WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2008-10-30 Time: 07:00:06 Posted By: Jan
By Barney Mthombothi
Es’kia Mphahlele, a titan of African letters, died on Tuesday at 89. It is difficult to put Mphahlele’s life in a box. The breadth of his life experiences, his works and his vision defy any description.
Mbulelo Mzamane described him as a true icon of modern African letters. Don Mattera called him a sage. It was not an exaggeration.
For a period that spanned a whole generation, Mphahlele was at the forefront of articulating, and reflecting on our pains like no other writer.
His first book came out in 1947. His was an extraordinary life; a journey that took him around the world. To call him an African literary giant, while a compliment, is perhaps to limit his influence to a place.
He was a man of the world.
It is an indictment of our society that Mphahlele, twice nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, was hardly celebrated in his own country, let alone known.
Most of his books are out of print. Mphahlele’s publishers, whoever they are, do not deserve this icon in their list.
If Nelson Mandela is our political star, Mphahlele was his literary equivalent. He earned many honours and awards, too numerous to mention here.
Mphahlele’s life mirrored and straddled almost every barrier imaginable. It came through lucidly in his works.
Born in Marabastad, outside Pretoria, he was taken to Maupaneng in then Northern Transvaal when he was five to stay with his paternal grandmother.
Big as fate, as forbidding as a mountain, stern as a mimosa tree, he described her in Down Second Avenue, his authoritative autobiography that has become a classic.
“She was not the smiling type. When she tried, she succeeded in leering muddily.”
At the age of 13 he and his siblings came back to stay with their mother and abusive father in Marabastad.
His father was soon to disappear and never to be seen again after he was found guilty and sentenced for assaulting his mother.
Women feature prominently in Mphahlele’s youth – his grannies, aunts and of course his mother, who with meagre resources miraculously puts him through high school.
As with all black people, apartheid – or its consequences – is a constant companion.
In 1952 he was banned from teaching for campaigning against the introduction of Bantu education in black schools.
Finally he decided he has had enough of this country, and wanted to leave for Nigeria.
Again apartheid would not let him. After many fruitless attempts, he finally, through the intervention of a black DRC pastor, got an audience with a bureaucrat in Pretoria, but not before pleading for his passport in Afrikaans.
“The pastor struck me as having had years of training in patience,” Mphahlele remarked.
In Nigeria, he threw himself into the literary scene, and rubbed shoulders with the likes of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo and JP Clark (America, their America).
In the early 1960s, while working in Paris he came into contact with literary and political personalities from Francophone Africa such as Leopold Senghor, Sembene Ousmane, Aime Cesaire and many others, and many a debate was had on Negritude.
Professional duties also took him all over Europe and Africa.
Wherever he was, be it Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia or the US, the trajectory of his sojourn meant he was always part of the literary scene.
He explored and discovered the world, but more important, it was also a journey of self-discovery.
Mphahlele completed the circle when in 1977, exactly 20 years since he left this country. He came back home. His return met with opposition from certain quarters.
But he said it was influenced by a desire to participate in the functional development of the African consciousness. He could not do that from exile.
In 1955 he wrote an article on the dilemma of the African intellectual which is still well-regarded. In a life of so much frustration, and conditions that placed even the basic things out of reach, the masses look up to the educated man to lift them out of the bog, he wrote.
“They expect him to win for them political and financial power. The intellectual has not lived up to these expectations.”
He could have been referring to present-day South Africa, especially the black elite’s single-minded pursuit of wealth, to the exclusion of everything and everybody else.