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Longing for Renewal
| Article
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15944 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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7 / 1989 |
2,587 Words |
| Author
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David F. Wells
David Wells teaches at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He
is from South Africa. |
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
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