The World that Es'kia Mphahlele Made: An East African View

First released in 1967 in Nairobi by East African Publishing House, whose activities the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) - Mphahlele's employer - funded, the book occupies a curious place in Anglophone literary development in East Africa.1 Since the collection was banned in South Africa until 1978, and was therefore not widely circulated in the country until its reissuing by Penguin in 2006, it found itself in an odd position in that it was not as commonly read there as in Kenya, in which the world of apartheid the book depicted remained beguilingly alien. [...]it is metaphor upon metaphor upon metaphor (497) On the other hand, displacement produced paranoid and violent masculinities, which remain sources of concern in South Africa. Since the circumstances of his early life in Marabastad and what he observed in the beleaguered Black communities of the slums induced in him a humanism stemming from what Manganyi has described as a "feminine identification" (Bury Me 468), he was turned off by the machismo of the male political elites in independent African states (see Cagiano). [...]even as he learns in exile to turn away from the acute sense of racial sensitivity that his South African life had fostered, he remains prickly, as can be seen in a stinging letter he sends to Dennis Duerden (initially an officer in the education ministry of colonial Nigeria, later a curator of West African art and director of the BBC Hausa service) for treating Lewis Nkosi patronisingly (Bury Me 118). [...]the South African predicament and the experience of exile forced him to turn inward, back to the very scenes from which he had fled.