It is hard to overstate the cruelty of the indignities that the apartheid system thrust upon generations of black South Africans. And yet, compared to the scale of this crime against humanity, remarkably little has been written about it.
Anguished reports poured out of the United Nations and various humanitarian and anti-apartheid organisations during the time of the entrenchment of the system; and we still await the voluminous report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, denied to us because of the wranglings of various parties to the processes of apartheid, who would rather not have their role in years of destruction aired before the general public.
We have a few novels, and some collections of short stories and poetry that probe a part of the psychology of apartheid. But compared to writings about the European holocaust of the 1930s and 1940s, South Africans have given themselves precious little space to dig deep into all the personal and public complexities of that era.
Our struggle to transform the country’s educational curriculum highlights just one aspect of this failure. How are we bringing disparate parts of our society together into one worldview? The debate rages on unabated.
Es’kia Mphahlele has been applying his considerable mind to all these matters for almost as long as any of us can remember. As a novelist, short story writer, and academic educationalist he has continually turned our most compelling issues over for inspection, offering up a range of questions and possibilities in an environment that offers scant space for debate.
Mphahlele’s recently published collection of essays, simply entitled Es’kia, pulls together much of his output as a serious thinker over a wide range of issues, with particular emphasis on educational models that we should be exploring in our brave new world. And as we discover, the challenge of education as part of our transformation spills over into numerous areas of our social, cultural and political life as well.
The section headings of African Humanism and Culture, Social Consciousness and Literary Appreciation all explore, to one degree or another, ways in which the broadening of our understanding of our obligations to ourselves and to each other is part of a never-ending quest for enlightenment and understanding — particularly under the conditions of a severely damaged society in transformation.
Mphahlele came to the two strands of what was to become his professional career more or less at the same time. A deprived childhood in the rural north of the country bred in him a sense of curiosity and wonder that would never be dimmed, and that informed his development as a creative writer. Then a tough adolescence in the rough, segregated world of Marabastad, near Pretoria, gradually brought him to an understanding that education was a way out of the trap of poverty. He became a voracious reader, and in the process absorbed literary influences that would further broaden his creativity.
But his dedication to his profession as a teacher was absolute and, as he says, he would probably have stayed loyal to that profession in the country of his birth — even under the iniquitous system of Bantu Education — had he been allowed to. But, because he had become an active campaigner against the introduction of Bantu Education in the late 1950s, the apartheid government chose to ban him from teaching, and thus from earning a living.
Life as a member of the gregarious crew of Drum writers had never been much to his taste — nor would it have provided a sustainable income for his family. And so, in 1957, he left on a one-way ticket to Lagos, where he took up a teaching post and continued to write novels, essays, poetry and short stories.
He also extended his academic credentials, moving on to Kenya and France, and then to the United States, where he was to become an important figure on the African literature and African studies scene, as well as a distinguished educationalist. He also taught at the University of Zambia for a brief period, before returning to his American academic base.
Although Es’kia is a collection of academic essays, to follow through its various themes is to obtain a profound sense of Mphahlele’s personal and professional development. His themes are never divorced from the central thrust of his thinking, which shows a deep commitment to the pressing issues of South Africa and the African continent as a whole.
Mphahlele says that he felt more comfortable being an exile in the various African countries in which he lived than in the United States, for all the vibrant engagement of that country’s African-American communities in issues of race and underdevelopment. But even in Nigeria, Kenya and Zambia, he had felt a measure of alienation. He could never feel entirely at home — exile itself became an obstacle to his further creative development.
At the age of 58 he had begun to see exile as yet another “ghetto of the mind”. He needed to return to South Africa to come to terms with himself, to block out that feeling of irrelevance and disconnection that an exile feels when forced to live in someone else’s country.
For 20 years he had wandered with his family in West, East and Central Africa, in France and finally in the United States. Now, in 1977, in the depths of what he describes as the “frozen, brooding, searing silence that reigned in the country” after the brutal murders of Steve Biko and other Black Consciousness activists, he had finally decided to take the long road home, and re-establish a relevance for himself.
He came braced with the knowledge that it was not going to be an easy ride.
We forget how much water has flowed under the bridge since those turbulent times. In choosing to return to the land of his birth, he would be swimming against the tide of exile, which he himself had pioneered, in the company of a tiny handful of frustrated activists and intellectuals, in the late 1950s. The trickle had become an overwhelming flood after the students’ revolt of 1976, and the violent repressions that had followed. For a high-profile exile with a distinguished American academic career to contemplate returning to the belly of the beast at that time seemed to many exiles to be an act of folly — even of betrayal of “the cause”.
On the other side of the fence, at the point of arrival into the forbidden motherland, come other sources of betrayal. These are even more complex, and one side feels no less betrayed than the other.
There is the sense of betrayed memories: nothing is as the exiles had left it. “We returned to find most things had changed for the worse. The black townships had grown enormous …” And the lives of those who were forced to inhabit them had become even more brutal and brutalised than they had been 20 years before. Families and communities turned in on themselves with unspeakable callousness and violence, threatening to destabilise the returnee’s sense of coming home to regain a sense of groundedness that he could not bring himself to feel in the outside world.
Then there was the lingering, guilty sense of betrayal that the exile forces on himself for having turned his back on his people and his country in the first place — a betrayal that he believes he reads in every set of eyes that looks at him.
And then, of course, in Mphahlele’s case there was the unsurprising betrayal by a state apparatus that, rather than looking to the well-being of one of its citizens, had taken away his means of livelihood and sense of self-respect, and forced him into that involuntary exile. That state apparatus was still in place, and did its best to frustrate his attempts to apply his accumulated knowledge and wisdom for the benefit of his compatriots.
Mphahlele nevertheless threw himself into the vital work of being part of the process of transformation, focusing his energies on developing alternative models of education. Some of the results are there to see, but most, as one hears in the challenging, dissatisfied tone of many of these essays written back on home soil, are still far beyond the horizon.
It is extraordinary today to try and recall the many ways in which apartheid bent over backwards to marginalise, if not destroy, South Africa’s greatest minds. Jail, exile and carefully nurtured despondency leading to self-destructiveness put paid to too many lives, leaving us with a landscape whose barrenness we cannot properly see — because we can no longer imagine what extraordinary flowers grew in this space in previous times.
Es’kia Mphahlele has survived the buffets of both home and exile, choosing to see his journey through rather than lose his sense of self-worth and succumb to an inferior intellectual force.
In this collection of important essays, we see many of the fruits that he has brought home at the end of that long and arduous journey.