Bury me at the Marketplace - Selected Letters of Es'kia Mphahlele 1943-1980

By N Chabani Manganyi.

Skotaville Publishers, Johannesburg, 1984. Softcover, 202 pages. Good condition. Pages neat but tanning towards edges. The binding is good and the book is neat and clean throughout inside. 

Eskia Mphahlele died on 28 October 2008, in his eighty-ninth year. His passing gives to this collection and its title a special, if poignant, relevance. When Chabani Manganyi published the first edition of selected letters twenty-five years ago (1984) as a companion volume toExiles and Homecomings: A Biography of Eskia Mphahlele(1983), the idea of Mphahleles 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.

Es'kia Mphahlele was a South African writer, educationist, artist and activist celebrated as the Father of African Humanism and one of the founding figures of modern African literature. He skilfully evoked the black experience under apartheid in Down Second Avenue (1959). It recounted his struggle to get an education and the setbacks he experienced in his teaching career. Mphahlele wrote two autobiographies, more than 30 short stories, two verse plays and a number of poems. He is described as the "Dean of African Letters"