Book Review: Great man of letters

The loneliness of exile unhinges you. It assaults your psyche. Your mind's screws start to make a funny rattling sound. Flashbacks go off like neon signs in the night. Certain songs on the radio reduce men and women into bawling babies.

The longing for home, for familiarity, the sounds, the tastes and the textures gnaw at your insides, screaming for you to pack up and head back.

The late Dean of African Letters Professor Es'kia Mphahlele, writes about the agony of being uprooted from his familial ties in his republished autobiography, Afrika My Music, and the desire to make the reconnection with the place where his umbilical cord is buried.

Mphahlele, late Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania president Zephania Mothopeng and Isaac Matlhare - three teachers at Orlando High in Soweto - were banned from teaching after opposing the introduction of Bantu education in the early 1950s.

Mothopeng threw himself into the liberation struggle, and his health and family suffered. Mphahlele found refuge in journalism, rubbing shoulders with the late "bugs" columnist Casey ''Kid" Motsisi, the erudite Can Themba, academic Lewis Nkosi and musician Gwigwi Mrwebi.

But journalism was not Mphahlele's true calling. Yes, he could shine among a galaxy of star writers, but the glamour that came with socialising with celebrities and being invited to ''mixed" parties in the whites-only suburbs of Johannesburg was not enough for him.

Unisa's first student to get a distinction for a master's in English, Wits's first black professor and Order of the Southern Cross recipient, Mphahlele articulates the agony of being forced to turn his back on South Africa to continue his passion for teaching in foreign climes.

The first port of call for the Mphahlele caravan is heaving Lagos, and then the academically snobbish Ibadan. The family is embraced and welcomed into Africa's bosom. But that is tinged with a sadness as Nigerian academics turn up their noses at this holder of a non-British MA in English.

That fails to dampen Mphahlele's spirits as he immerses himself in the arts, as he did in his homeland when he staged a musical with mathematician Wilkie Khambule and music maestro Khabi Mngoma.

Mphahlele travels Nigeria to establish lasting relations with artists and wordsmiths such as Wole Soyinka, Gabriel Okara and Uche Okeke.

He once got renegade painter, poet and writer Breyten Breytenbach to babysit his five children. He is known to have enjoyed the social life in Paris, where the Mphahleles had found refuge before returning to Kenya.

The journey continued to the US, where he earned a citation for his PhD at Denver University and lectured in African literature and creative writing.

Although he does not dwell on it much, exile exerted a heavy toll on his family. Fortunately, his wife, Rebecca, ensured that nights of ice-cream dinners with the resultant diarrhoea were few.

But what relevance are the insights of Mphahlele, born in 1919, into a rudderless South Africa? What could be learnt from the musing of a greying old man who returned to the country of his birth at the height of apartheid in 1977?

For one, he lived, advocated and chronicled African excellence. He negated self for the common good. He sacrificed material comfort in developed countries for his calling.

But, above all, he had a love for education and scientific inquiry, something our current leaders seem allergic to.

• Afrika My Music is published by Kwela Books and is available free on the Es'kia Mphahlele Institute's website (www.eskia.org.za)