Abstract
There is one writer in whose work it is possible to trace, over a period of forty years, both the problems of literary production experienced by South African writers and the stages in the development of an appropriate critical approach: for Ezekiel Mphahlele functioned as artist and critic throughout that period, encountering in his creative and confronting in his critical work the alienation of consciousness and the appropriation of discourse, while his later criticism records the efforts of black writers towards reappropriation.
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Notes
Ezekiel Mphahlele, preface to The African Image, 1st edition (London: Faber & Faber, 1962) p. 16.
Ezekiel Mphahlele, preface to The African Image, 2nd edition (London: Faber & Faber, 1974) p. 10.
N. Chabani Manganyi, Exiles and Homecomings: A Biography of Es’kia Mphahlele (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983) p. 2.
Ezekiel Mphahlele, Voices in the Whirlwind and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1972) p. 160.
André Brink, A Dry White Season (London: W. H. Allen, 1979).
Nadine Gordimer, July’s People (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981) p. 8.
Ibid., p. 152.
Larry Need, ‘The Black Arts’ Movement’, The Drama Review, vol. 12, no. 4 (T40) Summer 1968, p. 29, quoted in Whirlwind, p. 65.
Ibid.
Mafika Gwala, ‘Writing as a Cultural Weapon’ in M.J. Daymond, J. Jacobs, Margaret Lenta (eds), Momentum: On Recent South African Writing (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1984) p. 50.
Ibid.
‘Looking In: In Search of Ezekiel Mphahlele’, interview with N. C. Manganyi, Looking Through the Keyhole (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1981) p. 44.
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© 1989 Jane Watts
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Watts, J. (1989). The Construction of a Framework: Ezekiel Mphahlele. In: Black Writers from South Africa. St Antony’s/Macmillan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20244-7_3
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