SOURCE: A review of Bury Me at the Marketplace: Selected Letters of Es'kia Mphahlele, 1943-1980, in Research in African Literatures, Vol. 17, No. 3, Fall, 1986, pp. 395-98.

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.”]

This “Second Volume” was announced by N. Chabani Manganyi in the introduction to his biography of Es'kia Mphahlele, Exiles and Homecomings (Braamfontein: Ravan, 1983). Manganyi went on to suggest that this extensive selection of his subject's letters, from 1943 to 1980, would be of interest to both scholars and...