Author Description

Es'kia Mphahlele's first work of autobiography, Down Second Avenue, is one of the classics of African literature. After that seedtime came the years of exile during which - he was a 'listed' person - none of his works could be read in South Africa. His second autobiography, Afrika My Music, is set amidst the tumultuous years of his return to South Africa after 1976. 'Bantu Education' - the system which had forced him out of teaching and into exile when it was introduced in the Fifties - had triggered the Soweto revolt barely a month before he returned to his native land after twenty years in Europe, Africa and the United States. Drawing strength from ancestral ground, he begins to grapple with old cultural dilemmas that haven't gone away and new ones that plague an age of pseudo-reform. Meanwhile he unpacks his traveller's trunk of memories. African writers, artists, musicians, educationists and politicians crowd his pages, in settings ranging from Ibadan through Paris to Philadelphia. Friendships and conversations with the living and the dead, university teaching, work as an organiser of arts programmes in Africa - against this backdrop the mature views of Mphahlele the African Humanist come into focus. We begin to understand his controversial decision to return, and what it was he came back to do.