This resulted in fear, anger, and student rebellion raged, leading to the repeated closure of the institutions. The state set itself on revenge at every turn. In the process, students all but lost the original lofty ideals that had launched them on the freedom road.
Domestic boycotts, sit-ins, the laying to waste of kitchens and toilets came to contain little more than a nuisance value. Sounds like home, doesn't it? This extract sounds like a 'cautionary tale' and it speaks of a world hemmed in by intolerance of dissent and characterised by paranoia on the part of those who have been entrusted with leadership responsibilities in our country.
Mphahlele was an itinerant scholar. His worldwide travels had provided him with invaluable first-hand experience of the erosion of democratic ideals after the attainment of independence in some of the countries he had lived in.
He therefore spoke from an informed position. Not only were his concerns valid: They were prescient. We ignore them at our own peril. In what can be safely regarded as his final gift to Africa and the world - a book entitled, There Was a Country , Chinua Achebe counsels us:.
But there is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless. An artist, in my definition of the word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects. Throughout his life, Mphahlele consciously chose not to 'take sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects', to cull a phrase from Achebe.
Achebe further enlightens us:. My own assessment is that the role of the writer is not a rigid position and depends to some extent on the state of health of his or her society. In other words, if a society is ill, the writer has a responsibility to point it out. If the society is healthier, the writer's job is different. Mphahlele was highly sceptical of Christianity, partly because of its perceived collusion in the conquest, disinheritance and subjugation of indigenous African people - and his discordant relationship with Christianity can be traced back to his celebrated work, Down Second Avenue , where he writes:.
It never seems to have occurred to the church that under its nose has been growing a calculating white barbarism, among those it considered as hereditary custodians of Christianity.
Custodians who need mission stations in their very midst. I cannot but reaffirm what I said in a B. I'm still suspending belief and disbelief as far as the necessity or uselessness of organised religion goes. All I know is that I found no use for it in South Africa; that since when I stopped going to church, I have become progressively weary of all the trappings of mystical formalism that go together with South African 'Christianity'.
For the moment, I'm content to move on, free of this sort of allegiance, exposing myself to the impacts of as many ways of life as possible. I'm glad that I can at last exercise that right. Mphahlele was not the first black writer in South Africa to launch an attack on Christianity - an attack that was based on lived experience.
Before him, S. Mqhayi also had crafted a poem exposing the inherent contradictions of Christianity - a poem entitled 'AA! Hail The Hero of Britain' , whose argument partly runs thus:. You come with a preacher assisted by a soldier; You come with gunpowder and bullets; You come with cannons and guns - which burned - like knees Please forgive me O God, but whom should we obey?
Go past, Calf-of-the-big-animal, Trasher-with-the-feet, trashing us for a long time already! Come past us and go nicely back, You who feast on the inheritance of my country.
Mqhayi As we celebrate his legacy, I would like to quote fragments from his lesser known work, a poem entitled, 'To You My People' Mphahlele b , which speaks to his stance on Christianity.
The poem was published in the literary journal New Classic , which is now out of print:. Whilst I'm on my sickbed Whilst I'm on my deathbed I want no christian hymns: they come from abject hearts drained of joy, from soul-eroding guilt and fear of death.
Save your hymns - at best they devastate me with their sadness unredeemed; they come from church where singers only take their wretched souls and miseries to God and not their strengths and beauty.
This is not an anti-God poem, nor is it a diatribe or an act of desecration. It is a poem that speaks about broken trust, and, by extension, the corruption of Christianity in order to serve narrow sectarian interests. Mphahlele's rejection of Christianity and all it stands for is palpable in the following stanza:. Keep away from me those hebrew folktales testaments about the love of an angry god we slavishly recite to entertain each other while the whiteman holds us hostage.
Save me from your dead-end prayers, Give me freedom songs in many tongues give me drums and whistles let me hear your bodies shuffle to the song of Africa. Footnote: The word 'hebrew' is written in small letters throughout the poem. He seems to question the authenticity and sincerity of Christianity; he also seems to regard it as a form of drama, as the word 'entertain' signifies. But this poem also seems to have the tone of a will which is essentially a blueprint for his burial:.
When you bury me I want no coffin save a crudely made container just to put at ease th'ecology freaks just not to stink up rooms for coming lodgers: wrap me in a hide from slaughtered ox then unbox me at the graveside down me wrapped in my oxhide. Here he seems to be arguing for a return to the source - a return to African burial traditions and rituals. Could this be a rejection of modernism and its formalism?
Mphahlele fully embraced Africa, its beauty, its landscape, culture and traditions long before it became chic to do so. The following stanza is equally instructive:. When you bury me read me poetry let me linger on a line of truth and exquisite beauty: poetry's my passage to the gods - a passage draped with never-ending showers of soft shimmering beads of purest African stone no mortal ever owned nor ever can. Behold the shimmering beads that pave my way dissolve beneath my every stride and then recover when I've raised my foot: that's the way of poetry!
This stanza is well crafted. Embedded in it is Mphahlele's death wish, the reading of poetry at his funeral - and what a grand send-off this would be! It would indeed be a fitting send-off for a man who had spent his lifetime in the realm of the work of the mind: writing, writing and spreading the gospel of African literature all over the world. In his address entitled, 'Poetry and Humanism: Oral Beginnings' , he advances the following argument on the pivotal role of poetry in African Tradition:.
I must repeat, in the light of the foregoing, that the African's traditional habit of mind that gathers together man, external nature, ancestral presences, the Vital Force or Supreme Being that inhibits and give meaning to these relationships, all into organic whole - this habit of mind is the creative principle itself.
Because poetry lives in the relationship between beings, alive and alive-in-death, things, time and space, and in the essence of this network, establishing connections in a beautiful because powerful language.
To make poetry is to be authentically human. To be such is also an affirmation that I am because we are, we are because you are. His forthright critique of Christianity is also embedded in the following excerpt from the address cited above:. The Christian Gospel could not mediate effectively for the process of mutual recognition because its messengers were full of themselves, and full of contempt for the African's thought and belief. By the time Christianity had eventually spread, slavery, and later colonialism had damaged relations between the strangers and the indigenous inhabitants.
Mphahlele's stance on Christianity in the poem is plausible and is based on tangible, verifiable evidence. It is earlier advocates and adherence's failure to recognise and accommodate other world views or other forms of consciousness is a glaring weakness.
It failed to unify disparate, contending world views in Africa as Chinua Achebe shows in his classic, Things Fall Apart. One of the building blocks of Afrikan Humanism, according to Mphahlele, is a sort of postcolonial hybridity in which traditional African religious tenets refuse to die. Similarly, because colonialisation came with Western Christianity, the imported trope of Christianity from the European colonisers remains one of the major features of religious practice among Africans today.
According to him, the immensity of the challenge faced by Africans to manage postcolonial hybridity in an empoweringly self-defining manner is evident in divisions among Africans in the extent to which they embrace Western Christianity and other imported lifestyles in an uncritically mimicking manner.
Father Come Home is one of Mphahlele's novels in which the intersection of these two conflicting religions and its effects on African communities is explored in artistically and theoretically dexterous ways. One of Mphahlele's remarkable contributions to intellectual is his advocacy for a philosophy he called African Humanism also Afrikan Humanism.
In a lecture entitled 'Poetry and Humanism: Oral Beginnings' , which was part of the Raymond Dart Lectures Lecture 22 , he offers the following insights:. There are a variety of philosophical and ideological doctrines that claim humanism as their basic impulse, both as process and as final destination of mankind.
For instance, Marxism and Communism will claim that they are out to rescue man from the self-alienation that capitalism and private enterprise drive him to; Protagoras' pragmatism will assert, 'man is the measure of all things'; Personalism or spiritualism will claim that man is capable of perceiving transcendental reality; the mystic will say that he does not need any intercessor between himself and his god-he is capable of perceiving God's powers; every religion will claim that it is the Way to man's happiness on earth and ultimate salvation, no matter how narrow or thorny.
The existentialist will affirm that the universe of 'human subjectivity' is the only one there is, you're on your own, in other words.
All the time. His publication Renewal Time, contains stories he published previously as well as an autobiographical afterword on his return to South Africa and a section from Afrika My Music, his autobiography. Stories like "Mrs. Plum" and "The Living and the Dead" have received praise by critics reviewing Mphahlele's work. Charles R. Larson, reviewing the work in the Washington Post Book World, says that the stories in the book present "almost ironic images of racial tension under apartheid.
Plum" as "the gem of this volume. Chirundu, Mphahlele's first novel since his return to South Africa, "tells with quiet assurance this story of a man divided," says Rose Moss in a World Literature Today review. The novel "is clearly this writer's major work of fiction and, I suppose, in one sense, an oblique commentary on his own years of exile," observes Larson in an article for World Literature Today.
Moss finds that in his story of a man torn between African tradition and English law, "the timbre of Mphahlele's own vision is not always clear"; nevertheless, the critic admits that "in the main his story presents the confused and wordless heart of his charcter with un-pretentious mastery. On the subject of writing, Mphahlele commented: "In Southern Africa, the black writer talks best about the ghetto life he knows; the white writer about his own ghetto life.
We see each other, black and white, as it were through a keyhole. This is symbolic of the South African situation. The only cultural vitality there is to be seen among the Africans: they have not been uplifted by a Western culture, but rather they have reconciled the two in themselves. This is the sense in which I feel superior to the white man who refuses to be liberated by me as an African. Are we really to believe that the United State Army went to Mississippi to make it possible for Meredith to sing the blues or gospel songs?
Of course, I am quite aware of the certain-and luckily they are few-non-African and Whites Blacks who come crawling on their bellies into this continent as it were, prepared to be messengers or lackeys of some of us, prepared to eat the dust under our feet in self-abasement in an attempt to identify with Africa. Such people are prompted to do this out of a guilt complex whereby they seek to bear the sins of past colonizers whom, they imagine, we associate with them.
Elsewhere I have earned against this ugly self abasement because it prevents the patient from criticizing adversely anything the African says or writes, ripe, raw, and rotten.
I fully agree with James Baldwin when he says in a brilliant and most moving essay in a recent issue of The New Yorker 17 November that the Negro must solve his problem inside America, not by a romantic identification with Africa. And yet he also says that White and Black in the United States need each other badly, that the White American needs to be liberated from himself, but can only do this when he has liberated the Negro.
After this, integration must come. Although he appreciates the Black Muslims, he foresees that one day he may have to fight them because they are such a menace. Now to negritude itself. Who is so stupid as to deny the historical fact of negritude as both a protest and a positive assertion of African cultural values?
All this is valid. What I do not accept is the way in which too much of the poetry inspired by it romanticizes Africa-as a symbol of innocence, purity, and artless primitiveness. I feel insulted when some people imply that Africa is not also a violent continent. This is only a dramatization of what Africa can do and is doing. The image of Africa consists of all these, and others. And negritude poetry pretends that they do not constitute the image and leaves them out.
So we are told only half-often even a falsified half-of the story of Africa. Sheer romanticism that fails to see the large landscape of the personality of the African makes bad poetry. The omission of these elements of a continent in turmoil reflects a defective poetic vision. Having broken out of the constraints of apartheid racism he was able to rub shoulders with other African writers and intellectuals.
He had a brief association with Ulli Beier, a German Africanist whose literary journal, Black Orpheus , made a huge impact amongst African writers in the English language. Mphahlele launched his literary career with the publication of Man Must Live in The Lesane stories helped consolidate the short story tradition in South African literature that stands among the best in the world.
Two collections of short stories followed Man Must Live. The Living and the Dead appeared from West Africa in Turning to scholarship, in he published The African Image , based on his MA thesis in which he provides a history of African literature in South Africa, which he juxtaposes with an examination of the African character in literature by writers of European ancestry. A second and revised edition appeared twelve years later. His engagement with literary and cultural production in the African Diaspora finds expression in Voices in the Whirlwind and Other Essays , which examines African and African-American literature in relation to the Western tradition.
His career as a novelist produced The Wanderers , a novel of exile originally submitted as a dissertation for his PhD in creative writing. Written after his return from exile, it also seems to rationalise his decision to return to South Africa at the height of apartheid repression. For a while Mphahlele worked with the Paris based Congress for Cultural Freedom, organising conferences and workshops on education, literature, arts and culture. He was instrumental in establishing the Chemchemi Creative Centre in Kenya and the Mbari Club in Nigeria that became the hub of activity in African arts and culture.
0コメント