Voyager: Thomas Mofolo and his wife Emma in East London in 1936. The writer’s first book ‘Moeti oa Bochabela’ (‘Traveller to the East’) was published in 1907.
Southern African literature owes so much to two small, remote printing presses attached to mission stations.
In what was Natal, The Lovedale Press published, among others, Sol Plaatje’s novel Mhudi in 1930.
And in what was then the Basutoland Protectorate, the Morija Sesuto [sic] Book Depot in January 1907 published the first of 17 episodes of Thomas Mofolo’s story Moeti oa Bochabela (Traveller to the East).
The Book Depot was attached to the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society which, to celebrate its 75th anniversary in Morija, serialised the work of one of its employees, Mofolo, in the local fortnightly Sesotho newspaper Leselinyana (The Little Light).
A proofreader and an all-round hand at the depot, Mofolo was to have the distinction of being the first published African novelist when, later in 1907, Traveller was issued in book form.
It’s important to remember that the honour of being the first African novelist is generally accorded either to Plaatje for Mhudi or to Chinua Achebe for Things Fall Apart (1958). Yet here is Thomas Mofolo, at first identified in the serialisation only as “TM”, stepping forth as a novelist in 1907. The English translation by Harry Ashton was published in 1934.
Students of literature will identify Mofolo more readily with his later work Chaka (1926), a historical romance that won him wide renown. In the literary equivalent of that misnomered category, World Music, Chaka is regarded as a classic of “world literature”. (A term that can also be condescendingly read as “good stuff not in English”.)
But from very early on, the French literary establishment knew what they had in Mofolo and said so. Traveller was acclaimed in Livre d’Or in 1912: “A masterpiece, we have called it, when talking of Mofolo’s book. We’ll never withdraw the word, which is an exact description.”
That is indeed precise. Mofolo offers the reader a journey of the soul and a physical journey, both parts the protagonist Fekisi’s quest for enlightenment, a better way of living, a more discerning relationship with nature and fellow humans, and most of all a search for ultimate meaning.
The Christian influence of the mission station is present but so is much else. Whereas Achebe was to depict an existential struggle between his main character Okonkwo’s traditional beliefs and those of the incoming — invading — Christian missionaries, Mofolo gives us a complex and subtle synthesis of those two seemingly irreconcilable positions.
The great scholar Ali Mazrui once posed the question of whether Achebe’s perspective and descriptions of life in Okonkwo’s time would have been deemed racist had they come from the pen of Joseph Conrad. In a paper titled Things Fall Apart Revisited, Mazrui asks: “Does Things Fall Apart have more in common with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness than Chinua Achebe has been prepared to acknowledge?
“Would Things Fall Apart have been accused of racism had it been written by a white man? Does Things Fall Apart share with Heart of Darkness the quality of ambivalence between viewing the white man as intrusive and viewing the black man as primitive?”
These questions are a prelude to quoting the opening sentence of Traveller, a line powerful and shocking and unforgettable.
It might pose to certain modern readers, sometimes given to instant reactions and offence, an impediment to reading on. That would be their loss, and the questions raised by Mazrui are useful in considering Mofolo’s view of life in chapter one of the book, “The Darkness of Old”.
Here is that opening line: “In the black darkness, very black, in the times when the tribes were still eating each other like wild beasts, there lived a man called Fekisi.”
Before there are shouts to “cancel” Mofolo, consider what Mazrui says of Achebe: “Things Fall Apart is a work of ethnic and racial candour and honesty. But had it been written by a white man, it would probably have been widely condemned and never have been accepted as a great contribution to world literature.”
So too with Mofolo, because Traveller is a work of great candour. It is similarly clear-eyed, and thus imperishably beautiful, in its perceptions and descriptions of nature, the sun, the stars, rain, cattle and the seasons. Crowning those is the spiritual journey that Fekisi undertakes, which sees him embarking on the most challenging of physical journeys too, an odyssey away from his old physical home towards a new “house” in the east.
Mofolo’s writing immediately evokes Africa and her being, times of winds and harshness and dryness, times of rain and coolness and softness. Anyone who has lived in Southern Africa will recognise the intimate acquaintance of the author with the land, flora and fauna of which he writes. It’s gripping and comforting, with a loving familiarity that cannot be bought but can be gained only from lived experience thought deeply on.
Here is writing of biblical stature, not so much in the high-flown style of the King James Version of the Bible but rather in the exact description of the Jerusalem Bible translation: the reader is close to the young herder Fekisi’s heart, mind and soul, shares his feelings, fears and forebodings, and is a fellow traveller in the best sense of that phrase.
Here are some samples of the beauty of Mofolo’s prose: “The dawn broke, night did not refuse to go. The sun rose, it rose, it mounted higher.” (This brings to mind one of Homer’s stately travel formulae in The Odyssey: “The sun went down, and all the travelling ways grew dark.”)
“When he was tending his cattle and rain fell, it seemed to him a most wonderful thing. He would gaze up into the sky to try to see where the rain came from. He asked himself what rain was, where it came from. What were the clouds? Where did they come from? By what thing were they held of such strength that they did not fall down upon people? And when it thundered, what was it? And what was the lightning produced by in such great waters?”
“The sun rose. It rose as always, as we have said. It shone brightly as always. And now this youth of ours asked himself terrifying questions … He began to be suspicious about the sun; all things were distasteful to him, evil to him.”
These speculations are Aristotelian in mien. Fekisi, like the great observer and seeker of scientific and philosophical truth, wants to know how the world works — and why.
Fekisi’s questing mind compares the harmonies and anomalies of nature, regards tenderly the sentient beings who are the cattle he looks after, and analyses sharply the imperfections and horrors of human nature and behaviour.
It is in murderous human actions — a man kills his wife with an axe to her head, another man is strangled after a feast — that Fekisi finds further motivation to leave his home. His sun-watching and sky-gazing at night lead him to the most powerful factor: “He asked himself by whom are those things, those stars held, by whom are they guided?”
Disillusioned by the sparse, joyless and often nasty life of the village, and driven by a hunger to find something larger than himself and his fellow humans, and more meaningful, Fekisi abandons a life that would have been comfortable, and the esteem of many, and sets off towards the east.
He journeys through plains and deserts until he reaches the sea. En route there are encounters with lions that stamp him with the bravery and faith of Daniel. His resourcefulness and implacable desire to attain a higher plane of being drive him on inexorably through thirst, hunger, sickness and occasional despair. To say more of the sea and the plotlines it brings would be to take away pleasures for first-time readers.
Let us end with the second sentence of the book, which follows that startling line above. It shows Mofolo’s dramatic awareness and, above all else, his love of and respect for Fekisi, one of literature’s most memorable travellers in search of knowledge.
“Yes, I say a man, not a man in appearance only, one knowing how to speak, but a man in speech, in actions, in all his habits; a man in secret and openly; a man in grief and joy; in good fortune and bad; in hunger and plenty.”