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Man Must Live
43 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
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About the author
Es'kia Mphahlele
29 books17 followersEs’kia Mphahlele, born Ezekiel Mphahlele, the name he used until 1977 (born Dec. 17, 1919, Marabastad, South Africa died Oct. 27, 2008, Lebowakgomo), novelist, essayist, short-story writer, and teacher whose autobiography, Down Second Avenue (1959), is a South African classic. It combines the story of a young man’s growth into adulthood with penetrating social criticism of the conditions forced upon black South Africans by apartheid.
Mphahlele grew up in Pretoria and attended St. Peter’s Secondary School in Rosettenville and Adams Teachers Training College in Natal. His early career as a teacher of English and Afrikaans was terminated by the government because of his strong opposition to the highly restrictive Bantu Education Act. In Pretoria he was fiction editor of Drum magazine (1955–57) and a graduate student at the University of South Africa (M.A., 1956). He went into voluntary exile in 1957, first arriving in Nigeria. Thereafter Mphahlele held a number of academic and cultural posts in Africa, Europe, and the United States.
He was director of the African program at the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Paris. He was coeditor with Ulli Beier and Wole Soyinka of the influential literary periodical Black Orpheus (1960–64), published in Ibadan, Nigeria; founder and director of Chemchemi, a cultural centre in Nairobi for artists and writers (1963–65); and editor of the periodical Africa Today (1967). He received a doctorate from the University of Denver in 1968. In 1977 he returned to South Africa and became head of the department of African Literature at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (1983–87).
Mphahlele’s critical writings include two books of essays, The African Image (1962) and Voices in the Whirlwind (1972), that address Negritude, the African personality, nationalism, the black African writer, and the literary image of Africa. He helped to found the first independent black publishing house in South Africa, coedited the anthology Modern African Stories (1964), and contributed to African Writing Today (1967). His short stories—collected in part in In Corner B (1967), The Unbroken Song (1981), and Renewal Time (1988)—were almost all set in Nigeria. His later works include the novels The Wanderers (1971) and Chirundu (1979) and a sequel to his autobiography, Afrika My Music (1984). Es’kia (2002) and Es’kia Continued (2005) are collections of essays and other writings.
Encyclopædia Britannica.
Mphahlele grew up in Pretoria and attended St. Peter’s Secondary School in Rosettenville and Adams Teachers Training College in Natal. His early career as a teacher of English and Afrikaans was terminated by the government because of his strong opposition to the highly restrictive Bantu Education Act. In Pretoria he was fiction editor of Drum magazine (1955–57) and a graduate student at the University of South Africa (M.A., 1956). He went into voluntary exile in 1957, first arriving in Nigeria. Thereafter Mphahlele held a number of academic and cultural posts in Africa, Europe, and the United States.
He was director of the African program at the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Paris. He was coeditor with Ulli Beier and Wole Soyinka of the influential literary periodical Black Orpheus (1960–64), published in Ibadan, Nigeria; founder and director of Chemchemi, a cultural centre in Nairobi for artists and writers (1963–65); and editor of the periodical Africa Today (1967). He received a doctorate from the University of Denver in 1968. In 1977 he returned to South Africa and became head of the department of African Literature at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (1983–87).
Mphahlele’s critical writings include two books of essays, The African Image (1962) and Voices in the Whirlwind (1972), that address Negritude, the African personality, nationalism, the black African writer, and the literary image of Africa. He helped to found the first independent black publishing house in South Africa, coedited the anthology Modern African Stories (1964), and contributed to African Writing Today (1967). His short stories—collected in part in In Corner B (1967), The Unbroken Song (1981), and Renewal Time (1988)—were almost all set in Nigeria. His later works include the novels The Wanderers (1971) and Chirundu (1979) and a sequel to his autobiography, Afrika My Music (1984). Es’kia (2002) and Es’kia Continued (2005) are collections of essays and other writings.
Encyclopædia Britannica.
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July 8, 2019
The late Es'kia Mphahlele (South Africa) was one of the greatest writers Africa ever produced, a top notch academic to boot. He was one of the early African creative writers, and this was his first book published originally in 1946 (that was at least ten years before Achebe's classic, Things fall apart, was published). As a world class writer and academic, Mphahlele would later criticise this book - the short stories contained therein - and feel uneasy about them. But as his autobiographies show, he was very much ecstatic when this his first book was first published.
After all, that was very much the milieu of stultifying apartheid S.A. and it was a big achievement for a Black man to have a book published, never mind an imaginative one. Despite his doubts about this book, many a reader might actually feel that the early work of Mphahlele here is in some ways more interesting than the later works that would make him world famous (especially Down Second Avenue). These well written short stories have the ring of authenticity focusing on vicissitudes of "black life" at the time - as second class citizens at best. Here are slices of life that are very important not only for sociological and historical purposes . How was life like for proliferating denizens who appeared just to live to survive, as it were? How do the oppressed and suppressed feel about such burthen? Yet we see that no matter the strictures on the people here, they are still very much human with human elements like love, family, relationships, social commingling comprising the warp and weft of life. Yes, the disparities (between the "whites" and "blacks") is clear, and jarring enough; eg the simple basic existence of the one managing to get a container of water for a self contained rude "bath", which can easily be conflated with the one washing and bathing luxuriously in a proper, gleaming scent-encrusted bath/shower. But life still goes on, throbbing with human foibles and intermittent delectations. The early work also shows the sensitive perspicacity of the author.
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