Ezekiel Mphahlele

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Analysis

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Ezekiel Mphahlele’s fiction and other writing have been important bridges between African and Western societies. As an African in a segregated South Africa dominated by Western whites, and later as an African living in exile in Europe and the United States, Mphahlele has been in a unique position to present to many Westerners a picture of black South African life that they would not otherwise have had. Because his writings were officially banned by the South African government in 1961, making it illegal for South Africans to read or even quote his work, most of his stories were not read in his own country until the ban was lifted in 1979. While Mphahlele has always considered himself an African author writing for an African audience, he also recognized the opportunity to address Western oppressors at the same time that he celebrated the strength and beauty of his own people.

Trained in a European-based school system, Mphahlele had as literary models only Western fiction writers, including Charles Dickens, Miguel de Cervantes, and Fyodor Dostoevski. He writes in Afrika My Music that he had never read an “artful” short story before he began writing them, “so I had no genuine models.” He traces his realism to Dickens, William Faulkner, and others and his tendency to focus on a single character in a single intense situation to Scottish and English ballads. Over these European frameworks he drapes the cloth of South African experience and sensibility. His stories typically focus on one African character struggling to survive.

Critics often point to Mphahlele’s prevailing sense of hope and optimism, even as he writes about racial tension. This optimism comes from Mphahlele’s immersion in African humanism, a belief in the essential connection between human nature and the natural world, strengthened by the presence of ancestral spirits and the spirit of community.

Man Must Live, and Other Stories

Mphahlele’s first short-story collection, Man Must Live, and Other Stories included five short stories about characters struggling to survive in a difficult world. The theme of survival grew out of his own childhood in a segregated black township, always under a cloud of poverty and oppression. In the title story, a black railroad policeman named Khalima Zungu adopts a philosophy that he chants to himself, “man must live.” He marries a woman of means, then treats her poorly and squanders her money, always telling himself that he is entitled to whatever he can get because “man must live.” After his new family leaves him and he burns down their house out of revenge, he lives alone in a tin shack, still believing that his need to live is more important than how he treats others. Zungu’s life has been a hard one, but his decline is due more to his character than to his circumstances.

Mphahlele knows that survival in a racist society is a struggle, but his underlying belief in community informs this story and many later stories. Community is a central pillar in the belief system Mphahlele has called African humanism. The seven hundred copies of Man Must Live, and Other Stories sold quickly in and around Cape Town, establishing Mphahlele’s early reputation. As he grew as a writer, however, Mphahlele rejected most of the stories as clumsy and immature. Only “Man Must Live” retained his approval, and he included it in his next collection, In Corner B.

“Grieg on a Stolen Piano”

One of Mphahlele’s most likable characters is Uncle, the central character in “Grieg on a Stolen Piano” from In Corner B . Uncle, like many black South Africans, has been shaped by a...

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rich blend of traditional and Western cultures. He is a school inspector who moves between the white and black worlds, sometimes playing Edvard Grieg on the piano and using the services of medical doctors, sometimes playing African music and calling for a traditional herbalist and witch doctor. He shares with Zungu of “Man Must Live” a strong will to survive, but Uncle is amusing and gentle, harmful only to himself.

As the story unfolds, Uncle hatches a get-rich-quick scheme to pay off a gambling debt by coaching pretty Mary-Jane to victory in a beauty contest. His plan includes bribing the judges, but Mary-Jane loses anyway. Uncle feels no remorse for his crookedness, nor for the fact that many of his possessions, including his piano, were bought as stolen property. “Don’t we steal from each other,” he asks, “lie to each other every day and know it, us and the whites?”

“In Corner B”

The title story of In Corner B shows the richness of life in South Africa’s black townships, a world that is invisible to whites, who encounter blacks only as employees and know nothing of them socially. The story is a simple one, about the recently widowed Talita and her troubled memories of her husband of nineteen years on the day of his funeral. Just before her husband’s death, Talita learned that he had a mistress, Marta. Marta comes to the funeral and wails loudly but later writes Talita a letter to say that the husband never gave Marta his love. The story again shows Mphahlele’s concern with community, and includes scenes of township people laughing, drinking, and preparing for a funeral. “In Corner B” does not deal with racial tension; whites appear only in the background. Mphahlele would write later, in the essay “Renewal Time,” that whites would appear less and less in black African writing because they are “simply irrelevant to the black man’s understanding of himself.”

“Mrs. Plum”

Mphahlele has called “Mrs. Plum” “the best thing I ever pulled off.” First published in In Corner B, it tells the story of the black housemaid Karabo and her white employer Mrs. Plum. Told from Karabo’s viewpoint, the story is one of the first pieces of fiction to feature a black African woman as the central character. Karabo is young and eager to take her place in the world. Like Zungu in “Man Must Live,” she carries a refrain with her: “I learned. I grew up.” What she learns is that Mrs. Plum, a typical white liberal in segregated South Africa, is as hypocritical as she is well meaning. Mrs. Plum allows herself to be arrested to protest the injustice of discriminatory laws but will not allow her daughter to marry a black intellectual, who has been a guest in their home. Additionally, she is never able to see Karabo as an equal. Gradually Karabo develops the confidence to demand fair treatment from her employer.

Mphahlele’s indictment of white liberal hypocrisy and his detailed true-to-life scenes of South African domestic life are typical of his fiction. Also typical is the story’s focus on one central character, struggling to survive in an oppressive society. Karabo’s story is set in a real place, at a real time, and the civil injustices she faces are historically accurate.

Renewal Time

Renewal Time is especially significant because it was the first collection of Mphahlele’s short fiction published and reviewed outside Africa. Issued in 1988 by Readers International, it made the short fiction more easily available to American and European readers who already admired Mphahlele for his autobiographical volumes and criticism. Renewal Time comprises the eight stories Mphahlele considers his best, including “Man Must Live,” “Grieg on a Stolen Piano,” “In Corner B,” and “Mrs. Plum”; all of the stories were included in In Corner B, and most were written during Mphahlele’s exile from South Africa.

Mphahlele begins and ends the volume with new essays reflecting on the stories in the context of his own exile and return. “The Sounds Begin AgainEssay, 1984” (actually the first chapter of Afrika My Music) is a narrative account of the author’s return to South Africa, interwoven with memories of his youth. In the episodic structure and poetic language of fiction, the piece traces the educational system and the writers—mostly Western—who shaped Mphahlele’s own writing. Discovering the short stories of Richard Wright in the 1940’s, Mphahlele learned ”how to use the short story as a way of dealing with my anger and indignation.” In “Renewal TimeEssay, 1981,” Mphahlele addresses the reader directly, calling for revolution and renewal.