Mr. Mphahlele is the most interesting writer to emerge from South Africa for some time. It is not that he possesses a high degree of technical accomplishment; the essays collected … [in The African Image] are loosely woven and the longest and most ambitious of them bears too many marks of its origin as a postgraduate thesis. What he does possess, to an extent unusual at the best of times and especially perhaps among exiles, is a capacity for combining passion with scrutiny….

[For] all his anger he refuses to fall into fashionable African attitudes. He reveres Monsieur Senghor but pays no homage to négritude; he is carried away by President Nkrumah's oratory but remains sceptical about the African personality; he is a nationalist if nationalism means anti-tribalism, whether the tribe be black or white, but not if it means black fascism or chauvinism. He is against the...