In the following essay, Chapman, Mphahlele's former colleague at the University of Denver, discusses the intellectual atmosphere at the University during the author's time there.

In the following interview, Mphahlele discusses African humanism, his writing, and life in Africa.

[Man Must Live is] Mphahlele's first collection of short stories…. (p. 17) Although the characters in the stories are not as yet realistic portraits of the earthy people among whom he lived, Man Must Live already sets the pattern for Mphahlele's future writing in its dependence on personal experience. It is tempting in all Mphahlele's writing to spot the corresponding incident or character in his life, but this can obviously serve no useful purpose except to demonstrate authentic...

In the following essay, Jarrett-Kerr discusses how much of Mphahlele's writing derives from his sense of exile and alienation.

The advent of Ezekiel Mphahlele's first book, Down Second Avenue (1959), at the same moment that West African writing was beginning to assert itself, was a challenge to the understanding both of Western readers and of African readers themselves. There is hardly a single generalization which could be made about the predominantly peasant culture of West, East or Central Africa which would be equally applicable to the urban, industrialized Africa for which Mphahlele spoke. This Africa of vast segregated...

In the following review, Masilela discusses Mphahlele's controversial return to South Africa and concludes that the problem with the author's Poetry and Humanism “is its blissful happiness in the sunshine of bourgeois liberal humanism, when that ideology has decayed at the dawn of a new ideological age in South Africa.”

In the following review, Worsfold asserts that Bury Me at the Marketplace, a collection of Mphahlele's letters edited by N. Chabani Manganyi, “Read[s at a continuous piece and not randomly, … provide[s] a vivid picture of Mphahlele, husband, father, teacher, writer, and academic, and, in the more recent pieces, as a man torn between family and friends in South Africa and family and friends in the outside world, the outcome of years spent in self-imposed exile.”]

In the following review, Frank compares Mphahlele's Chirundu to Stephen Gray’s Caltrop’s Desire, asserting that Chirundu“is a compelling, if slightly uneven, success.”

There are a few African writers who have contributed much to the development of modern African literature and have had little written about them. Of the few, the black South African writer, Ezekiel Mphahlele, stands out rather pathetically as a much neglected, generally underestimated and often misjudged writer. (p. 38) The reasons for the neglect which Mphahlele has suffered in the last decade seem obvious. I believe he is not 'popular', especially among the younger generation, because of his...

Chinua Achebe and Ezekiel Mphahlele in various publications have addressed themselves to questions regarding the role of the African writer and his art. They view art as a craft that is responsible to African society, and as artists, regard themselves accountable to their societies. But there is often a contradiction between what they stated in articles, interviews, etc. … and what their early literatures actually express. It seems, that having realized this they are now working hard towards making t...

[The series of essays included in Voices in the Whirlwind] were written over a period of years. As a result, the statements concerning the Black Aesthetic, the Negritude and Pan-Africanist movements, the possibilities of detente between Black and white, and the possibilities of freedom under the Western Aesthetic, now appear to be outdated. However, when [Mphahlele] writes of the African situation, when he draws upon his own experiences while analyzing poets and novelists, when he throws over them his own p...

In the following review, Creighton complains that Mphahlele's The African Image is a “rather foggy, disproportioned and untidy parcel of interesting reflections.”

In the following review, Ramraj lauds Mphahlele's study of the African image in politics, culture, and literature in The African Image.

In the following review, Rive offers qualified praise for Mphahlele's Voices in the Whirlwind and Other Essays.

In the following review, Harries questions the stated purpose of Mphahlele's African Writing Today, but praises the anthology as a good introduction to African writing.

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 sh...

Reading Down Second Avenue and The Wanderers, one finds it easy to understand why the author, Ezekiel Mphahlele, and his books are banned in his native South Africa. Down Second Avenue is autobiography which covers Mphahlele's life down to his flight into exile in 1957…. From the pen of another, less talented, less sensitive writer, Down Second Avenue could easily have become a sociological analysis of apartheid and/or a psychological explication of the effects of this "political"...

In the following excerpt, Kaye complains that Mphahlele had too many purposes in mind in Chirundu. She states, “The shifting tone which results from these many purposes is at times perplexing and detracts from the overall impact.”

Because Mphahlele has established himself as a major African literary critic, cultural commentator, and short story writer, we awaited his first published novel with hopeful expectations. But we were somewhat disappointed [with The Wanderers]. Although Timi Tabane, the black exile and first person narrator, tells us, near the beginning of the novel, how his life and that of Steven Cartwright, the white South African exile, are "twined around each other", and although Mphahlele uses Steve as a ...

In the following review, Mackay praises Mphahlele's Down Second Avenue for its powerful story and characterizations.

In the following review, Povey praises Mphahlele's African Writing Today, asserting, “Certainly no editor has managed through the inevitable compromises of selection, to survey African writing more fully than this humane writer and distinguished critic.”

Mphahlele's story [Chirundu], about the self-made Chimba Chirundu, minister of transport and public works in an imaginary African country, is well crafted. The atmosphere conveys a sense of momentum; life is on the tracks in Mphahlele's fictional land, and the characters, while momentarily blocked by subterfuge, disappointment, or deception, do not lose their spirit. Chirundu is arrested on a charge of bigamy brought by his first wife. He defends his second marriage on the basis of Bemba triba...

Mphahlele's life has been constantly uprooted, a constant wandering over the earth as the partly autobiographic novel, The Wanderers, attests…. For Mphahlele, the recalled nightmare of his early adult years in South Africa is synthesized in the image of the South African land scarred with terror…. (p. 260)

If anger, first-hand experience, outrage, compassion, and topicality were the sole requirements for great literature, The Wanderers might well be one of the masterpieces of this declining part of the twentieth century. Ezekiel Mphahlele has been there and knows and cares. He is in charge of his emotions and convictions, and ofay doubters can step aside…. But passionate involvement is simply not enough in itself, at least for fiction. What is sadly missing here is firm narrative line, convincing and f...

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 ange...

[Ezekiel Mphahlele] writes a clear and serviceable, if unexciting—and sometimes too baldly didactic—prose, has a zest and a fair talent for the creation of a wide variety of characters from all races, and an occasional flair for narrative suspense which gives his story pace. Yet [The Wanderers], if always authentic and well-meant, remains too ordinary to make much that is new out of his range of bitter, touching or ironical experiences. It gets off to a good enough start…. But two-third...

[Chirundu] traces the downfall of Chimba Chirundu, the corrupt, power-hungry minister of transport in an unnamed central African country…. Many urgent social and political problems are contained in Mphahlele's complex narrative web: the corruption of post-independence African governments; the struggle for workers' rights; the incompatibility of indigenous and colonially imposed laws; and the bitter impotence of exile. An eloquent work by a major African writer. Peter Sabor,...