Es'kia Mphahlele Heritage Foundation 3.2

ESKIA MPHAHLELE: A South African writer whose 1959 memoir Down Second Avenue vividly dramatized the injustice of apartheid and became a landmark work of South African Literature.

He wrote essays, short stories and novels. He was best known for Down Second Avenue a searing account of his boyhood and early manhood.

(In an essay in The Star, the journalist and editor Barney Mthombothi wrote “If Nelson Mandela is our political star, Mphahlele was his literary equivalent.)

Collecting and delivering the laundry his grandmother washed for the white customers, Ezekiel learned his place in South African society.At the same time he excelled in school and attended a progressive secondary school that left him he later said detribalized, Westernized but still African. The conflict, both social and artistic, between African and Western identities would become an important theme in his work.

After training as a teacher, Mr Mphahlele worked as a secretary at a school for the blind and began contributing short stories to drum, New Age and other magazines.In 1945 he married Rebecca Mochadibane.

While teaching English and Afrikaans at a Johannesburg High School, he earned a B.A and M.A in English literature from the University Of South Africa and published his first book of stories Man Must Live in (1946).His career as an educator came to a sudden halt however after he publicly agitated against the discriminatory Bantu Education Act. Barred from teaching in SA he struggled to survive and in 1957 emigrated.

I was suddenly seized by a desire to leave SA for more sky to soar he wrote at the end of Down Second Avenue.He was, he complained shriveling in the acid of my bitterness.In his first novel The Wanderers (1971), Mphahlele offered a sweeping view of African racial problems as seen through the eyes of an exile very much like himself. While in exile he also published two well regarded works of criticism the African Image (1962) and Voices in the Whirlwind (1972).

In 1977 Mphahlele surprised friends and family by giving up his University post to return to South Africa.” I couldn’t grasp the cultural goals of Americans found them so fragmented. What am I contributing to American education? I had no answer.

He became the first black Professor he taught African literature and created a department devoted to the subject. He also wrote two novels Chirundu (1980), Father Come Home (1984) as well as volume of memoirs Africa My Music (1984).

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He is a recipient of many awards and honorary degrees from different Universities around South Africa. Received the Southern Cross from Former President Mandela. Received numerous awards for lifetime achiever.

Profesor Es'kia Mphahlele died on the 27th October 2008 at the ripe age of 88years.He as received a posthumous award on the 6th of December 2008 from Mapungubwe in collaboration with the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture.