RENEWAL TIME
Es'kia Mphahlele
London: Reader International, 1988
215 pp., $8.95
A bumper crop of autobiographies reached the shelves during the past year. Barry Goldwater, Shirley Temple Black, Joan Collins, Kirk Douglas, and Michael Jackson, for example, all told us about themselves. The fact is that we are fascinated with the intimacies of other people's lives, no matter how banal these might be, and those who do not mind being invaded usually discover the "gold in them thar hills!"
Es'kia Mphahlele's Renewal Time is of a different stripe: autobiography, but not in a strict sense. It is a collection of eight short stories largely quarried from Mphahlele's life. They are like an aperture into his inner world in which one sees both his enduring fascination with South Africa, where he was born, and his revulsion against its white regime, which remains so intransigent, so unyielding, and which sent him into exile in 1957.
It is this world that brought forth the Bantu Education Act, the fruit of which was separate and unequal education for blacks and whites. Mphahlele could not reconcile himself to this systematic racism, and his opposition finally precipitated his enforced departure. Following his exile, he traveled, wrote, and taught in Nigeria, Kenya, France, and the United States. Despite the fact that he was still "listed" (his writing was banned), he was finally able to return to his homeland in 1977 after five years of negotiations with the government. He was then restricted to living in Lebowa, a town for blacks, and teaching at the black University of the North in Sovenga. Today, he is professor of African literature at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
These eight stories are bracketed by an introduction and an epilogue. The introduction describes the author's return to South Africa in 1977, his return to the goat trails he had known as a boy, to the sounds that have continued to make music in his soul even in far-off places--and to the bitterness of rejection, for on his return, he is denied a university post for reasons other than his academic credentials. In his years away, the human landscape has changed, changed dramatically, and yet in those matters close to the black spirit, it has not changed at all The epilogue is brief and poetic; it is the sighing of a man who longs for the foundation under the high partition that separates the races to be eroded so as to allow a little human seepage to pass each way.
Between these brackets are the eight stories, some about South Africa and some drawn from life in Nigeria. Mphahlele is at his best when rubbing against the circumstances that have given him his wounds. When writing about South Africa, the friction creates light. Here the map of the human spirit becomes clearly drawn. We hear a yearning that transcends the possibility of its realization and is all too often entirely lost in the wilderness in which it cries.
This set of stories, at least as they relate to South Africa, is about the meeting, mingling, and mutual repulsion of two cultures. The white culture thinks of itself as European (either British or Continental). The other is black and African. The repulsion on the one side is haughty and
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