Down Second Avenue by Ezekiel Mphahlele. Garden City. 1971. Anchor Books. 210 pages. paperback. Cover design by Bob Cunningham. Cover typography by Jim McWilliams.
DESCRIPTION - This classic is the autobiography of a black South African, describing the struggle for human dignity in the quagmire of poverty, violence and apartheid. The scene moves briskly from the rural reserves to the slums and shantytowns of Pretoria and Capetown as the protagonist reconstructs his development from child to adult and his growing awareness of the limits imposed by the system on his horizon. In narrating the author's life story, this book illuminates the whole South African scene, revealing life in all its luridness, the raw unpleasantness of everyday life, the endless silly restrictions imposed by the petty bureaucracy and the savage environment in which violence and brutalization are accepted as mundane facts of life. This is also the story of a people and their way of survival, a story studded with portraits of indefatigable characters whose experiences speak volumes about the frightful pressures and contradictions of the South African pigmentocracy. A Doubleday Anchor Original.
In a Penguin Classic edition:
Down Second Avenue by Es'kia Mphahlele. New York. 2013. Penguin Books. 9780143106791. Foreword by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. 236 pages. paperback. Cover art by Eric White.
DESCRIPTION - Es'kia Mphahlele's seminal memoir of life in apartheid South Africa - available for the first time in Penguin Classics. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1969, Es'kia Mphahlele is considered the Dean of African Letters and the father of black South African writing. Down Second Avenue is a landmark book that describes Mphahlele's experience growing up in segregated South Africa. Vivid, graceful, and unapologetic, it details a daily life of severe poverty and brutal police surveillance under the subjugation of an apartheid regime. Banned in South Africa after its original 1959 publication for its protest against apartheid, Down Second Avenue is a foundational work of literature that continues to inspire activists today.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Es'kia Mphahlele (December 17, 1919 - October 27, 2008) was a South African writer, academic, artist and activist. He was born as Ezekiel Mphahlele but changed his name to Es'kia in 1977. Mphahlele's first book of short stories, MAN MUST LIVE, was published in 1947. Banned from teaching by the apartheid government in 1951, Mphahlele supported himself and his family through a series of clerical jobs before leaving South Africa to teach in the British Protectorate of Basutoland. On his return to South Africa, Mphahlele soon found a job as a political reporter, sub-editor and fiction editor on the innovative popular magazine Drum, under its editors Anthony Sampson and later under Sylvester Stein, while studying for a Master's degree by correspondence at UNISA (The University of South Africa). Es'kia Mphahlele's life and work is currently found in the efforts of The Es'kia Institute, a non-governmental, non-profit organization based in Johannesburg. During the 1950s Mphahlele became increasingly politicized, and joined the African National Congress in 1955. Disappointed in ANC approach to matters of education - he later disassociated himself from the organization. In 1957, Mphahlele was offered a job teaching in a Church Mission Society school in Lagos, Nigeria. Unwilling to permit him to travel abroad because of his political activities, the South African government finally granted him a passport in September 1957. Mphahlele spent the following twenty years in exile: first in Nigeria, and subsequently in Kenya, where he was director of the Chemchemi Cultural Centre; Zambia; France and the United States, where he earned a doctoral degree from the University of Denver and taught at the University of Pennsylvania. Mphahlele returned to South Africa in 1977 and joined the faculty of the University of the Witwatersrand.
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