Mphahlele, Ezekiel 1919–: Critical Essay by Adrian Roscoe

The problem of imagination in South African writing … is illustrated by the career of Ezekiel Mphahlele, scholar, teacher, lucid provocative critic, wanderer, and creative writer, a man whose experience in a rough world (badly treated even in independent Africa) has turned a deeply compassionate view of humanity into a conviction that only guns and violence can cure the cancer of apartheid in Vorster's Republic. It is not that Mphahlele lacks imagination. Far from it. Various collections of short stories such as In Corner B and Let Live, and The Living & the Dead, and a substantial though highly autobiographical novel The Wanderers … are evidence enough of an imaginative gift. Nor were the strengths of his first major critical book, The African Image, which added a wholly new dimension to African critical debates especially as they concerned negritude, underestimated, to say nothing of his most recent work, Voices in the Whirlwind…. It is simply that he feels that his autobiography Down Second Avenue … is the best book, presumably the most important book he has yet written; as if, in other words, the workaday South African scene is too fraught with pain and urgency for mere fiction, no matter how clever, to take precedence over the naked truth hauled up from the well of memory and set forth with care in an autobiography. Even his description of how the creative process worked in him while still at home makes a similar point about how close to daily reality the short stories are. Written in almost immediate response to sudden provocation, they have, on his own evidence, enjoyed little time for a slow steady fictive reworking of raw material where the fancy and imagination life mundane stuff into the realms of literary art. Mphahlele strikes no poses [and] sees himself in the role of neither prophet nor messiah…. (pp. 228-29)

As individual pieces, the short stories are not always distinguished. Sometimes it is stretches of slack prose that reduce their impact; sometimes the standards of a professional teacher break through and impose a correctness and a propriety where 'fluency' should rule. Sometimes it is the very struggle between correctness and the desire to run free and capture the registers and dialect of the people that becomes obvious and therefore a weakness. But Mphahlele's stories as a group, a body, a collection, are excellent. From 'Man Must Live', where a whole life span is squeezed into the strait-jacket tightness of the short story form, to 'A Point of Identity', which explores the tragicomic complexities of the colour bar, to 'Mrs. Plum' and 'The Living and the Dead', which play very deftly on the workings of the white South African mind, liberal or otherwise, the evidence accumulates that no other writer, with the exception of La Guma, can record with such delicacy the slow tragic harmonies that lie beneath the trivia, the unpolished surface of poor lives. The sad division among the various non-white groups which is subtly fostered by the white community is often reflected together with a plea for the kind of solidarity needed to unite all the oppressed groups against a common enemy…. The same note of needful solidarity and grim endurance rings through 'In Corner B', one of Mphahlele's finest stories. (pp. 229-30)

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