Ezekiel Mphahlele

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The African Image

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SOURCE: A review of The African Image, in Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. I, No. 1, March, 1963, pp. 117-18.

[In the following review, Creighton complains that Mphahlele's The African Image is a “rather foggy, disproportioned and untidy parcel of interesting reflections.”]

I know the most hideous crime in a reviewer is to review a book his author did not write instead of the one he did. But I honestly do not believe, after much thought, that [The African Image] is the book Ezekiel Mphahlele meant to write. No one of his insight, sensibility, literary distinction, and critical penetration can have meant to give us this rather foggy, disproportioned and untidy parcel of interesting reflections. I think he wanted to write three books: one on the social and political phenomenon of African nationalism; one on literature in Africa; and an autobiography of his own adventures in what he calls ‘living with freedom’ in Nigeria and Britain in the five years since he left South Africa. But the phrase ‘the African image’ seems to have fascinated him into trying unsuccessfully to make an abstract thesis out of all three.

Mr. Mphahlele writes first about the conception of négritude and African personality (perceptively and on the whole, as a declared ‘non-nationalist’—an African citizen of the world—negatively); then, with justified indignation, about the position of Africans in South Africa, and the mendacious inflated attempts of the white rulers of the Federation to disguise white supremacy behind the façade of partnership; and, in a very generally critical way, about ‘the nationalist’ in politics and society. In the second section he gives synopses of the plots of large numbers of books by black and white Africans about each other and their environment, and by Africans about themselves; but there are too many unrevealing quotations and a disappointing absence of critical judgments. The book ends with some tantalising snatches of autobiography, suggesting a continuation of Down Second Avenue. But the string that should tie this untidy parcel together—any coherent definition of what is meant by the African image—is simply not there. His observation of himself, of Nigeria and Britain is precise, fastidious, idiosyncratic, and very well described; I want more of it. But the book as a whole is out of focus and lacks a central figure, like the background to a studio photograph taken without the sitter.

In the literary section it is valuable to be reminded that South Africans were writing in English and African languages well before there was much written African literature in the rest of the continent. The quotations from the pseudonymous ‘Hadi Wasuluhangeni’, Mqhayi, Dhlomo, Thomas Mofolo, Sol Plaatje and others suggest that their works are highly relevant to the incipient study of African literature. But of the contemporary scene Mr. Mphahlele has little enlightening to say, except that ‘there is no cross play of impacts between the literature of South and West Africa’ chiefly because one is free and the other under a tyranny.

The crucial questions for African literature today are those of language, form, and subject matter. Can modern African writers find the literary forms and means, in African or European languages, to express a new flowering of the imagination? Or must they go along with the rather depressing European decline which has replaced Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Yeats, Gide or Proust by the modest talents of Messrs Wain, Amis, Wesker, Pinter, of Sartre, Camus, or M Robbe-Grillet? This decline is not, after all, part of their spiritual heritage and tradition, any more than the formal conventions of ‘the novel’, ‘the drama’, ‘the lyric’, or ‘the ode’, except in so far as they choose to adopt them. But their beginning is caught up in Europe's perhaps transient recession. Can they graft new living growth on to the old stock or will African literature remain a branch of the European tradition?

So far the work of African writers, some of it excellent, has been very derivative and, for wholly comprehensive reasons, too much preoccupied with the narrow theme of the meeting of black and white. They will have to get beyond this if Africa or any part of it is to establish a world literature in its own right in the next half century—and to begin with it may be easier for this to happen in free Africa than in the still enslaved South. But there is no precedent for a situation in which gifted writers all over a continent, with a strong oral tradition in their background, are using the forms and languages of an outside culture for their own purposes. I have no idea what will develop. But I should like to know what Mr. Mphahlele thinks. He himself seems to accept European literary forms as the vehicle for African expression.

He is, unavoidably, much concerned with race relations. No South African, black or white, who retains, as Mr. Mphahlele triumphantly does, a humane sense of balance, can be otherwise. But he hates race-consciousness, black or white, with a noble passion and this, it seems, is why he says he is a non-nationalist. He is not very easy to construe about this, but appears to feel uneasily that current African nationalism is in danger of neglecting the highest cultural values just as the white chauvinism it is superseding has done.

I hope Mr. Mphahlele will write all the books he has adumbrated here. And I hope he will begin with some more autobiography.

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