Mphahlele was born in Pretoria on 17 December 1919, but from the age of five till he was thirteen, he lived in the village of Maupaneng with his paternal grandmother, Mathebe. In one of his earliest works, the story "Tomorrow You Shall Reap," in Man Must Live (1946), he describes nostalgically the beautiful mountains, the sparkling rivers, and the songs of the birds in his early surroundings. But as the circumstances of his life became more bitter, so the scenery of his early childhood seemed to grow darker, the mountains more ominous, and the river more chaotic. The feeling of terror remained with him until he went there in the late 1970s and allowed the nightmares to "shrink into a manageable world" in his adult mind, as he says in his autobiography Afrika My Music (1984).
At age thirteen Mphahlele joined his parents in Marabastad, a township in Pretoria, and they lived on Second Avenue-thus the title of his first autobiography (1959). His father habitually treated his mother badly, and, after a ghastly attack on her with a pot of boiling stew, Moses Mphahlele was arrested. The parents were divorced and the young Mphahlele never saw his father again.
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