ES'KIA MPHAHLELE

A BIBLIOGRAPHY

Compiled by

Catherine Woeber and John Read

Digitised by the University of Pretoria, Library Services, 2011

INTRODUCTION
Bibliographies are tools for specialists. Austere lists of essentials which researchers must tinker with and tug into lively essays or books. Only researchers can release the spunk and vigour that bibliographies so mutely hold. Perhaps bibliographies are like grocery lists which barely hint at the tastiness to come. But this bibliography is different. Try as it might, this one can't mask the vibrance of Letobe Ezekiel Mphahlele's lifetime of writings, for here is a map through a most unusual career of creativity and scholarship. On its own it marks an exercise in exact and precise scholarship which incurred countless hours to compile. Not simply because of the usual rigours required of bibliographers, but precisely because Mphahlele's writing has been strewn far afield and in the most diverse publications. Besides, and I don't think we can play this down, he is the frrst Black South African to be so truly international. So, who is this writer with an unpronounceable name and what could have prompted NELM into this exhausting exercise? This comprehensive and up-to-date list displays the frowns and sparkles of a remarkably rich imagination and intellect. Here is a creative writer and a deep thinker on display. An astute and delicate mind that has pondered personal experience in two autobiographies. His first, Down Second Avenue, is widely accepted as a classic and has been translated into about twenty languages world-wide. He has also written three novels, four collections of short stories with several others unanthologised, and a number of poems. He has convened and addressed a great number of conferences, delivered a vast number of public lectures and produced a veritable mountain of many critical articles on literature, education and culture. Selections are contained in two texts, The African Image, and Voices in

Digitised by the University of Pretoria, Library Services, 2011

NELM BIBLIOGRAPHIES

the Whirlwind. What makes this bibliography particularly exceptional is that Es'kia
Mphahlele has worked in nearly every literary category. And in their turn, several scholars have written about his work. The full industry is represented here. By his own proud admission he is obsessed with teaching and has taught at institutions in Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia and the USA. Teaching has always been an obsessive love - the mere presence in a classroom seemed to whisk away even his deepest fatigue. He lives an insistent and pressllred present and enjoys its every moment. At times he may grumble at the daily pile of mail (and a pile it is), or at the dozens of requests made on his time; but there are always signs of a thrill. A great listener, his patience is unfathomable. When he is with students time simply melts away - he listens, agrees, corrects, guides, and listens some more. Teaching is his faith and the drama of the classroom a major ritual of his life. His achievements grew out of ghetto beginnings, and from under daunting odds. In his frrst autobiography he recalls:

The class teacher said I was backward. The principal said I was backward. My aunt said I was backward. So said everybody. My Mother didn't know. I had no choice but to acknowledge it. So when I was placed in Standard Three instead of continuingfrom Standard Four, it didn't occur to me that they might be wrong.
From here he moved briskly to delivery boy and tea-maker to a frrm of Johannesburg lawyers, to clerk-typist at an institute for the blind, to reluctant journalist on Drum Magazine (after he was barred from teaching because he challenged the proposed Bantu Education scheme), and late to an academic of the highest international esteem. Along the way he picked up a nomination for the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Ordre des Palmes Medal from the French Government for his contributions to French language a.nd culture. Arts Afrique/African Arts magazine of the University of California awarded his first novel, The Wanderers, their frrst prize as the best African novel for 1968/69. There have also been a number of prestigious visiting lectureships, including a stint at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Farfield Fellowship and most recently, in 1988/89, a Fulbright Professorship. Es'kia Mphahlele's academic qualifications are impressive. He obtained his Bachelors, Honours and Masters degrees by correspondence through the University of South Africa. His Masters was awarded with distinction and the frrst such honour accorded a Black South African. Denver University admitted him to the PhD and welcomed hi."l1 to their faculty over a double sojourn. In recent years he has collected honoris causa Doctorates from Pennsylvania, Natal and Rhodes Universities.

Digitised by the University of Pretoria, Library Services, 2011

ES'KIA MPHAHLELE

Everything adds up to a sober scholar too busy to do much else besides teach and write! Yet many of us think of him also as a maverick. Despite his stately .wardrobe of quietly dramatic African shirts, he is known also for his reverberating . laughter; for his playful prose in letters to friends; for the outlandish, and certainly unforgiveable actions such as the axing of a piano and the uprooting of a fully-grown and bearing crab apple tree. Many of us know him also as the boy who got his cinema fare paid to read the subtitles in the silent movies - a service for his illiterate friends. We know him also for confronting a hand-cuffed house burglar with such questions as:

Answer me this, why did you have to rob me? What did I ever do to you?
when he knew full well that the burglar's blank stare simply made Mphahlele the bigger fool for asking. We know him also for urinating on a national hero's tombstone in the vain hope that the stone would itch enough to feel some guilt at enjoying monument status over the anonymous African who had guided the heroic ride. Only to wonder whether the African guide even deserved his protest - after all, he had no damn business being party to the whole adventure anyway! Users should picture a portly gentleman with something of a comical swaying gait (no swagger, mind you). Picture a father who in a whisper bribed his youngest son out of an extra helping of creme custard, or someone who checked into a South Carolina sleep clinic only to fmd he slept more soundly than he could ever remember; and this before any specialists could even observe his sleep patterns - except that the excursion cost him $800! Picture a pensive thinker whose very soft hands often wield a very sharp pen. Here then is an exhaustive listing that would titillate and satisfy every reader's taste. It is every bit as much a reading list which ought to appeal to both the researcher and to anyone curious enough to want to touch the texture of a noted Black South African mind. Peter N. Thuynsma Johannesburg, 1989

Digitised by the University of Pretoria, Library Services, 2011