When Chabani Manganyi published the first edition of selected
letters twenty-five years ago as a companion volume to Exiles and
Homecomings: A Biography of Es'kia Mphahlele, the idea of
Mphahlele's death was remote and poetic. The title, Bury Me at the
Marketplace, suggested that immortality of a kind awaited
Mphahlele, in the very coming and going of those who remember him
and whose lives he touched. It suggested, too, the energy and
magnanimity of Mphahlele, the man, whose personality and intellect
as a writer and educator would carve an indelible place for him in
South Africa's public sphere. That death has now come and we mourn
it. Manganyi's words at the time have acquired a new significance:
in the symbolic marketplace, he noted, 'the drama of life continues
relentlessly and the silence of death is unmasked for all time'.
The silence of death is certainly unmasked in this volume, in its
record of Mphahlele's rich and varied life: his private words, his
passions and obsessions, his arguments, his loves, hopes,
achievements, and yes, even some of his failures. Here the reader
will find many facets of the private man translated back into the
marketplace of public memory. Despite the personal nature of the
letters, the further horizons of this volume are the contours of
South Africa's literary and cultural history, the international
affiliations out of which it has been formed, particularly in the
diaspora that connects South Africa to the rest of the African
continent and to the black presence in Europe and the United
States. This selection of Mphahlele's own letters has been greatly
expanded; it has also been augmented by the addition of letters
from Mphahlele's correspondents, among them such luminaries as
Langston Hughes and Nadine Gordimer. It seeks to illustrate the
networks that shaped Mphahlele's personal and intellectual life,
the circuits of intimacy, intellectual inquiry, of friendship,
scholarship and solidarity that he created and nurtured over the
years. The letters cover the period from November 1943 to April
1987, forty-four of Mphahlele's mature years and most of his active
professional life. The correspondence is supplemented by
introductory essays from the two editors, by two interviews
conducted with Mphahlele by Manganyi and by Attwell's insightful
explanatory notes.
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