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Chabani Manganyi published the first edition of Mphahlele’s selected letters twenty-five years ago under the same title. Bury me at the Marketplace suggested the energy and magnanimity of Mphahlele the man, whose personality and intellect as a writer and educator would carve an indelible place for him in South Africa’s literary and cultural history, the international affiliations out of which it has been formed, particularly in the diaspora that connects South Africa to the rest of the African continent and to the black presence in Europe and the United States.
This selection of Mphahlele’s own letters has been greatly expanded: it has also been augmented by the addition of letters from Mphahlele’s correspondents. It illustrates the networks that shaped Mphahlele’s personal and intellectual life, the circuits of intimacy, intellectual enquiry, of friendship, scholarships and solidarity that he created and nurtured over the years. The correspondence is supplemented by introductory essays from two editors, by two interviews conducted with Mphahlele by Manganyi and Attwell’s insightful explanatory notes.
Preface
In his own words - N Chabani Manganyi
Chapter 1 Introduction
Reading in the company of Es’kia Mphahlele - David Attwell
Chapter 2 Correspondents
Chapter 3 Letters 1943-2006
Chapter 4 Interviews
Looking in: In search of Es’kia Mphahlele
Metaphors of self
Interview references
Index

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Psychology

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Publié par	WITS University Press
Date de parution	01 novembre 2009
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781776142927
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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BURY ME AT THE MARKETPLACE
ES’KIA MPHAHLELE AND COMPANY
LETTERS 1943-2006
Edited by N Chabani Manganyi and David Attwell
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg
South Africa
http://witspress.wits.ac.za
First published 2010.
Reprinted 2018.
Preface, introduction and notes ©N Chabani Manganyi and David Attwell, 2010
Letters ©individual authors as indicated, 2010
ISBN: 978 1 86814 489 1
ISBN: 978 1 77614 292 7 (EPUB)
ISBN: 978 1 77614 293 4 (MOBI)
Excerpts from ‘Looking In: In Search of Ezekiel Mphahlele’ originally appeared in Exiles and Homecomings: A Biography of Es’kia Mphahlele by Chabani Manganyi, Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1981. Copyright © Chabani Manganyi, 1981. Reprinted with permission.
Excerpts from ‘Metaphors of Self ’ originally appeared in Selves in Question: Interviews on Southern African Auto/Biography , edited by Judith Lütge Coullie, Stephan Meyer, Thengani Ngwenya and Thomas Olver, Honolulu, HA: University of Hawaii Press, 2006. Copyright © University of Hawaii Press, 2006. Reprinted with permission.
The poem ‘Death’ by Kuba originally appeared in African Poetry: An Anthology of Traditional African Poems , compiled and edited by Ulli Beier, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.
Wits University Press has made every reasonable effort to locate, contact and acknowledge copyright owners. Please notify us should copyright not have been properly identified and acknowledged. Any corrections will be incorporated in subsequent editions of the book.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
Edit by Pat Tucker
Design, layout and typesetting by Crazy Cat Designs
Cover image by George Mnyalaza Milwa Pemba, courtesy of N Chabani Manganyi
When I die, don’t bury me under forest trees.
I fear the dripping water.
Bury me under the great shade trees in the market,
I want to hear the drums beating
I want to feel the dancers’ feet.
Taken from the poem ‘Death’ by Kuba
CONTENTS
PREFACE
In his own voice
N Chabani Manganyi
INTRODUCTION
Reading in the company of Es’kia Mphahlele
David Attwell
CORRESPONDENTS
LETTERS 1943-2006
INTERVIEWS
Looking in: In search of Es’kia Mphahlele
Metaphors of self
Interview references
Index
The editors have compiled footnotes to place the letters in this volume in context. The footnotes include information about correspondents, information about the historical, political or social context surrounding the time of writing, translations into English from other languages, as well as other useful information. For ease of reading the notes in each letter start at 1 and appear directly below the letter in which they appear.
THE EDITORS
N CHABANI MANGANYI
N Chabani Manganyi is a Senior Research Fellow in the Unit for Advanced Studies at the University of Pretoria. A retired clinical psychologist, his professional writings have appeared in academic journals and in collections of essays such as Treachery and Innocence: Psychology and Racial Difference in South Africa (1991). A long-standing interest in life writing dating back to the late 1970s resulted in the publication of the biographies of Es’kia Mphahlele (1983) and the late South African artist, Gerard Sekoto (2004). In 2008 Chabani Manganyi was honoured by the universities of the Witwatersrand, South Africa and Rhodes in recognition of his contribution to psychology and social change in South Africa.
DAVID ATTWELL
South African by birth, David Attwell is Chair of Modern Literature at the University of York (UK), having held positions at the universities of the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Witwatersrand. He collaborated with J M Coetzee on a series of dialogues which were collected, with Coetzee’s non-fiction, as Doubling the Point (1992), and later wrote J M Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (1993). His interest in African literature dates from the late 1970s and has led to essays on Wole Soyinka’s uses of Yoruba mythology, on Thomas Mofolo’s historical fiction, and on theoretical formations in African criticism. His most recent book is Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History (2005).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
W e dedicate our book to the memory of Es’kia Mphahlele, who, in 2005, graciously entrusted us with the task of researching and editing this expanded edition of letters and interviews. We pay homage to him and are grateful to his family, and to South African and international correspondents for enriching our lives and those of future generations of fellow South Africans.
Funding for the Life Writing Project at the Unit for Advanced Study of the University of Pretoria was provided by the university and by the Department of Arts and Culture of the Republic of South Africa.
We are grateful for the cooperation we have received from the staff of the National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library at Yale University, the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Borthwick Institute at the University of York. Our particular thanks are due to Bernth Lindfors who generously transcribed a group of letters in the HRHRC in Austin.
Pat Tucker undertook the technical editing of the manuscript through its final stages of preparation. Her professional rigour and approach have added considerable value to our work.
Throughout the development of this book, we benefited from the unfailing support of the office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) of the University of Pretoria, Professor Robin Crewe. Special thanks are due to Mrs Alta Scheepers, who ensured that administrative, financial and other research related matters were attended to.
As editors, we could not have wished for a better publisher than Wits University Press under the leadership of Veronica Klipp and her colleagues. We thank them most heartily.
Ezekiel Mphahlele at home in 2005. Photograph taken by N Chabani Manganyi
PREFACE
IN HIS OWN VOICE
T he first edition of this book was a companion volume to my biography of Es’kia Mphahlele entitled Exiles and Homecomings . 1 At the time the books were published there was a small group of enterprising and progressive alternative publishers in Johannesburg, among them, Ravan Press and Skotaville Publishers, who supported the anti-establishment voices of the day. In my introduction to the first edition of Bury Me at the Marketplace I wrote that from a biographer’s point of view the letters were a worthy companion to Exiles and Homecomings , a standpoint I maintain today. 2
I wrote, too, that Mphahlele’s letters told the ‘story of a life lived’ to the fullest possible extent and were an invitation to enter into ‘a privileged inner circle of intimacy, humour, compassion, love and pain’. Significantly, at that time, I raised the prospect of a future edition of letters from and to Es’kia Mphahlele, a hope that has been realised with the publication of this edition. Work on this book has been in progress for a number of years and I have been privileged during that time to collaborate with David Attwell, an eminent scholar with a well-established understanding and knowledge of Mphahlele’s literary oeuvre within the broader context of South African literature as a whole. 3
While working on the manuscript of this collection I felt as challenged as I was in the early 1980s when I engaged with and responded to the many faces of Es’kia Mphahlele as he took centre stage in different situations, countries and in relationships with a cast of illustrious writers, academics, friends and family coupled with his emergence as a world figure – a literary and cultural critic and significant writer in his own right.
One of the most important lessons I learnt is that memorable moments in letter writing come to light whenever a letter or set of letters gives the reader as much pleasure as it did the writer at the time of its composition. I have come to the conclusion, following a close reading of Mphahlele’s letters, that a well-written letter makes demands on the writer that are similar to those normally associated with short-story writing. Letters which are to command the reader’s undivided attention must feel self-contained, reflect a moment of cognitive and affective concentration and confirm the importance of an ability to create an atmosphere similar to that found in good short stories.
One example that comes to mind, among several others, is the letter written on 11 November 1980 by Mphahlele to his daughter. In it he tells the story of the ‘visitor’ who turned out to be a closet alcoholic. The style is conversational and is coupled with Mphahlele’s unobtrusive, yet potent and explosive sense of humour, used to good effect in dealing with the grotesque in everyday life. This ‘mission’ to be a storyteller is prophetically expressed in a letter dated 24 December 1943 to his lifelong friend and confidante, Norah Taylor, in which he writes of ‘the passion of one who desires to tell a story’.
Author and academic James Olney, in a letter dated 12 March 1974, recognised Mphahlele’s ability to engage his readers when he wrote:
I enjoyed very much and was deeply touched by your letter received yesterday. Thank you. All the qualities that have always distinguished your writing were there on that single sheet – intelligence, sensitivity, creative vitality and energy – and, in addition, what one could only guess at in the published work: personal courtesy and kindness. There are few men, – especially few of your literary and human achievements – from whom one could expect such a gesture of selfless generosity.
What we find in Mphahlele’s letters is the profile of an open-minded, fearless, in