Es’kia Mphahlele

Ezekiel Mphahlele was born on the seventeenth of December 1919 at Marabastad, the segregated location of Pretoria — the same Black township that furnished the principal setting of his 1959 autobiography Down Second Avenue — the son of Moses Mphahlele, a domestic worker, and Eva Mphahlele, a domestic worker. He was sent at five to the rural Pedi-speaking Northern Transvaal household of his paternal grandmother at the village of Maupaneng.

He returned to Marabastad at thirteen in 1932 and completed the St. Peter’s Secondary School at Rosettenville on the outskirts of Johannesburg in 1939. He took the bachelor’s in arts at the University of South Africa in 1947 by correspondence study while teaching at the Orlando High School at Johannesburg — among the principal Black secondary schools of pre-apartheid Witwatersrand.

He was dismissed by the Bantu Education Department of the apartheid state in 1952 for his opposition to the Bantu Education Act, and went into a twenty-year exile in 1957 — at Lagos, Paris, Nairobi, Lusaka, Denver and Philadelphia.

He completed across the exile the Ph.D. in English at the University of Denver in 1968 — the dissertation The Wanderers on the African autobiographical novel — and the M.A. at the same university in 1966.

He published in 1959 the autobiography Down Second Avenue — the chronicle of his Marabastad childhood and his St. Peter’s adolescence — recognised across the following half-century as one of the principal Black autobiographies of the twentieth-century African continent.

He published five further novels and two short-story collections across the exile — among them The Wanderers (1971), Chirundu (1979), and Father Come Home (1984).

He returned to South Africa in August 1977 under one of the rare apartheid-period exemptions for senior Black intellectuals — the first such senior Black exile to do so — and was appointed in 1979 to the University of the Witwatersrand as senior research fellow in the new African Literature programme. He founded in 1983 the Council for Black Education and Research.

He died at Lebowakgomo, Limpopo on the twenty-seventh of October 2008, at eighty-eight.

He is honored here as the author of Down Second Avenue.