That Es’kia Mphahlele, the acclaimed Pretoria-born writer, stands in the very forefront of South Africa’s literary ranks is beyond question. How to place him, however, is another question. Mphahlele used the term ‘African Humanist’ to describe himself, but what he meant has become a much debated issue in terms of its orientation to a range of contemporary social and political questions. Was this humanism actually ‘Africa[n] or West[ern]?’ asked Barnett, his first major interpreter. Percy More, following soon after Barnett had opened the debate, raised the question, referencing Frantz Fanon, of Mphahlele’s attitude to the necessity of violence. Corinne Sandwith, writing almost twenty years later, seeking to locate him in relation to the recurring South African question of class and/versus race, asked whether he was a ‘collaborator’ or a ‘revolutionary’. Interestingly, all three of his biographies, Ursula Barnett’s Ezekiel Mphahlele which came out in 1976, Chabani Manganyi’s Exiles and Homecomings: A Biography of Es’kia Mphahlele in 1983 and Ruth Obee’s Es’kia Mphahlele: Themes of Alienation and African Humanism in 1999, found in him the enduring marks of a boundary crosser In all of this discussion there is contestation. Even as there is agreement that Mphahlele was able to manage difference, there is disagreement about the character, substance and significance of his approach to the world which he was seeing and experiencing and having to respond to. Barnett, for example, using the issue of Manganyi’s method, felt that he was reading too recklessly into Mphahlele’s head. Manganyi chose, she said, using his own words, ‘narrative form which would be equal to the fibre of the man’, written largely in the first person, as if it was Mphahlele himself producing the text.

Others also pitched in. Writing almost thirty years later, Michael Titlestad, reviewing Obee’s Themes of Alienation, found her characterisation of Mphahlele wanting. She used the term ‘African Humanism’, he said, ‘as a repository for anything of ethical value’.