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)

This image of South Africa becomes for the wanderer of the novel the symbol of his own interior landscape of desolation. The fate of a people is once more internalized in the drama of a single consciousness, that of Timi, the journalist-writer forced to exile himself from South Africa and to live an uprooted life in West Africa and East Africa. The historical conflict between traditional and modern society, between permanence and exile, are catalytic agents to the private conflict between Timi and his equally uprooted son Felang. Thus Mphahlele's The Wanderers is not only a powerful evocation of human imposition...