Winchester School and Balliol College, Oxford. He and Mphahlele met in what is now Lesotho where Duncan worked for the British colonial service, from which he was to resign in order to take part in the South African liberation struggle. Holding strong anti-communist views, he sought membership of the ANC but later joined the Liberal Party (editing the journal Contact). After a banning order he abandoned non-violent opposition and joined the Pan-Africanist Congress, for a short while representing the PAC in Algeria.

Ian Glenn, formerly Head of the English Department at the University of Cape Town, is Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Centre for Film and Media Studies at UCT. His research interests are media in the new South Africa, political communication, audience studies, media technologies, environmental media and the literature of exploration.

Stephen Gray, writer, academic and critic, was Professor of English at the Rand Afrikaans University in Johannesburg until 1992. He has published eight novels, is a prolific poet and has edited numerous anthologies. He edited the 2006 Penguin Modern Classics edition of Mphahlele’s short fiction (In Corner B) and worked with Mphahlele on the PMC 2006 edition of Alfred Hutchinson’s Road to Ghana.

Nadine Gordimer, recipient of the 1991 Nobel Prize for literature and Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. Author of fifteen novels, sixteen short story collections and numerous essays, she was a committed anti-apartheid activist and supporter of many black South African writers, Mphahlele among them. She has been vice-president of International PEN, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was a founder of the Congress of South African Writers. Mphahlele was introduced to Gordimer by Norah Taylor in the late 1940s.

Andrew Gurr, born in Leicester, England, grew up in New Zealand and studied at the University of Auckland and Cambridge. He taught at the universities of Wellington, Leeds, Nairobi (at which he was head of department) and Reading. He has written two books on African literature but is best known for his work on Shakespeare and his contemporaries and Renaissance theatre.

Norman Hodge, editor of To Kill a Man’s Pride and Other Stories from Southern Africa, was Professor of English at the University of Transkei. He has written literary criticism on Mphahlele, including an essay on the short story, ‘Mrs Plum’, published in English in Africa in 1981, soon after the ban on Mphahlele’s work was lifted.

Langston Hughes (1902-1967), novelist, short-story writer, poet and playwright, specialised in insightful verbal portraits of black life in America from the 1920s to the 1960s, some of them influenced by his engagement with the world of jazz. His life and work had an important influence on the artistic contribution of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Mphahlele’s essay on Hughes, which appeared in Black Orpheus in 1961, was probably the first literary appreciation of this great American poet by an African scholar or literary critic. Their mutual interest in Hughes also provided a literary link between Richard Rive and Mphahlele.

Stuart James, who was Professor of English at the University of Denver, Colorado, came to know Mphahlele first as a student and later as a colleague in the English Department. On 31 August 1976 James wrote a strong letter of recommendation to the University of theNorth in Pietersburg (now Polokwane), South Africa, supporting Mphahlele’s application for the chair of English at that university.

Martin Jarrett-Kerr CR (1912-1991), a monk of the Community of the Resurrection and an early opponent of apartheid, first encountered Mphahlele in the 1940s when Mphahlele was working as a typist-clerk and instructor at Ezenzeleni under the Rev Dr Arthur Blaxall. Jarrett-Kerr was, at that time, associated with St Peter’s Priory in Rosettenville, Johannesburg. He later returned to England. A literary critic in his own right he published studies on D H Lawrence, among other writers.

Edward A Lindell, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Denver at the time negotiations were under way to secure Mphahlele’s return to Denver from the University of Zambia in Lusaka in the course of 1969.

Bernth Lindfors, former professor at the University of Texas in Austin, and one of the founding members of the African Literature Association (ALA), founding editor of the Journal of African Literature, and editor of the bibliography Black African Literature in English. He amassed over forty years one of the largest private collections of African literature, comprising some 13 000 books, journals and rare tape and video material, now housed at the Centre for African Literary Studies (CALS) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg).

Teresa Mphahlele was born in South Africa in 1950, the second of the Mphahlele children and the only girl among four boys. After her parents’ return from exile 1977 she, like her brothers, continued to live in the United States.

Khabi Mngoma (1922-1999), a lifelong friend of Mphahlele, was a leading figure in the world of South African music who facilitated the careers of many musicians both in South Africa and in the southern African region. He founded the Music Department of the University of Zululand, the Ionian Music Society and Youth Orchestra and the Khongisa Academy for the Performing Arts. Shortly before his death he was honoured by then President Nelson Mandela with a Presidential Award for merit.

Njabulo Ndebele, writer, teacher and researcher, was vice-chancellor and principal of the University of Cape Town from 2000 to 2008. During a distinguished academic career he was a successor to Mphahlele as the chair of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand. His collection of short fiction, ‘Fools’ and other Stories, received the Noma award for the best book published in Africa in 1983 and was joint winner of the Sanlam prize for outstanding fiction in 1986. His influential critical essays are published in The Rediscovery of the Ordinary and Fine Lines from the Box. His latest work of fiction is The Cry of Winnie Mandela.

Isidore Okpewho, State University of New York Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies, English and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University, was born in Nigeria. His areas of specialisation are African and comparative literatures, with an emphasis on comparative oral traditions. He has also published four novels, The Last Duty winning the African Arts Prize for Literature in 1976 and Tides winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa in 1993.

James Olney, the Voorhies Professor of English and Professor of French and Italian at Louisiana State University and a