The Wanderers by Ezekiel Mphahlele. New York. 1971. Macmillan. 351 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by digeorge.
DESCRIPTION - The Wanderers is a complex, brilliant, and unprecedented novel; the most ambitious and panoramic work yet to come out of modern Africa. Exposing, for the first time, the South African in exile, it extends beyond the confines of one nation to explore the problems of Pan Africanism and the reasons for the wars that shattered Nigeria and continue to plague the entire continent. ‘How can I make my children understand we have all wandered away from something - all of us blacks; that we are not in close contact with the spirit of Nature, although we may be with its forces, that growing up for us is no more the integrated process it was for our forbears, but that this is also a universal problem?' A stranger in his hostile homeland of South Africa, an exile in ravaged Nigeria and black colonial Kenya, Timi Tabane is one of The Wanderers, a group of intellectuals and political activists - both black and white - stripped of home, country, and hope. A teacher-journalist who dared investigate and print the truth about kidnapping and murder South African slave farm, Tabane is condemned to run for his life - forever. And so the odyssey of Tabane his family begins; a harrowing trek along the west coast of Africa in search of refuge. Teaching in high schools and universities; watching, listening, and understanding that there is no asylum for the black exile - not even in ‘black' Africa. And so they move again, to East Africa and the comic-opera rule of a black government dressed in British colonial convention and white imperialist money. Inevitably, the years of rootlessness and frustration take their toll: In nightmares of pursuit; in forcibly abandoned intimacies; and in the violent, tragic death of Timi's rebellious son who chooses to die for freedom rather than flee for life. The Wanderers are black and white, colorless in their exile and equal in their alienation. Political nomads, they move through a tragic ritual search for shelter, drifting from one turbulent country to another, victims - and perpetrators - of the violence that has enslaved them. EZEKIEL MPHAHLELE grew up in Praetoria, South Africa, and was educated at the University of South Africa. He lived in Nigeria for four years, teaching at the University of Ibadan. He is the author of Down Second Avenue, a novel, and three volumes of collections of his own short stories.
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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