Foundational African Writers

Andrea Thorpe, Thuto Thipe, Tina Steiner, Crain Soudien, Stéphane Robolin, Christopher EW Ouma, James Ogude, Obi Nwakanma, Thando Njovane, Sikhumbuzo Mngadi, Innocentia J Mhlambi, Athambile Masola, Anne-Maria Makhulu, Simon Gikandi, Victoria J Collis-Buthelezi, Hugo Canham, Jill Bradbury, Makhosazana Xaba, Khwezi Mkhize, Bhekizizwe Peterson

Description

This collection explores the complexities of black existence, and intellectual and cultural life in the work and legacies of centenarian writers, Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Cyril Lincoln Nyembezi and Es’kia Mphahlele.

The essays in this collection were crafted in celebration of the centenaries, in 2019, of Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Cyril Lincoln Nyembezi and Es’kia Mphahlele, all of whom were born in 1919. These foundational writers produced more than a half-century of writing and cultural production spanning criticism, editorials, essays, fiction, journalism, life writing and orature.

The essays in the collection showcase these writers’ multifaceted engagements and generative insights on a wide range of issues, including precolonial existence, colonialism, empire, race, the language question, tradition, gender, modernity, exile, Pan-Africanism and decolonisation.

A number of political and thematic threads cut across the essays, including those that explore the significance of the ‘colour line’, the role of education and cultural practices amidst the unfolding of colonial modernity, state racism and print culture in South Africa and elsewhere.

Foundational African Writers examines the ways in which the centenarians’ legacies still resonate in the present and how the body of work that they produced is crucial to the genealogies and institutions of modern African and diasporic black arts and letters. Studying their works revisits established debates, provokes possibilities for interdisciplinary engagement with the imperatives of decolonisation and opens up new trajectories for future scholarship.

List of illustrations

Foreword – Simon Gikandi

Acknowledgements

Tribute to Professor Bhekizizwe Peterson – Jill Bradbury, Khwezi Mkhize and Makhosazana Xaba



Introduction – Bhekizizwe Peterson, Khwezi Mkhize and Makhosazana Xaba



Part I: Remapping and Rereading African Literature and Cultural Production

Chapter 1 Foundational Writers and the Making of African Literary Genealogy: Es’kia Mphahlele and Peter Abrahams – James Ogude

Chapter 2 Foundational African Literary Discourse and Dimensions of Authority – Obi Nwakanma

Chapter 3 Situating Sibusiso Nyembezi in African Literary History – Sikhumbuzo Mngadi

Chapter 4 A Footnote and a Pioneer: Noni Jabavu’s Legacy – Athambile Masola

Chapter 5 ‘Navigations of Tyranny’: Reconsidering Es’kia Mphahlele’s Writing – Crain Soudien

Chapter 6 Noni Jabavu and the Sensibilities of Early Black Educated Elites – Hugo Canham



Part II: South Africa and Fugitive Imaginaries

Chapter 7 (Un)Homing and the Uncanny: The (Auto)Biographical Es’kia Mphahlele – Thando Njovane

Chapter 8 In the Shadows of the British Empire: Nyembezi’s Inkinsela YaseMngungundlovu – Innocentia J. Mhlambi

Chapter 9 Escaping Apartheid: Race, Education and Cultural Exchange, 1955–2003 – Anne-Maria Makhulu

Chapter 10 Photographing Home Life in Alexandra between the 1930s and the 1970s – Thuto Thipe

11 Down Avenues of (Un)Learning: Reading, Writing and Being – Jill Bradbury



Part III: In the Eye of the Short Century: Diaspora and pan-Africanism Reconsidered

Chapter 12 Es’kia Mphahlele and the Question of the Aesthetic – Khwezi Mkhize

Chapter 13 ‘African Contrasts’: Noni Jabavu’s Travelogue as Kaleidoscope – Tina Steiner

Chapter 14 Es’kia Mphahlele, Chemchemi and Pan-African Literary Publics – Christopher E.W. Ouma

Chapter 15 The ‘Crossroads and Forkways’ of Pan-Africanism between 1948 and 1968 – Bhekizizwe Peterson

Chapter 16 ‘She Certainly Couldn’t Be Conventional If She Tried’: Noni Jabavu, the Editor of The New Strand Magazine in London – Makhosazana Xaba

Chapter 17 Anti-Colonial Romance and Tragedy in Peter Abrahams’ A Wreath for Udomo – Andrea Thorpe

18 Mphahlele’s Writing in the Whirlwind – Stéphane Robolin

Chapter 19 From South Africa to Coyaba: Peter Abrahams’ (New) World Geographies – Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi



Contributors

Index

Sujets

• Littérature Africaine
• Littérature Africaine
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Comparative literature
• Modern history
• Modern
• 20th Century
• Literary Criticism

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776147540
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 25 Mo

Extrait

Foundational African Writers
Foundational African Writers
Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu,
Sibusiso Nyembezi and Es’kia Mphahlele
Edited by Bhekizizwe Peterson, Khwezi Mkhize and Makhosazana Xaba
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
www.witspress.co.za
Compilation © Bhekizizwe Peterson, Khwezi Mkhize and Makhosazana Xaba 2022
Chapters © Individual contributors 2022
Published edition © Wits University Press 2022
Images © Copyright holders
Cover images: Peter Abrahams © Van Vechten Trust; Noni Jabavu courtesy of Amazwi South African Museum of Literature, Makhanda; Sibusiso Nyembezi courtesy of the Nyembezi Family; Ezekiel Mphahlele photograph by Jurgen Schadeberg.
First published 2022
http://dx.doi.org.10.18772/22022067519
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CONTENTS
List of illustrations
Foreword
Simon Gikandi
Acknowledgements
Tribute to Professor Bhekizizwe Peterson
Jill Bradbury, Khwezi Mkhize and Makhosazana Xaba
Introduction
Bhekizizwe Peterson, Khwezi Mkhize and Makhosazana Xaba
Part I: Remapping and Rereading African Literature and Cultural Production
1 Foundational Writers and the Making of African Literary Genealogy: Es’kia Mphahlele and Peter Abrahams
James Ogude
2 Foundational African Literary Discourse and Dimensions of Authority
Obi Nwakanma
3 Situating Sibusiso Nyembezi in African Literary History
Sikhumbuzo Mngadi
4 A Footnote and a Pioneer: Noni Jabavu’s Legacy
Athambile Masola
5 ‘Navigations of Tyranny’: Reconsidering Es’kia Mphahlele’s Writing
Crain Soudien
6 Noni Jabavu and the Sensibilities of Early Black Educated Elites
Hugo Canham
Part II: South Africa and Fugitive Imaginaries
7 (Un)Homing and the Uncanny: The (Auto) Biographical Es’kia Mphahlele
Thando Njovane
8 In the Shadows of the British Empire: Nyembezi’s Inkinsela YaseMngungundlovu
Innocentia J. Mhlambi
9 Escaping Apartheid: Race, Education and Cultural Exchange, 1955–2003
Anne-Maria Makhulu
10 Photographing Home Life in Alexandra between the 1930s and the 1970s
Thuto Thipe
11 Down Avenues of (Un)Learning: Reading, Writing and Being
Jill Bradbury
Part III: In the Eye of the Short Century: Diaspora and Pan-Africanism Reconsidered
12 Es’kia Mphahlele and the Question of the Aesthetic
Khwezi Mkhize
13 ‘African Contrasts’: Noni Jabavu’s Travelogue as Kaleidoscope
Tina Steiner
14 Es’kia Mphahlele, Chemchemi and Pan-African Literary Publics
Christopher E.W. Ouma
15 The ‘Crossroads and Forkways’ of Pan-Africanism between 1948 and 1968
Bhekizizwe Peterson
16 ‘She Certainly Couldn’t Be Conventional If She Tried’: Noni Jabavu, the Editor of The New Strand Magazine in London
Makhosazana Xaba
17 Anticolonial Romance and Tragedy in Peter Abrahams’ A Wreath for Udomo
Andrea Thorpe
18 Mphahlele’s Writing in the Whirlwind
Stéphane Robolin
19 From South Africa to Coyaba: Peter Abrahams’ (New) World Geographies
Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi
Contributors
Index
List of illustrations Figure 0.1: Bhekizizwe Peterson, Lalibela, Ethiopia, August 2019 . Figure 1.1: Peter Abrahams in his home in Coyaba, Jamaica, 2003 . Figure 1.2: Es’kia Mphahlele, 1976 . Figure 2.1: Peter Abrahams arrives in Johannesburg, 1952. To his right is Henry Nxumalo . Figure 2.2: Es’kia Mphahlele, Drum . Figure 3.1: Sibusiso Nyembezi on his arrival in Pietermaritzburg in 1960 . Figure 4.1: Noni Jabavu walking down Regent Street, London, 1949 . Figure 5.1: Es’kia Mphahlele leads the singing of ‘ Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika ’, Accra, Ghana, 1959. Alfred Hutchinson stands to his far right . Figure 6.1: Noni Jabavu in London, 1960 . Figure 8.1: Sibusiso Nyembezi at a retirement function hosted by Shuter and Shooter . Figure 10.1: Mofolo House on 8th Avenue . Figure 11.1: Gerard Sekoto, Yellow Houses: A Street in Sophiatown . Figure 12.1: Es’kia Mphahlele with Chimp, 1957 . Figure 12.2: Es’kia Mphahlele at the Chemchemi Club, Nairobi, January 1965. South African-born architect Julian Beinart is second from the right . Figure 14.1: Es’kia Mphahlele reading Drum . Figure 14.2: The first issue of Chemchemi Newsletter , March 1964 . Figure 15.1: Ernest Mancoba, Untitled, 1976–1988 . Figure 16.1: Noni Jabavu in the late 1940s . Figure 17.1: Peter Abrahams in Johannesburg, 1952 .
Foreword
Simon Gikandi
This book was imagined as a retrospective examination of the lives of four major African writers − Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Nyembezi and Es’kia Mphahlele − all born in 1919, now recognised as key figures in the founding of African literature and its criticism. Since the essays collected in this volume came out of a series of conferences celebrating what would have been their hundredth birthdays in 2019, the four writers are referred to as centenarians. But with its millennial connotations, the word centenarian also carries some significant symbolic weight in the history of modern Africa: the centenarians were born in the same year the new world order was born, or stillborn, at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles; they witnessed the tragedies triggered by this European arrangement, including the rise of white nationalism in South Africa; and, yes, they all lived long enough to witness the fall of apartheid and the final decolonisation of Africa.
But the book is much more than a celebration of a generation of pioneering writers and intellectuals and their struggle to define what it meant to be African in the long twentieth century; it is also a bold and expansive exploration of some of the questions that have troubled African literary history since the early 1960s. How and why did this literature emerge? What was the nature of the literary public that it both imagined and willed into being? What was the role of African languages in the making of this literary culture? Which writers were included in the emergent canon of letters and which voices were lost or repressed?
Bringing together a cross-section of literary and cultural scholars, many of them based in African institutions of knowledge production, this book is a powerful statement about what African literature looks like when read from below, outside the normative pressures of European and American institutions. In looking back at these centenarians and their important foundational work from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, we are able to see how the subordination of African literary history and criticism to the larger flow of theoretical work − most of it functioning under the rubric of poststructuralism − was both a blessing and a curse. The importation of Euro-American theories and discourses into the study of African literature was a blessing because it enabled the displacement of old colonial models of literary history and criticism and hence rescued African literature from the last remnants of the colonial university and its humanism; it provided this literature with a pathway to an evolving global project, one attuned to the movement of cultures and languages across boundaries.
This opening of African literature to the world was also a curse because it was taking place at the same time as neoliberal programmes that were being used to neuter the African university as a site of original research. Such programmes, which went under the insidious term of ‘structural adjustment’, meant that the priorities of African knowledge production were, yet again, being determined elsewhere. No sooner had African literature been admitted into the Euro-American house of culture than it was asked to sit in the back.
A more immediate consequence of the subordination of African literary criticism to poststructuralist paradigms was the neglect or delegitimisation of those African texts that seemed to belong to another era, to have been generated by a different set of priorities, or to be out of synch with the framework developed to explain Africa in terms of globalisation. So, if the centenarians seemed to have disappeared from the cultural map of Africa in the twenty-first century, it was because their works and concerns were considered to belong to another time. In fact, to a generation of scholars uninterested in foundations and eager to belong to the brave new world being chaperoned by neoliberalism, the centenarians would be compared to grandparents; they were respectable in their time, but the questions that had motivated their projects had been resolved by historical transformations and their preferred forms of writing were belated.
Such dismissals of the early generation of African writers, which most contributors to this volume resist vigorously, have always been premised on a poor understanding of literary history. For if we consider William Shakespeare and John Milton to be central to an understanding of the literature of England, or Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine to be pillars of the literature of France, the