Ezekiel Mphahlele Research Articles

The University Of Zambia and the Liberation of Southern Africa, 1966–90

This article examines the role of the University of Zambia (UNZA) in relation to the liberation of southern Africa, and seeks to cast light on Zambia's often ambivalent role. A contradiction emerged between the Zambian government's support for liberation abroad and its intolerance of criticism at home. The university came to be seen as a centre of opposition and was often a place of conflict. I seek to answer a number of questions. What was the role of exiled academics and intellectuals, such as Jack Simons, Ben Magubane, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi and Fay Chung, at the university in the first two decades of its existence? Why did issues relating to the liberation struggle become points of conflict in the major crises of 1971 and 1976? What was the role of the founders of the Chikwakwa Theatre – and the exponents of ‘theatre for development’, John Reed, Michael Etherton and Fay Chung – in the radicalisation of the student body? What role did UNZA staff such as Simons, Magubane and Chung play in the life of the liberation movements to which they belonged? What was the role of UNZA in the training of students who went on to play important roles in liberation movements and in government on their return to their home countries? What were the links, from an UNZA perspective, between the liberation struggles waged by exile groups based in Zambia and the demand for democracy in Zambia itself?

Cultural Exchange in a Black Atlantic Web: South African Literature, Langston Hughes, and Negritude

Research Article| December 01 2014 Cultural Exchange in a Black Atlantic Web: South African Literature, Langston Hughes, and Negritude Shane Graham Shane Graham Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2014) 60 (4): 481–512. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2014-1006 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Shane Graham; Cultural Exchange in a Black Atlantic Web: South African Literature, Langston Hughes, and Negritude. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 December 2014; 60 (4): 481–512. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2014-1006 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This I Remember

was fortunate indeed to be present at the inaugural meeting of the African Literature Association in Austin, Texas in the spring of 1975. remember it was a cold spring in New Hampshire so going to Texas was a double blessing! remember that visiting guests were housed in dormitory rooms-it was inexpensive; it was personal; it was friendly. It said a good deal about the ALA in the beginning.The first meeting was unlike any that were to follow in that writers, not academics, sat on center stage. do not remember any other conference with so many distinguished writers. It was like being present at a meeting of the gods. And the writers wrestled with no holds barred.Today some of the principal issues facing Africa include systematic rape, corruption, civil conflict, China's role on the continent, the need for transparency, and democracies that are democrazies. In 1975 the struggle against apartheid dominated. In 1974 Portugal was forced to let go of her African territories. Now all attention turned to South Africa and to the man whose long walk to freedom paralleled that of his continent.In 1975 Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country was often taught in American schools, but non-white voices were seldom heard. The Austin Conference told South Africa's story from Sharpeville to Soweto by writers old and young. Veterans Ezekiel Mphahlele, Mazizi Kunene, Dennis Brutus and Cosmo Pieterse shared platforms with a younger generation, mostly of poets, who were strongly influenced by strident rhythms and social activism of the African American community-writers like James Baldwin, Ishmael Reed, Sonia Sanchez and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). Three dynamic young South African poets Willy Kgositsile, Wally Serote and Oswald Mtshali stood up in Austin, stood up to declare, I fling the gauntlet at your feet. This remember.In the beginning the ALA was not just another academic organization. There was passion and a sense that literature mattered. Scholars were there to serve Africa and that meant forming networks to help each other. Something important was happening. From Africa, from Europe, from Canada, from Australia, from the Caribbean, from USA, scholars and literary people came together. This remember.In the beginning the ALA was exciting. Each spring eagerly looked forward to our annual meeting to renew friendships, to meet with publishers, to be stimulated by writers and academics who knew more than I. would always leave the Conference with new books to read, new avenues to research. Over the years, however, as the ALA grew, it lost, or seemed to lose, that personal sense, that intellectual integrity that characterized the early years. …

‘Letters ... in the thick of affairs’: The place of fiction in Africa South , 1957–61

What could fiction and cultural debate bring to readers of the magazine Africa South ? In the late 1950s this magazine published political, economic, legal and other analyses of social life in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as polemics and journalism by writers variously but militantly opposed to the apartheid government’s policies in South Africa. The purpose of its editor, Ronald Segal, was to foster a broad front of opposition to racism at home and to connect with international intellectual movements opposing colonialism and racism. This article argues from Bakhtin’s observations about the radical instability of the sign in fiction, that fiction requires a different kind of reading from factual report. It demonstrates how the short stories in Africa South could enjoin on readers a conscious responsibility for sense-making and interpretation. This awareness created a questioning relation to text and thence to external realities that was in itself fundamentally oppositional and hospitable to the subject of socio-political change, for which the magazine as a whole argued. The writers considered here include both the famous and the forgotten: Ezekiel Mphahlele, Alan Paton, Tony O’Dowd and Noel Frieslich. Attention is on the semiotics of reading rather than on the contents of the short stories discussed. Because expectations of fiction change with the times, my question is necessarily an historical one. The article goes on to compare the climate of the 1950s with that of the more revolutionary 1980s, and with the present. For the present era Njabulo S Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela stands as a possibly representative text.

The Dassie and the Hunter: A South African Meeting, by Jeff Opland

Reviewed by: The Dassie and the Hunter: A South African Meeting Ntongela Masilela The Dassie and the Hunter: A South African Meeting By Jeff Opland. Durban: U of KwaZulu-Natal P, 2005. 389 pp. ISBN 1-86914-036-2 hardback. In this unusual but pertinent book, Jeff Opland reconstructs the interaction between himself, an eminent scholar of Xhosa literature, and David Livingstone Phakamile Yali-Manisi (1926–1999), the distinguished Xhosa imbongi (poet), which occurred across nearly three decades from 1970 to 1999. It is very rare to find a scholar or a researcher and the subject work in proximity to each other, in fact, in mutual reciprocity with each other about their common passion, in this instance Xhosa literature. The generic form of the book is not easily classifiable, since it is as much an autobiography of Opland’s own engagement with the poetic output of his subject, as it is a biographical sketch of the intellectual trajectory of this imbongi. The third instance characterizing the uniqueness of the text are the many translations of Yali-Manisi’s izibongo (praise poems) that are interspersed throughout The Dassie and the Hunter. This makes it the most extensive gathering of Yali-Manisi’s praise poems in the English language. Most the poems, if not all of them, were translated by the researcher and the subject together in mutual collaboration. The scholarship of Jeff Opland is impeccable, as has always been apparent in the past: Xhosa Oral Poetry (1983), Xhosa Poets and Poetry (1988), and his other books. This intellectual seriousness is also realized in his latest publication, The Nation’s Bounty: The Xhosa Poetry of Nontsizi Mgqwetho (U of Witwatersrand P, 2007). What then of David Livingstone Phakamile Yali-Manisi as imbongi! He himself first and foremost establishes his literary lineage as from that of the great Xhosa poet S. E. K. Mqhayi (1875–1945), arguably through practice the foremost exponent of African literature in the African languages. Mqhayi was the dominant figure of South African literature in the first half of the twentieth century, as surely Mazisi Kunene (1930–2006) will eventually be recognized as such regarding the second half when his yet unpublished twenty-two epics and anthologies are made available in their isiZulu original and subsequently in translation in the coming years. The listing of this remarkable work here, both in the original and in English translation, would be merely gratuitous. Kunene wrote this work while he was Professor of African Languages and Literature at UCLA from 1975 to 1993. An anthology consisting of four hundred short poems from this copious work is presently being translated in South Africa from isiZulu into the English language. What united the unyielding historical visions of Mqhayi and Kunene was a belief in the classicism of the African languages as being second to none. It is the classicism of the Xhosa language that Yali-Manisi sought to continue in the second half of the twentieth century when he described himself as a literary descendant of Mqhayi. Much more fundamental, the classicism that Mqhayi was insistent on, exemplified in the poems that appeared in the newspapers Izwi Labantu (The Voice of the People) in the late 1890s and in the 1900s, in Imvo Zabantsundu (African Opinion) in the 1910s and 1920s, in Umteteli wa Bantu (The Mouthpiece of the People) in the 1920s, and in Bantu World in the 1930s, gave rise to extraordinary poets writing in the African languages who dominated South African poetry across the twentieth century: Nontsizi Mgqwetho (?–?), J. J. R. Jolobe [End Page 159] (1902–1978), Benedict Wallet Vilakazi (1906–1947), Mazisi Kunene, and Yali-Manisi. These New African intellectuals were a central part of the New African Movement that eventuated in South Africa between 1904 and 1960. Yali-Manisi and Mazisi Kunene were among its youngest members and its last survivors, which included Lewis Nkosi and Ezekiel Mphahlele. In aligning himself with the intellectual tradition of Mqhayi, David Livingstone Phakamile Yali-Manisi inscribed himself into the New African Movement through the poetic practice he emulated. Like his New African intellectual predecessors such as R. V. Selope Thema, Simon Majakathetha Phamotse, H. I. E. Dhlomo, Yali-Manisi too came to...

Still beating the drum: critical perspectives on Lewis Nkosi

Lindy Stiebel and Liz Gunner, eds. Still Beating the Drum: Critical on Lewis Nkosi. Cross/Cultures 81. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. xxxv + 375 pp. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. No price reported. Cloth. Critics and avid readers of South literature will welcome this wideranging collection of works by and on Lewis Nkosi, the eminent playwright, novelist, poet, and literary critic. Erudite, well-researched essays plumb the depths of the diverse achievements of this complex writer, whom casey Motsisi once deemed angriest Angry Young Man. Those not already aware of Nkosi's contribution to literature, who may know him only as a writer cursorily discussed by WoIe Soyinka in 1976 in terms of a Salvationist ethic, will read in this volume about the nuanced perspectives of a postcolonial author who is both a and a committed South thinker. First encountered in Africa during his brief work with the legendary journal Drum in the late fifties, Nkosi remains today a prolific writer of articles and reviews for publications such as Contact, New African, Transition, the Guardian, and The London Review of Books. He is most recognized, however, for his fiction, having burst on the literary scene with the play The Rhythm of Violence in 1964, and having drawn extensive critical attention with his 1983 novel, Mating Birds. Nkosi's oeuvre is indeed impressive, from his contributions to literature to his projects in radio, television, and film, and he has had a distinguished career as a professor of literature in the United States and England. Part 3 of Still Beating the Drum, A Retrospective Selection, includes some of Nkosi's own essays representing a cross-section of his views on literature and culture. His essay Negritude: New and Old Perspectives is a good place for readers of Nkosi's criticism to start, as the essay reflects the complexity of history and of postcolonial perspectives on literature. Nkosi's view of the Francophone literary and cultural movement (analogous in some ways to the Anglophone African Personality perspective of Kwame Nkrumah) reflects his position as migrant intellectual and engage writer. Granting the movement's history an essential place in the study of literature at the outset, the essay traces negritude's intellectual influences, concluding with the genealogical metaphor of the Negritude family tree, which includes apart from the living heritage, Freudianism, Marxism, surrealism, and Romanticism (290). He looks closely at the commentaries of Abiola Irele and Jean-Paul Sartre, whose seminal Orphee noir (1948) Nkosi believes to be still among the most subtle commentaries written on negritude. Nkosi dismisses the idea that negritude thought has outlived its role, asserting its importance to black literature on a global scale, its significance as a set of cultural, philosophical, and literary concerns that remain debated today, and its relevance to intellectual history and to anyone committed to Africa and the diaspora. Leopold Senghor, Aime Cesaire, Alioune Diop, and Leon-Gontran Damas remain the most famous names. The intellectual branch of twentieth-century pan-Africanism since the twenties and thirties, when the movement coalesced in Parisian Francophone and Caribbean intellectual circles, negritude was harshly criticized as a form of reverse racism by Nkosi's countryman Ezekiel Mphahlele in The Image (1962). Denounced by writers such as Frantz Fanon, Remy Medou Mvomo, and WoIe Soyinka, the movement suffered a resounding blow at literary conferences in Dakar and Freetown in 1963 when it was dismissed by many other great writers, among them Tchicaya U Tam'si and Ousmane Sembene, who proclaimed it outmoded and superfluous. …

BOOK REVIEW: ed. James Ogude et al.ES'KIA. Roggebaai, Cape Town: Kwela, 2002.

This collection of forty essays, the majority of which have never been published, covers about forty years of the writings of Es'kia Mphahlele (1919-) one of the doyens of South Africa's literary world. He wrote as Ezekiel Mphahlele until 1979, and this name change occurred after twenty years of [End Page 197] exile on alien soil when he left South Africa in 1957, an exile that took him to teaching posts in Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia, France, and the United States of America—where he obtained his PhD at the University of Denver—and his eventual return back home in 1977.

Mythologization of Characters in the Autobiographies of Camara Laye,Wole Soyinka and Ezekiel Mphahlele

This essay argues that the beauty of Laye, Soyinka and Mphahlele as artistic autobiographers derives from their use of mythologized characters to heighten meaning and to elevate their autobiographies as works of art.

Black Writers from South Africa: Towards a Discourse of Liberation

Part 1 case for a new approach: the problems of the writer - material conditions, apartheid, censorship, the question of African tradition, the lack of literary tradition, problem of consciousness attempts to find solutions towards a new ideology of literature - a time of change - from protest to consciousness, a time for action - from consciousness to participation, a time for experiment - new attitudes to form, language, production and distribution criticism and black South African writing - black writing and literary theory, theories of artistic consciousness and socio-historical criticism. Part 2 Criticism as autobiography - the construction of a framework - Ezekiel Mphahlele: the west versus Africa negritude American black writing the African tradition Mphahlele and the Black Consciousness Movement the influence of Marxist cultural theory. Part 3 Autobiography: a question of function - autobiography as a self-making process, the autobiographer as spokesman, autobiography as outlet for racial violence, humour as a defence mechanism, nostalgia and exile, bearing witness the South African struggle with form - fragmented reality, restructuring reality, towards orthodox significant form, autobiography as novel - the hybrid form, life entire as autobiographical form. Part 4 Poetry as autobiography - Mongane Serote: individual development historical consciousness formal resolution from individual development to group consciousness. Part 5 Autobiography and the literature of combat: the early protest novels from liberation to liberation - the novel in the 1980s, Miriam Tlali - Amandla, Sipho Sepamla - A Ride on the Whirlwind, Mbulelo Mzamane - The Children of Soweto, Mongane Serote - To Every Birth its Blood.

The need for a feminism: Black township writing

Summary The essay looks at four books by contemporary black writers, Down Second Avenue by Ezekiel Mphahlele, Blame Me on History by Bloke Modisane (both autobiographies) Fools and Other Stories by Njabulo Ndebele and To Every Birth Its Blood by Mongane Serote. It compares the sense of the roles and experiences of South African Black women which these writers offer with that of Sol Plaatje in his historical romance, Mhudi, first published in 1930 and written about 1917. Plaatje seems to have believed that the dissolution of traditional and tribal bonds between members of age groups and the distancing of the young from their elders would strengthen the bond between man and wife and allow women to become joint decision makers with their husbands. The four contemporary writers are much more conservative and tend to portray women as passive victims of their men.

The Humanism of Ezekiel Mphahlele

The Humanism of Ezekiel Mphahlele

Survival Politics: Afrikanerdom in Search of a New Ideology

IN his thorough sociological study of Afrikaner ideology, Dunbar Moodie has shown that the civil theology most adequate to the exigencies of the 1930s was an interpretation ‘which was tight enough to unite Afrikaners and yet loose enough to allow considerable difference of opinion on practical matters’.2While the same functional needs for a proper ideology remain for the 1970S and 80s, ‘civil theology’ can no longer fulfil this task. This is mainly due to increased secularisation and value changes in an urbanised life, which has diluted traditional culture with the corruptive spoils of affluence. Moodie aptly concludes that the exigencies of Afrikaner power have changed the debate from one between rival metaphysical interpretations of Christian-Nationalism (Kuyperianism, neo-Fichteanism,Volkskerk) to that of ‘the very continuance of ideology itself’.3Such considered findings are confirmed by similar observations of ‘outsiders’ who have returned after a lengthy exile. In the assessment of Ezekiel Mphahlele:

Poetry as a Possibility of Life

you help, Ezekiel, to resurrect our manly spirits to see the wheel of thought and imagination? Ezekiel Mphahlele (it sounds poetic: Mpha hlele Ezekiel) teach us to write. Open our mouths. Else we choke with lumps of thought. Else we go migrating in search of inspiration to Mbari. Else we cut Ulli Beier into two and leave Nigeria with the legs. We want more. But we do not even have any yet. Could we find an alchemist? An alchemist to change Moore, Gerald Moore, into a tribes man to give us another Mbari? Moore, will you teach us only to com ment?

Panel on South African Theater

Dr. Ezekiel Mphahlele spoke at the end of the session yesterday, and since there is considerable misunderstanding about at least one of the points he made, he has offered to make a clarification this morning.Yesterday I got the impression that people left the meeting under the impression that I was trying to be an iconoclast and trying to bust things up. I am always considered to be a bull in a china shop. But far be it from me to want to bust people’s games up. Just before I spoke, my longstanding friend from the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, Donatus Nwoga, said the same things in so many words, expressing a wish that he could be back home.

Panel on South African Theater

Dr. Ezekiel Mphahlele spoke at the end of the session yesterday, and since there is considerable misunderstanding about at least one of the points he made, he has offered to make a clarification this morning.Yesterday I got the impression that people left the meeting under the impression that I was trying to be an iconoclast and trying to bust things up. I am always considered to be a bull in a china shop. But far be it from me to want to bust people’s games up. Just before I spoke, my longstanding friend from the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, Donatus Nwoga, said the same things in so many words, expressing a wish that he could be back home.

The Four Modes of Drum: Popular Fiction and Social Control in South Africa

Literature is both an object and an agent of social control. Not only is it shaped by social constraints, but it is also a constraint on society. Ezekiel Mphahlele (1962: 186), the South African writer, has lamented the effect of society on literature in his homeland: During the last twenty years the political, social climate of South Africa has been growing viciously difficult for a non-white to write in. It requires tremendous organization of one's mental and emotional faculties before one can write a poem or a novel or a play. This has become all but impossible…[At one time,] oppression provided just a sufficient spur to adult creative writing. The spur is a paralysing one today. Although the short story is very demanding, it is often used as a short-cut to prose meaning. And so it has become the most common medium in African literary activity, barring the large volume of vernacular writing being produced for school use. Oppression constrains not only the structure of literature but also its content. Mphahlele suggests that the short story in such a racist setting goes through three stages: romance or escape, then protest, and finally irony. He calls irony “the meeting point of acceptance and rejection in the broadest terms: acceptance and protest in specific areas of black-white relations within implicit acceptance in a larger area” (Mphahlele, 1962: 188).

Negritude: Some Dissident Voices

Only eight years ago Janheinz Jahn stated in Neo-African Literature that the critics of nigritude were all writing in English—not in French. Jahn was referring to writers like Ezekiel Mphahlele, Gerald Moore and Wole Soyinka, whose criticism he regarded as “based on an inadequate translation.” 2 The most important movement in the literary evolution in French-speaking Africa had, according to Jahn, only been criticized out of ignorance and misunderstanding. Today, criticism of Negritude has become a major issue in those French-speaking countries which were among its strongest supporters originally. It should be mentioned, however, that certain French African writers—among them Ferdinand Oyono and Ousmane Sembene—have opposed Negritude since the 1950s.

On African Literature

Welcoming the English translation of Bernard Dadie's Climbie -- some fifteen years after its publication in French--Ezekiel Mphahlele commented: It has became a habit for us to complain that intellectuals--including writers, artists, politicians, and scholars--from French-speaking Africa do not work smoothly with those from countries of British influence in Africa. Somehow, when we are in conferences, we find ourselves talking along parallel lines, or we find argument entangled in fluent, passionate rhetoric, or else served up in a highly prosaic manner, lacking any kind of romance. In small groups, we say of one another, “Oh, those Francophones, they're the end!” and “Les anglophones, c'est veritablement la mentalite anglo-saxonne, ca.!” Yet, we keep coming to a meeting point somewhere: the times demand it, the ideals of pan-Africanism, however depressingly distant they often look, make it desperately necessary for us to understand one another, if only at the basic colour level (Dadie 1971, p. vii). It is a fact that the artificial barriers erected throughout Africa by the colonial structure in the course of the nineteenth century are still in existence and the many works dealing with African literature published in the last ten years or so--ever since the emergence to independence--still reflect a situation which, one hopefully assumed, was to end with colonialism. The French, English, Portuguese, and Spanish “cultural” empires carved in Africa seem to have maintained their autonomy, and there does not seem to be much interpenetration between the various components of the African continent.

African–Scandinavian Writers' Conference

This, the broadest and most thoroughgoing confrontation to date of African and Scandinavian writers, took place at the inter-Scandinavian cultural centre near Stockholm. More than 20 African writers, including representatives from North Africa, Ethiopia, ‘Black Africa’, and South Africa (refugees) took part in the conference, among them some outstanding personalities: Albert Memmi, Wole Soyinka, Tchicaya U'Thamsi, George AwoonorWilliams, James Ngugi, and Ezekiel Mphahlele, to mention only a few. A similar number of writers from Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway took part; tours and social arrangements made it possible for the African writers to meet a further selection of Scandinavian writers and artists and to become acquainted with local scenery and institutions. The initiative for the conference was taken by the Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, the Swedish Institute for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, and the Swedish Council for Overseas Information.

The Dead End of African Literature?

Dorothy Sekkade, Death. 1963. Woodcut Perhaps the most important achievement of the Conference of Writers of English Expression held in Makerere College, Kampala, in June I962 is that literature as now defined and understood leads nowhere. conference itself marked the climax of the attack on the Negritude school of Leopold Senghor and Aime Cesaire. For some time now, writers of English expression like Ezekiel Mphahlele, Wole Soyinka, and Christopher Okigbo have treated this kind of literature, which expresses sterile concepts such as negritude or the African personality,1 with the utmost derision. One would say that Negritude is now dead, judging from the confident tones of the remarks and decisions made at the Makerere conference. Another significant event at the conference was the tacit omission of Amos Tutuola. Not only was Tutuola, who is undoubtedly one of Africa's most significant writers, not present in the conference, but there was a deliberate exclusion of his works in the discussions of the conference. In fact, according to the conference report, Tutuola's publishers protested the implied questioning of their integrity in publishing this writer's works. One can guess that Tutuola received this kind of treatment partly because influential critics like Janheinz Jahn have repeatedly grouped him with the Negritude school, and partly because he has gone out of line, winning acclaim overseas for using a kind of English expression that is nonIbadan and non-Makerere. With the now seeming defeat of the Negritude and Tutuola schools of writing, what now represents literature can be seen from a few examples from some of the writings of those who now dominate our literature. Una Maclean, reviewing J. P. Clark's play, Song of a Goat, opens in the following fashion: The author of this poetic melodrama possibly perceives himself as some sort of Tennessee Williams of the Tropics. Suddenly the sultry symbolism of the sex war seeps through the swamps, to hang like a