Foundational African Writers: Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Nyembezi and Es’kia Mphahlele

458 Pages·2022·10.838 MB·English

by  Bhekizizwe Peterson, Makhosazana Xaba, Khwezi Mkhize

Foundational
African Writers
Published online by Cambridge University Press
Published online by Cambridge University Press
Foundational
African Writers
Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu,
Sibusiso Nyembezi and Es’kia Mphahlele
Edited by Bhekizizwe Peterson, Khwezi Mkhize
and Makhosazana Xaba
Published online by Cambridge University Press
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
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Compilation © Bhekizizwe Peterson, Khwezi Mkhize and Makhosazana Xaba 2022
Chapters © Individual contributors 2022
Published edition © Wits University Press 2022
Images © Copyright holders
Cover images: Peter Abrahams © Van Vechten Trust; Noni Jabavu courtesy of Amazwi
South African Museum of Literature, Makhanda; Sibusiso Nyembezi courtesy of the
Nyembezi Family; Ezekiel Mphahlele photograph by Jurgen Schadeberg.
First published 2022
http://dx.doi.org.10.18772/22022067519
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CONTENTS
List of illustrations vii
Foreword
Simon Gikandi ix
Acknowledgements xvii
Tribute to Professor Bhekizizwe Peterson
Jill Bradbury, Khwezi Mkhize and Makhosazana Xaba xix
Introduction
Bhekizizwe Peterson, Khwezi Mkhize
and Makhosazana Xaba 1
Part I: Remapping and Rereading African Literature
and Cultural Production
1 Foundational Writers and the Making of African Literary Genealogy:
Es’kia Mphahlele and Peter Abrahams
James Ogude 27
2 Foundational African Literary Discourse and Dimensions of Authority
Obi Nwakanma 53
3 Situating Sibusiso Nyembezi in African Literary History
Sikhumbuzo Mngadi 75
4 A Footnote and a Pioneer: Noni Jabavu’s Legacy
Athambile Masola 95
5 ‘Navigations of Tyranny’: Reconsidering Es’kia Mphahlele’s Writing
Crain Soudien 117
6 Noni Jabavu and the Sensibilities of Early Black Educated Elites
Hugo Canham 135
Part II: South Africa and Fugitive Imaginaries
7 (Un)Homing and the Uncanny: The (Auto) Biographical Es’kia Mphahlele
Thando Njovane 157
Published online by Cambridge University Press
8 In the Shadows of the British Empire: Nyembezi’s
Inkinsela YaseMngungundlovu
Innocentia J. Mhlambi 171
9 Escaping Apartheid: Race, Education and
Cultural Exchange, 1955–2003
Anne-Maria Makhulu 195
10 Photographing Home Life in Alexandra between
the 1930s and the 1970s
Thuto Thipe 215
11 Down Avenues of (Un)Learning: Reading, Writing and Being
Jill Bradbury 237
Part III: In the Eye of the Short Century: Diaspora
and Pan-Africanism Reconsidered
12 Es’kia Mphahlele and the Question of the Aesthetic
Khwezi Mkhize 259
13 ‘African Contrasts’: Noni Jabavu’s Travelogue as Kaleidoscope
Tina Steiner 279
14 Es’kia Mphahlele, Chemchemi and Pan-African Literary Publics
Christopher E.W. Ouma 301
15 The ‘Crossroads and Forkways’ of Pan-Africanism
between 1948 and 1968
Bhekizizwe Peterson 329
16 ‘She Certainly Couldn’t Be Conventional If She Tried’: Noni Jabavu,
the Editor of The New Strand Magazine in London
Makhosazana Xaba 355
17 Anticolonial Romance and Tragedy in Peter Abrahams’
A Wreath for Udomo
Andrea Thorpe 377
18 Mphahlele’s Writing in the Whirlwind
Stéphane Robolin 397
19 From South Africa to Coyaba: Peter Abrahams’
(New) World Geographies
Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi 417
Contributors 433
Index 437
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List of illustrations
Figure 0.1: Bhekizizwe Peterson, Lalibela, Ethiopia, August 2019. xix
Figure 1.1: Peter Abrahams in his home in Coyaba, Jamaica, 2003. 34
Figure 1.2: Es’kia Mphahlele, 1976. 42
Figure 2.1: Peter Abrahams arrives in Johannesburg, 1952.
To his right is Henry Nxumalo. 56
Figure 2.2: Es’kia Mphahlele, Drum. 60
Figure 3.1: Sibusiso Nyembezi on his arrival in Pietermaritzburg in 1960. 76
Figure 4.1: Noni Jabavu walking down Regent Street, London, 1949. 103
Figure 5.1: Es’kia Mphahlele leads the singing of ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’,
Accra, Ghana, 1959. Alfred Hutchinson stands to his far right. 119
Figure 6.1: Noni Jabavu in London, 1960. 136
Figure 8.1: Sibusiso Nyembezi at a retirement function hosted
by Shuter and Shooter. 173
Figure 10.1: Mofolo House on 8th Avenue. 218
Figure 11.1: Gerard Sekoto, Yellow Houses: A Street in Sophiatown. 241
Figure 12.1: Es’kia Mphahlele with Chimp, 1957. 269
Figure 12.2: Es’kia Mphahlele at the Chemchemi Club, Nairobi,
January 1965. South African-born architect Julian
Beinart is second from the right. 271
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Figure 14.1: Es’kia Mphahlele reading Drum. 306
Figure 14.2: The first issue of Chemchemi Newsletter, March 1964. 307
Figure 15.1: Ernest Mancoba, Untitled, 1976–1988. 330
Figure 16.1: Noni Jabavu in the late 1940s. 360
Figure 17.1: Peter Abrahams in Johannesburg, 1952. 381
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Foreword
Simon Gikandi
This book was imagined as a retrospective examination of the lives of four
major African writers − Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Nyembezi
and Es’kia Mphahlele − all born in 1919, now recognised as key figures in
the founding of African literature and its criticism. Since the essays collected
in this volume came out of a series of conferences celebrating what would
have been their hundredth birthdays in 2019, the four writers are referred to
as centenarians. But with its millennial connotations, the word centenarian
also carries some significant symbolic weight in the history of modern Africa:
the centenarians were born in the same year the new world order was born,
or stillborn, at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles; they witnessed the tra-
gedies triggered by this European arrangement, including the rise of white
nationalism in South Africa; and, yes, they all lived long enough to witness
the fall of apartheid and the final decolonisation of Africa.
But the book is much more than a celebration of a generation of pioneering
writers and intellectuals and their struggle to define what it meant to be
African in the long twentieth century; it is also a bold and expansive explor-
ation of some of the questions that have troubled African literary history since
the early 1960s. How and why did this literature emerge? What was the nature
of the literary public that it both imagined and willed into being? What was
the role of African languages in the making of this literary culture? Which
writers were included in the emergent canon of letters and which voices were
lost or repressed?
Bringing together a cross-section of literary and cultural scholars, many
of them based in African institutions of knowledge production, this book
is a powerful statement about what African literature looks like when read
from below, outside the normative pressures of European and American
institutions. In looking back at these centenarians and their important foun-
dational work from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, we are able
to see how the subordination of African literary history and criticism to the
larger flow of theoretical work − most of it functioning under the rubric of
poststructuralism − was both a blessing and a curse. The importation of
Euro-American theories and discourses into the study of African literature
was a blessing because it enabled the displacement of old colonial models of
ix
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FOUNDATIONAL AFRICAN WRITERS
literary history and criticism and hence rescued African literature from the
last remnants of the colonial university and its humanism; it provided this
literature with a pathway to an evolving global project, one attuned to the
movement of cultures and languages across boundaries.
This opening of African literature to the world was also a curse because
it was taking place at the same time as neoliberal programmes that were
being used to neuter the African university as a site of original research. Such
programmes, which went under the insidious term of ‘structural adjustment’,
meant that the priorities of African knowledge production were, yet again,
being determined elsewhere. No sooner had African literature been admitted
into the Euro-American house of culture than it was asked to sit in the back.
A more immediate consequence of the subordination of African lit-
erary criticism to poststructuralist paradigms was the neglect or delegitim-
isation of those African texts that seemed to belong to another era, to have
been generated by a different set of priorities, or to be out of synch with the
framework developed to explain Africa in terms of globalisation. So, if the
centenarians seemed to have disappeared from the cultural map of Africa
in the twenty-first century, it was because their works and concerns were
considered to belong to another time. In fact, to a generation of scholars
uninterested in foundations and eager to belong to the brave new world
being chaperoned by neoliberalism, the centenarians would be compared to
grandparents; they were respectable in their time, but the questions that had
motivated their projects had been resolved by historical transformations and
their preferred forms of writing were belated.
Such dismissals of the early generation of African writers, which most
contributors to this volume resist vigorously, have always been premised
on a poor understanding of literary history. For if we consider William
Shakespeare and John Milton to be central to an understanding of the lit-
erature of England, or Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine to be pillars of the
literature of France, then we should not hesitate to give the centenarians equal
standing in the literary history of Africa. Moreover, if we are concerned about
the devaluation of black lives as one of the major challenges of our times,
then we have to connect it to the long history of colonialism and racial vio-
lence, of which the centenarians are unmatched witnesses. In short, a major
achievement of this collective project is to recover a missing part of African
cultural and literary history and to restore it to its rightful place. The editors’
and contributors’ insistence on foundations as a necessary correlative to the
imagination of our futures is refreshing.
Without going into detail about individual contributions, the essays
collected here can be grouped around two broad concerns. First, many of
the contributors to this volume provide us with a careful exploration of the
x
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