(London published Fiction)
London published Fiction
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0930523555/?tag=2022091-20
(The author recounts his return to South Africa in 1976 af...)
The author recounts his return to South Africa in 1976 after twenty years in exile and describes the problems that still face his nation
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0869752375/?tag=2022091-20
(The quintessential story collection from "the most import...)
The quintessential story collection from "the most important black South African writer of the present age" (George Moore). Originally published in 1967, In Corner B contains the core stories of the original editions, together with more recent pieces, and is the first new edition of Mphahlele's work since his death in 2008. Written after his return from exile, these stories inimitably capture life in both rural and urban South Africa during the days of apartheid. A new introduction by Peter Thuynsma, a South African scholar and former Mphahlele student, presents the "dean of African letters" to a new generation of readers.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00475AS0G/?tag=2022091-20
(First published in 1959, Down Second Avenue is Nobel Priz...)
First published in 1959, Down Second Avenue is Nobel Prize nominee Es'kia Mphahlele's autobiography of his South African childhood and his struggle against discrimination. The memoir tells of Es'kia's childhood in Maupaneng, a small village outside Pietersburg, and Marabastad, a location in Pretoria. Here he showed academic promise. This resulted in a career as a teacher. After a number of years, though, he was barred from teaching because of his vocal opposition to the segregation and discrimination occurring in schools. Mphahlele then worked for Drum magazine in various capacities. The biography culminates in his exile from South Africa in 1957. Down Second Avenue is Mphahlele's personal account of his struggle for identity and dignity in the face of the growing discriminatory policies of the South African government. It is a compelling mix of humour and pathos. Es'ka Mphahlele was born in 1919. He qualified as a teacher at Adam's College in Natal, and from 1945-1952 taught at Orlando High School. He later joined the staff of Drum magazine. Meanwhile, he continued to study part-time and in 1956 was awarded his master's degree by the University of South Africa. In 1957 he left South Africa and would remain in exile until 1977. He lived in Nigeria, Paris and the USA and lectured at various universities as well as serving as director of Congress of Cultural Freedom in Paris. He received a Ph.D. at the University of Denver. After returning to South Africa, Mphahlele joined the University of the Witwatersrand as professor of African Literature. He retired in 1987. Mphahlele was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature for his novel "The Wanderers" (1968).
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1770100075/?tag=2022091-20
(secondhand copy, rubbing to covers, clipped half title pa...)
secondhand copy, rubbing to covers, clipped half title page, else a good copy with clean unmarked text
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0809013614/?tag=2022091-20
(Excerpt from The African Image It was my impressions in ...)
Excerpt from The African Image It was my impressions in Britain that threw up into relief my thoughts on what I choose to call the African image, and I yielded to the inner compulsion to put them down on paper. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1330375351/?tag=2022091-20
(Traces the fortunes and struggles of intellectual and pol...)
Traces the fortunes and struggles of intellectual and political activists exiled from their African homeland
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http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/084464451X/?tag=2022091-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0620067799/?tag=2022091-20
Ezekiel Mphahlele was born in South Africa, in 1919. From the age of five he lived with his paternal grandmother in Maupaneng village, Limpopo, where he herded cattle and goats. His mother, Eva, took him and his two siblings to go live with her in Marabastad (2nd Avenue) when he was 12 years old.
He trained as a teacher in South Africa but was banned from the classroom in 1952 as a result of his protest of the segregationist Bantu Education Act. Although he later returned to teaching, Mphahlele first turned to journalism, criticism, fiction, and essay writing.
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.
As a writer, he brought his own experiences in and outside South Africa to bear on his short stories, fiction, autobiography and history, developing the concept of African humanism. He skilfully evoked the black experience under apartheid in Down Second Avenue (1959). It recounted his struggle to get an education and the setbacks he experienced in his teaching career.
Mphahlele wrote two autobiographies, more than 30 short stories, two verse plays and a number of poems. He is deemed as the "Dean of African Letters".
He was the recipient of numerous international awards. In 1969, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 1984, he was awarded the Order of the Palm by the French government for his contribution to French Language and Culture. He was the recipient of the 1998 World Economic Forum Crystal Award for Outstanding Service to the Arts and Education. In 1998, former President Nelson Mandela awarded Mphahlele the Order of the Southern Cross, then the highest recognition granted by the South African Government (equivalent today to the Order of Mapungubwe). The Es’kia Institute was established in 2002.
(Excerpt from The African Image It was my impressions in ...)
(First published in 1959, Down Second Avenue is Nobel Priz...)
(The author recounts his return to South Africa in 1976 af...)
(The quintessential story collection from "the most import...)
(Traces the fortunes and struggles of intellectual and pol...)
(secondhand copy, rubbing to covers, clipped half title pa...)
(London published Fiction)
Quotations: "I want to be part of the renaissance that is happening in the thinking of my people, " he commented. "I see education as playing a vital role in personal growth and in institutionalizing a way of life that a people chooses as its highest ideal. For the older people, it is a way of reestablishing the values they had to suspend along the way because of the force of political conditions. Another reason for returning, connected with the first, is that this is my ancestral home. An African cares very much where he dies and is buried. But I have not come to die. I want to reconnect with my ancestors while I am still active. I am also a captive of place, of setting. As long as I was abroad I continued to write on the South African scene. There is a force I call the tyranny of place; the kind of unrelenting hold a place has on a person that gives him the motivation to write and a style. The American setting in which I lived for nine years was too fragmented to give me these. I could only identify emotionally and intellectually with the African-American segment, which was not enough. Here I can feel the ancestral Presence. I know now what Vinoba Bhave of India meant when he said: 'Though action rages without, the heart can be tuned to produce unbroken music, ' at this very hour when pain is raging and throbbing everywhere in African communities living in this country. "
Quotes from others about the person
Ursula A. Barnett, writing in the conclusion of her 1976 biography Ezekiel Mphahlele, asserts that Mphahlele's "creative talent can probably gain its full potential only if he returns to South Africa and resumes his function of teaching his discipline in his own setting, and of encouraging the different elements in South Africa to combine and interchange in producing a modern indigenous literature. "
He married Rebecca Nnana Mochedibane, whose family was victim of forced removals in Vrededorp, in 1945.
