I was 15 when I began high school at St Peter’s Secondary School, Rosettenville, one of Johannesburg’s southern suburbs. This was January 1935.
There was a sense in which boarding school protected one from the vulgarity, the squalor, the muck and smell of slum life such as Marabastad — a Pretoria location (I still feel “location” gives ghetto life a more distinctive character than the fancy name “township” does ). At any rate during term time, the reading bug had already bitten me, so I spent hours of free time reading in the school library: Charles Dickens, RL Stevenson, Walter Scott, Edgar Rice Burroughs (I was once thrown out of class for reading Tarzan during a free period), Conan Doyle, Baroness Orcszy, Pearl Buck, Quiller Couch, John Buchan, and so on: from Tarzan and mystery thrillers to the sublime.
Back in Marabastad I had rummaged through a lot of junk literature donated by some suburban families and dumped on the floor of a store room attached to a community hall that bore the sign Municipal Library. After ploughing through boys’ and girls’ adventure stories (all about white kids), through ghost stories; after throwing aside astrology books, I had one day stumbled upon Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
In the early years of the war I was at Adams (Teachers’) College, my next boarding school. I read more of the same stuff, adding to the list titles like Gone With the Wind. I was also an avid reader of Outspan, which during the war ran thrilling hunters’ stories, mystery and real-crime stories about John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, G-Man Purvis and so on. As I was an irrepressible moviegoer who had evolved from the “silent” days to the talkies, I read every book I could lay my hands on about the art and techniques of the cinema.
A story well told: this became in time an obsession with me. I retold a folk tale for a school contest and took away the first prize of 10 shillings.
During my first job at Ezenzeleni Blind Institute in Roodepoort (near Johannesburg), I started to write verse, chunks of long talkative verse, a compulsive lyricising of my immediate external nature. The impression had been left in our minds at school that poetry must be about trees, birds, the elements. We had never been taught poetry as well as we know how today. We had a compulsion to memorise in my school days, and it was a joy to recite and listen to the grandeur of Shakespeare on campus and during school debates. These debates were more an exercise in rhetoric than in the method of argument. The spoken word or phrase or line was the thing, damn the dialectic. So I was writing verse out of a book as it were. There was no one an “apprentice” could go to for advice on techniques, or to show a manuscript. It was a shot in the dark.
In the years that I worked at Ezenzeleni I lived in a location on the western edge of Roodepoort town. It was no less slummy than our Marabastad, just another heap of rusted tin shacks. The same dusty potted streets, the same communal taps, streets flowing with dirty water and littered with children’s stools; the same mongrels that accentuated the would-be stillness of my nights with their howling as I sat up late studying for the matric certificate (I had only the junior certificate and the two-year teacher’s diploma).
Sailing along the night air was also the incessant hum of location life that seemed to suppress the bellowing, screams and shrieks and street singing that would finally burst into an orgy with a reckless fury and abandon come Saturday night. Like the people of Marabastad, my Roodepoort people were hurting, even in the process of creating their own fun.
The war was raging in Europe and North Africa, Marabastad was being bulldozed, Jan Smuts was sending troops to viciously snuff the municipal workers’ strike that had burst into rioting in an African hostel adjacent to Marabastad. But, Roodepoort West location was still standing in its rusted stubborness, stretching out its lease of life till the Nationalists would blast it away during the 1960s.
On those nights, when I had had my fill of geometrical theorems and algebraic equations and graphs and Shakespeare and Milton and the Boston Tea Party and Bismarck and Black Hole of Calcutta, when the stench of night soil choked the night air from the wagons passing by, I would try to relax, seek refuge in the workshop of the mind. I would listen to the stories milling around in the workshop, looking for words to give them form. Before I knew what I was doing I had embarked on the great adventure of story- telling. I had in earlier years fallen in love with the printed word; now it was an obsession, aching for articulation by no other person than the present narrator. The story had found me. I had never read modern short stories before and, as I recall, I turned out pages and pages of freewheeling narrative episodes.
At high school and at Adams College my teachers had merely come to class and read (very badly, now I look back on those five years) poetry, excerpts from Shakespeare, from Dickens, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Again in hindsight, it seems they were all mindlessly bent on killing the love of literature in us. It was only my asinine persistence and obsession with the literary text that saved me from that death.
I’m one of hundreds of writers who first came to English as a working language, a learning language, a political medium of communication in a multilingual society, rather than as a native tongue. Thus studying English, either in a formal or non-formal situation, has enhanced my writing ability. While my general reading was for pleasure it was also of learning the language. My books are full of markings that trace the paths of a mind obsessed with idiom, the well-chosen word or phrase, the exquisite narrative and descriptive line. So private study, which took me through the University of South Africa for the BA, BA Honours, and the MA, and the teaching of English in high school after Roodepoort, afforded me ample opportunity to re-educate myself in the English language via its literature.
I was reading the Scottish and English ballad for matric when I became enthralled by its storytelling manner. Its brooding mood accentuated by the refrain and the supernatural element, its economy of language, its dramatic “leap” to clinch the violent happening — all these features reinforced in me an intuition about the mechanism and spirit of the short story. And my life in Marabastad, Roodepoort and later in Orlando provided that atmosphere that breeds violence, death, deprivation.
It was by mere accident that I came across an educational pamphlet brought out by Julian Rollnick’s African Bookman Publications, Cape Town. I nervously put my writing together in a packet and mailed it to Mr Rollnick. He promptly sent me back the verse and said he wanted to publish six of the 10 stories — a pick from a bunch I had been accumulating for six years. Man Must Live and Other Stories (1947) was Rollnick’s first try in fiction publishing.
In the early 1950s I was going through a number of literary experiences that were to drastically change my social attitudes and my writing style. I was introduced to Nadine Gordimer who immediately took an interest in my writing. She agreed to look at my stories and critique them. The discussions that followed and my initiation into Gordimer’s own craftsmanship in the genre gave me new insights into what I was engaged in.
I began to read the Russians: Nikolay Gogol, Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, and Maxim Gorky. Their mastery of the short story, especially that of the first three, blew my mind. By accident I discovered the Afro-Americans. Fanny Klenerman, the grand dame of Vanguard Booksellers in Johannesburg, had titles by Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes. Wright’s volume of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children, contained the kind of violence and brutal truths about white racism that struck a common chord in me, even as they tore me up inside.
I also discovered Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, Carl van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven. I discovered English translations of Gustave Flaubert, Giovanni Boccaccio, Francois Rabelais. Hemingway and Wright taught me economy of language and the impressionistic concreteness of image, Faulkner taught me resonance, the Russians the totality of craftsmanship.
On the advice of Gordimer, who was impressed with the story The Suitcase, I sent it to New World Writing, an international anthology published in New York. The story appeared in this collection in 1955. The late Langston Hughes read it in New York and wrote me a flattering word of appreciation, sending me at the same time his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, and book of short stories, The Ways of White Folks: the beginning of a long friendship.
Drum magazine was set up in 1950, and had by 1955 established itself as a vibrant monthly for black writing and the black urban proletariat. I had myself published the first story in Drum in 1952. I became its fiction editor only in January 1955, staying on till I left for Nigeria in September 1957. New Age and the Fighting Talk, the two leftist papers of the decade, and Ronald Segal’s Africa South also featured Alex la Guma, Richard Rive and I. Although we were not at school in the 1950s, although we had diverse interests and intellectual pursuits, even as journalists, we shared this much in common: we had found a voice.
And because urban blacks in South Africa have so much in common with urban Afro-Americans, almost to a man, the writers of the 1950s had more than just a dip into American culture: journalism, imaginative literature, jazz, innovative prose styles. There was in our styles a racy, concrete, nervously impressionistic idiom, often incorporating the grand Shakespearean image.
For my part I was, as a result of all these influences, learning to be much less sentimental in my view of character, much less didactic in tone, more concrete and incisive in dramatisation and idiom as a result of these influences. I was also trying out the same discipline in my creative writing as my Unisa mentor; Professor Edward Davis (now deceased), was putting me through in my English assignments. A notorious taskmaster, but a man I admired for his sparkling intellect and critical acumen.
I moved into exile. In 1957 I was moving from one vibrant literary scene, where new things were happening, into another: West Africa. There was abundant theatre activity, and the artists were most prolific. Independent commercial publishing was thriving, books found their way to the stalls of the open-air market square where food and miscellaneous goods were sold.
After Down Second Avenue (1959) and The African Image (1962) I was again writing short stories. This genre had been for us in South Africa a condensed form of prose that required a few broad but incisive strokes or flashes to get the “message” across. The writers who were creating out of a rural sensibility had been writing novels and lyric poetry that depicted the intrusion of Western-Christian values and custom into a non-aggressive pastoral humanism. The works of Thomas Mofolo, Sekese, Sol Plaatje, John Dube, AC Jordan, HIE Dhlomo, BW Vilakazi, BT Kgaketla fell in this tradition. The more intensely urban were using the short story and reportage as a way of coming to terms with their anger, as a response to the immediate pressures of deprivation and racism.
This was no longer my milieu in West Africa and France. In Kenya and Zambia I would only experience the residual effects of a colonial presence that was receding. I had to write out of new discontents or remembered hurts, which I knew would still be the lot of those I had left behind. The element of immediacy had gone. I was among people whose discontents had reference to other historical roots, although they merged with mine at the point of Europe’s colonial entry. But the discontents I found called for other responses than those demanded by racial confrontation and contemplation. My novel, The Wanderers (1972), was an attempt to reflect the fragmented passage of a South African black through a continent fragmented by a colonial history but trying vaguely to grope for a sense of unity on the grounds of that same shared history.
When I was waiting for something to be born in fiction I took to poetry, but more importantly to literary criticism. The revised edition of The African Image (1972) and Voices in the Whirlwind (1972), plus other essays that appeared in journals, are an example of these waiting intervals.
In all the nine years I was in the United States, I could not feel the country, grasp it, couldn’t pick up distinctive smells of places. So I gave up trying to spin something out of an American-inspired imagination; except, again, to express myself on Afro-American life, thought and literature.
A return to South Africa would have to be the resolution of my identity as an African teacher and writer. The one has often accused and justified the other by turns, and similarly they have wept over and gloried in the other.
Es’kia Mphahlele returned to South Africa in the 1980s. This essay, originally titled My Experience as a Writer, was written in 1971. It appears in Es’kia Continued, published by Stainbank & Associates, a follow-up to the successful 2002 collection, Es’kia