Es'kia Mphahlele

South African · 1919 to 2008

Es'kia Mphahlele was born Ezekiel Mphahlele on 17 December 1919 in Marabastad, a Black township outside Pretoria, and from the age of five was raised by his paternal grandmother in the rural village of Maupaneng, herding cattle and goats before rejoining his mother in Marabastad at twelve. He trained as a teacher at Adams College in Natal and began teaching English and Afrikaans at Orlando High School in Soweto, studying for further degrees by correspondence through the University of South Africa all the while. In December 1952 the government dismissed him, along with two colleagues, for opposing the Bantu Education Act, and barred him from teaching anywhere in the country. He turned to journalism, joining Drum magazine in Johannesburg and completing an MA in English with distinction from the University of South Africa in 1957. That same year he left South Africa for what became twenty years of exile, teaching and building literary institutions in Nigeria, France, Kenya, and the United States, where he earned a PhD in creative writing from the University of Denver in 1968. His autobiography, Down Second Avenue (1959), recounting his Pretoria childhood and the collapse of his teaching career under apartheid, was translated into a dozen languages and banned in his own country. In 1977 he returned to South Africa for good, changing his name from Ezekiel to Es'kia, and in 1983 founded the Department of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, becoming the university's first Black professor. President Nelson Mandela awarded him the Order of the Southern Cross in 1998. Known as the Dean of African Letters and the father of African humanism, he wrote two autobiographies, more than thirty short stories, two verse plays, and numerous essays. He died of natural causes on 27 October 2008 at a hospital in Lebowakgomo, Limpopo, near the village where he had grown up, at the age of eighty-eight.