Afrika, My Music. Es'kia Mphahlele
that was very much an assertion of the human spirit fighting for survival against forces that threatened to fragment or break it. Of what use was poetry in a social climate that generated so much physical violence? In a life that resisted any individual creative efforts, a social climate that made the study of literature, particularly in a foreign but official language like English, look like playing a harmonica or jewish harp in the midst of sirens and power drills and fire-brigade bells? It was the full recognition of these factors by students and teacher that conditioned the love we developed for literature. A love that had to be self-generated, given all the hostile external factors. The element of escapism also helped sustain that interest. Just as Cervantes, Laurel and Hardy, Buck Jones had served us when I was a boy. An element of escapism that one would have been ashamed in later years to acknowledge, because a few steps from there could land you in sheer snobbery. And snobbery is the cruellest joke anyone can play on himself in an African township. For me, as one who was then writing short stories, the whole literary adventure was a compromise between several disparate drives and urges.
Underlying the questions that we grappled with about the function of literature was always the motivation to master English at the grassroots level of practical usage. English, which was not our mother tongue, gave us power, power to master the external world which came to us through it: the movies, household furniture and other domestic equipment, styles of dress and cuisine, advertising, printed forms that regulated some of the mechanics of living and dying, and so on. It was the key to job opportunities in that part of the private sector of industry where white labour unions had little to lose if they let us in.
We had embarked on an adventure. This sense of adventure explains the enthusiasm, the energy, the drive with which Africa all over confronts the imperatives of learning.
It was during this period of self-education, of teaching, trying to understand what my students wanted, that I made three discoveries, all interrelated. Things that were to change my whole outlook, my whole stance and consequently my literary style. I became sharply aware of the realism of Dickens, of Gorky, Chekhov, Hemingway, Faulkner. I became aware of the incisive qualities of the Scottish and English ballads and saw in them an exciting affinity with the way in which the short story works: the single situation rather than a developmental series of events; concentration of the present moment or circumstance; action, vivid and dramatic; singleness and intensity of emotion, generated by the often terrifying and intense focus on a situation; the plotted and episodic nature of the narrative; the way in which character, instead of developing fully, is bounced off; the “telescoping” of where the characters come from and where they are at present; the heightened moment of discovery or illumination; the “leaping and lingering” technique in which the ballad passes from scene to scene in the narrative without having to fill in gaps, leaping over time and space and lingering on those scenes that are colourful and dramatic; the resonances. I have never, since, ceased to be moved by those ballads. They are so close to our own folk tales that depict violence and the supernatural. With so much death and violence around us in the ghetto, we seemed to be reliving those old days when life was so insecure, when nature was both kind and cruel, and when whatever force presided over human affairs abandoned us to our own predatory instincts.
Most directly related to my style and point of view was the third discovery, by chance in the late Forties, of Richard Wright’s short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children (1936). He was an Afro-American novelist who died in exile in Paris in 1960. I smelled our own poverty in his Southern setting. The long searing black song of Wright’s people sounded like ours. The agony told me how to use the short story as a way of dealing with my anger and indignation. It was the ideal genre. I fed on the fury and poured more and more vitriol into my words until I could almost taste them. I would come back from work, wait for the time my family would be asleep, do my studies, and return to my short-story writing. I would go out on my Orlando porch for a break, and have a clear view of the distant lights of Northcliff, thirty or so kilometres away. More and more they took on a symbolic meaning for me, those lights, because between me and them was the dense dark, so dense you wanted to compare it with soup. Since my return from the rural north as a boy, electric lights had never ceased to enchant me. They reminded me, as they still do, of the unfriendly darknesses and riotous floods of moonlight in the rural north. Seen from a distance, the lights taunted me, ridiculed me, tantalised me, reassured me, set off in me an urge sometimes to possess them, sometimes to spray them with black paint, to eclipse them one way or the other.
In 1954, Langston Hughes and I were introduced by letter. He sent me his collection of stories, The Ways of White Folks, and his poetry collection, The Weary Blues.
We were to meet several times in Africa and the United States before he died in 1967. Although he did not have the driving diction that was Wright’s trademark, in their own gentle and almost unobtrusive manner Langston’s short fiction and poetry did things to me. I realised later that I had needed them both – those two antithetical idioms of black American expression, Wright’s and Langston’s.
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