The Matriarchive as Life Knowledge in Es’kia Mphahlele’s African Humanism

Abstract

Prominent South African writer of the black diaspora Es’kia Mphahlele attributes his humanist consciousness to his grandmother and mother. His various forms of life writing (blurring the boundaries of fiction, memoir and scholarship) suggest how decolonizing the mind entails a voyage into the self, which is simultaneously a return to the source. Referring to examples of Mphahlele’s writing, I make a case for oral traditions passed on from matrilineal members of the family to their (grand)children as foundational to the formation of self and subjectivity within the larger cultural biography of black intellectual culture and the black radical tradition. I position the women of the matriarchive as critical thinkers, and their gendered knowledge as vital to the decolonial imperative which underscores Mphahlele’s consciousness.