Mphahlele - Down Second Avenue

PROPHET MPHAHLELE: NAMED AFTER EZEKIEL

It was in 1963, precisely fifty years ago, that Eskia Mphahlele, then still in exile from the apartheid regime, founded the Chemchemi Creative Centre in Nairobi. Kenya was on the verge of independence, but at the time it was still a settler colony, really a mirror image of apartheid South Africa. Chemchemi is the Swahili name for a spring or a fountain. It was meant to be a place where Kenyan writers could meet and draw from the same fountain. At the time there were hardly any published Kenyan writers to speak of; my own novel, Weep Not, Child, the first in East Africa, had yet to be published. There were skeptical glances when this exile from South Africa set up this fountain in what was then seen as a literary desert. But no skepticism would deflect him from his purpose. Where others saw desert, Mphahlele saw fertile soil to plant seeds. He organized seminars for the budding and would-be writers. Mphahlele focused on the future. The young were that future.

Apart from the seminars and activities at the CCC, Mphahlele traveled widely, giving talks at several schools. The same skeptics saw him as the latter-day Don Quixote who mistook shadows for writers. Like Don Quixote, Mphahlele stayed the course, oozing optimism even when the immediate results did not seem to give cause for it. Among the schools he visited in 1963 was Kamusinga in Western Kenya, far from Nairobi. One of the students who attended the talk that day later became Dr. Henry Chakava, who has published many Kenyan and African writers, including the Kiswahili translations of nearly all the African writers of the continent, the fulfillment of a dream of a lone prophet, an exile, from South Africa.

This prophet was not just a dreamer but a battle-tested activist and organizer. I first met Mphahlele in Kampala, Uganda, during the 1962 Conference of African Writers of English Expression. We knew him as Ezekiel Mphahlele. The conference brought together for the first time writers from South, West, and East Africa, as well as the Caribbean and America, the greatest pan-African gathering of the time, in some ways surpassing the previous black writers congresses in Rome in 1956 and Paris in 1959, for it had the advantage of being held on African soil. The chief organizer and the brain behind the gathering, Mphahlele built bridges both between continental African writers and between them and diasporic African writers from America and the Caribbean. The 1962 conference was a continuation of the bridge he himself had become. As the fiction editor of DRUM magazine in the fifties, he had been the link and mediating consciousness between the older generation of Mqhayi, Vilakazi, the Dhlomo brothers, and Peter Abrahams and the younger generation of tough- minded urbanites: Can Themba, Arthur Maimane, Lewis Nkosi, Bloke Modisane, Casey Motsisi, and Todd Matshikiza.

Even if he had stopped at Makerere, the university in Kampala where the conference was held, Mphahlele would still have made an indelible mark on the African literary scene and intellectual production. But he became a bridge between the creative and the scholarly, for in addition to creating platforms for writers, he also fought for the recognition of their product, African literature, in the academy. He followed up the success of the Makerere conference with another at Fourah Bay, in Sierra Leone, this time on the teaching of African literature at the university. Was he discouraged by finding no immediate takers for his ideas on the teaching of African literature in the academy? He obviously did not show it, because in 1966 he took the struggle to colonial Zambia after successfully persuading the English Department in Nairobi to let him teach a course on African literature.