Charges of plagiarism are being levelled against renowned South African writer and educationist Mbulelo Mzamane.
Philippa Garson reports
THE credibility of renowned South African writer and educationist Mbulelo Mzamane has been called into question, with evidence surfacing that he plagiarised extracts of the work of another famous writer and journalist, Joseph Lelyveld, now editor of the New York
Mzamane, who is vice-chancellor of Fort Hare University, chair of the Book Development Council of South Africa and chair of the board of the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism, wrote a short story, Entry into Soweto, in a collection entitled Colours of a New Day, published in 1990. The book was brought out to raise funds for the ANC’s cultural work.
The short story directly reproduces paragraphs of Lelyveld’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work Move Your Shadow (1985), inspired by his experiences as a foreign correspondent here in the 1980s.
The particular piece from which Mzamane drew describes an incident where he, Lelyveld, knocked down a pedestrian. Here and there, Mzamane has made slight changes to give the work a more South African flavour. Where Lelyveld writes “successsion of drab farming towns”, Mzamane writes “sucession of drab dorpies (as they are called here)”. Other phrases and descriptive passages are reproduced virtually word for word throughout Mzamane’s five-page story.
The short-story compilation, which includes previously unpublished works of a string of renowned authors, including Nadine Gordimer, Joyce Carol Oates and Ben Okri, was originally published by Lawrence and Wishart in the United Kingdom in 1990. It was published here by Ravan and in the United States by Pantheon Books.
Ironically, Pantheon Books and the publishers of Move Your Shadow, Times Books, are both divisions of the same US publishing corporation, Random House. It was at Random House that the duplication was spotted.
In a letter, dated July 19 1991, to Stephen Hayward and Sarah Lefanu, the editors of the anthology in which Mzamane’s story appears, the senior counsel for Random House Inc, Elise Solomon, writes: “I am writing on behalf of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House Inc, to notify you of an extremely serious plagiarism and copyright infringement charge which Pantheon has just learned of concerning the story entitled Entry into Soweto in the above-referenced book. Large portions of the story … appear to be taken verbatim from pages 11 through 13 of a book by Joseph Lelyveld entitled Move Your Shadow …
“Mr Lelyveld, who is managing editor of the New York Times, is quite upset, and we of course are shocked at the similarities.” Solomon then asks the editors to extract an explanation from Mzamane.
In a lengthy four-page reply written five days later, in possession of the Mail & Guardian, Mzamane defends his actions. He admits that the use of Lelyveld’s work comprises 50 percent of his short story, but claims the duplication was not “designed to pass unnoticed … The experimental technique may be controversial in ways I did not anticipate, but deception was never my contemplated end in view.” He describes the way he worked with Lelyveld’s material as “experimentation, adaption and transformation — an open excercise that hardly qualifies to be described as dishonest”.
Mzamane says in the letter he was not motivated by profit to write the work, since no payment was expected. He claims the original short story on his computer had a dedication to Lelyveld. He defends omitting any acknowledgement, saying that authors prefer to discover for themselves influences or literary references.
“It is an oversight I now sorely regret. It is my error of judgment, and it is not the fault of my editors, that some such form of acknowledgement as ‘dedication’ is missing,” writes Mzamane.
He cites the works of many classical philosophers, playwrights and poets to justify “a very ancient practice, not of copyright infringement and plagiarism, but of adaptation, sometimes leading to transformation and enrichment … My purpose, then, was to transform a remarkable anecdote into modern short-story form.”
Mzamane says in his reply that he drew on other authors for his story, including Alex La Guma, whose character Shilling Murile, in his work Time of the Butcherbird, is the man knocked down by the car, in Mzamane’s story.
Once the duplication was picked up, no further copies were printed by the publishers.
Other publishing houses expressing interest in the collection were turned away because of the “major copyright problem”, said Hayward, co-editor of Colours of a New Day, from his London office.
“Had we, the editors and the publishers, been aware of the origins of the work, it would never have been published. We took it for granted that the works from the three dozen writers around the world were their original work. It would have been insulting to say to some of the finest writers in the English-speaking world: ‘This is your original work, isn’t it?'”
In Hayward’s view, Lelyveld “behaved incredibly honourably throughout. He could have made life so painful it doesn’t bear thinking about. But he could see what the book’s overall purpose was, the spirit behind it. He didn’t want to cause trouble.”
Mzamane, who is a professor, did his PhD at Sheffield University in the UK and lectured at various universities in the US before returning to South Africa. He wrote an anthology of short stories and a novel before his Entry into Soweto: Mzala (Ravan, 1976) and The Children of Soweto (Ravan, 1982). Mzamane yesterday declined to comment further.
# Joseph Lelyveld writes
In a driving rain, at night, he came through the windshield. For an interminable moment I thought I had killed him. We were at the end of a 400-mile drive from Durban that had started at the coast, where the Indian Ocean breaking on rocks sent spume into a gray sky; then taken us through the green hills of Natal, mostly shrouded in mist, up to the highveld, through a succession of drab farming towns, set off by their churches, their gas stations, and their separate black ‘locations’, until abruptly the openness, the sadness, the sense of the land were lost in the thickening traffic of Johannesburg and we were driving past the movie palaces on Commissioner Street, where overdressed Saturday night crowds came tripping out of the rain.
# Mzamane’s side of the story
In a driving rain, at night, he came through the windshield. For an interminable moment I thought I had killed him. We were at the end of a 640-kilometre drive from Durban that had started at the coast, where the Indian Ocean breaking on rocks sent spumes into a grey sky, and then had taken us along winding paths through the green hills of Natal, mostly shrouded in mist, up to the highveld in the Transvaal, through a succession of drab dorpies (as they are called here), farming towns, set off by their churches with spiralling towers and a cock perched on top, their gas stations, and their separate black locations, until abruptly the openness, the sadness, the sense of the land were lost in the thickening traffic of Johannesburg and we were driving past the cinema houses on Commissioner Street, where overdressed Saturday night crowds of whites came tripping out of the rain.