Biography
Mphahlele's first book of short stories, Man Must Live, was published in 1947. Banned from teaching by the apartheid government in 1951, Mphahlele supported himself and his family through a series of clerical jobs before leaving South Africa to teach in the British Protectorate of Basutoland.
On his return to South Africa, Mphahlele soon found a job as a political reporter, sub-editor and fiction editor on the innovative popular magazine Drum, under the editorship of Anthony Sampson and later Sylvester Stein, while studying for a Master's degree by correspondence at UNISA (The University of South Africa). Es'kia Mphahlele's life and work is currently found in the efforts of The Es'kia Institute, a non-governmental, non-profit organisation based in Johannesburg.
During the 1950s Mphahlele became increasingly politicised, and joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1955. Disappointed in the ANC approach to matters of education, he later disassociated himself from the organisation. In 1957, Mphahlele was offered a job teaching in a Church Mission Society school in Lagos, Nigeria. Unwilling to permit him to travel abroad because of his political activities, the South African government finally granted him a passport in September 1957.
Mphahlele spent the following twenty years in exile: first in Nigeria, and subsequently in Kenya, where he was director of the Chemchemi Cultural Centre; Zambia; France and the United States, where he earned a doctoral degree from the University of Denver and taught at the University of Pennsylvania. Mphahlele returned to South Africa in 1977 and joined the faculty of the University of the Witwatersrand.
Read more about this topic: Es'kia Mphahlele
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)