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 ghetto, whatever the colour of the persons consigned to it, and for free communications and the interaction of cultures; and he is for and against these things equally passionately whether he is confronted by class distinctions in London, tribal distinctions in Ibadan or racial distinctions in Johannesburg.
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