Ezekiel Mphahlele (1919–2008)

A collection of short stories from across a wide segment of Mphahlele’s career, originally published when he was living in Nairobi in 1967, but reissued with a few extra pieces after his death. Early pieces like “The unfinished story” and “Man must live” show him as a young writer casting around for subject-matter and finding it in the lives of Black people in apartheid South Africa; at the other end of the book “Women and their men” and “Crossing over” show him taking show more subtle artistic approaches to specific issues in South African life — the Soweto school protests and the forced resettlement of Black people to “homelands”. In between there is a wide variety of styles and techniques going on, from the extended first-person narrative of “Mrs Plum” — the story of a domestic servant working for a liberal white intellectual — to the more abstract third-person narrative of the title story, “In Corner B”, where we follow the events surrounding a funeral in a Black township from the point of view of the widow. There’s also “A point of identity”, where a narrator who is clearly meant to be Mphahlele himself tells us about his neighbour, a man who identifies in every meaningful way with the Black residents of Corner B but nonetheless decides, when the government forces the issue, that he will have to claim the privilege of being officially “Coloured” through his white father. There are also a couple of pieces dating from Mphahlele’s time in Nigeria and set there.
Some tough reminders of the absurdities and painful realities of apartheid. Mphahlele is always hard but reasonable — there is no room for gratuitous pathos and sentiment here, the facts are enough to stand for themselves. show less

In this memoir, Mphahlele describes the first 38 years of his life, up to the moment when he went into exile in 1957 to teach in Nigeria. He talks about his early childhood living with his father's parents in a village in a "tribal area" of northern Transvaal, then his teens when he lived with his mother in Marabastad township ("Second Avenue") outside Pretoria, the most detailed section of the book, and the part that reads most like a novel. We move on to his difficult struggle to get an show more education, always haunted by the knowledge of the sacrifices his single mother was making to pay his fees (she works as a domestic servant, does white people's laundry, and brews and sells illegal beer), and his determination not to fail at any point. He qualifies as a teacher, and, after a spell in a clerical job at an institution for the blind, goes to teach at Orlando High School just in time to get swept up in the campaign against the Bantu Education Acts of the 1950s. As secretary of the Transvaal Teachers' Association, he is sacked and blacklisted by the Education Department, and eventually finds work on Drum magazine until he can get permission to leave South Africa.

Although this is the story of an ambitious self-improver who is transformed by circumstances into a community activist who comes close to destroying his family's livelihood through the work he is doing for others, Mphahlele's modesty (plus perhaps legitimate concerns for colleagues still in South Africa) means there isn't much emphasis on how this transformation in his character happened, or on the actual political work he was doing. We have to follow his political development indirectly, through the many little descriptions of incidents in his life that make clear the nastiness of the mid-20th century South African system and the way it made internalised racism inevitable for both black and white South Africans.

A wonderfully-written, warm, sympathetic account of growing up in difficult conditions in a lively, dangerous community, but also a chilling, clear-sighted indictment of the racism, self-interest and inequality that underlay that situation. show less

A 1979 novel about tyranny by a South African writer. It's divided into three sections, named for each of the three main characters:

• Chirundu, the ambitious government minister, convinced he is “destined for great things”
• Tirenje, Chirundu’s devoted wife, who divorces him after he takes a second wife in secret
• Moyo, Chirundu’s nephew, a trade union activist who leads a strike against his uncle’s transport ministry

Trust me, I have not spoiled the plot; the facts given above are all show more revealed quite early in the book.

The three sections are bracketed by chorus-like comic passages involving two refugee prisoners, from Zimbabwe and South Africa. Sometimes they converse with their visitors, Moyo or a South African teacher called Studs Letanka. The tale is set in a fictionalized Malawi immediately before and after independence, in the 1950s and '60s. There is a python motif throughout the book. The characters come from a kaleidoscope of ethnic groups: Bemba, Lozi, Tumbuka, Tonga [Chi]Nyanja, etc. History is invoked, and there are memories of wars with Ngoni and with Yao slave raiders. Studs Letanka says:

…we must know where we came from to understand where we are — where we’re going — we must remember — that’s a tremendous gift — memory — you know what I mean? Not to forget. But we cannot now hold ceremonies over the millions dead and gone during the long journey in slavery — the journey across the seas. Memory should strengthen us, it should not detain us in the funeral parlour or at the graveside — it gets tiresome to have to keep going to funerals without corpses — I am tired, God! —

That’s a good sample of Mphahlele’s loquacious, unpolished, introspective style. This is a book of thoughts and anxieties about the future. show less

Stories about ordinary people in 1960s/70s South Africa (plus a couple about Nigerian life). His stories are often subtle and very, very telling observations on the price of apartheid on specific individuals while illustrating the horrors and costs of that system.