The Intersection of Experience, Imaginative Writing and Meaning-Making in es'kia Mphahlele (Address‪)‬

After his birth in Pretoria on 17 December 1919 followed by the formative years of his cognition at the Maupaneng village of GaMphahlele in Limpopo-- as both expository and fictive writings by and on him reveal--Es'kia Mphahlele's cultural and political activism saw him grappling with identity formation as an African, including at the time he was traversing exile territories in a number of African states, in France and in America. (1) What I state here points to the three axes of experience, imaginative writing and meaning making on which Mphahlele's mission revolves as he acts it out in specific environments. That place or environment plays a major role in Mphahlele's attempts to negotiate personhood and Africanness is attested to by his description of Maupaneng times as "those highly impressionable years as a herdboy" (Mphahlele 1984: 11). The environment in which Mphahlele lived, wrote and philosophised consists of apartheid South Africa from 1919 until 1957 when he went into exile in Nigeria; of France from 1961 to 1963; of Kenya from 1963 to 1966 when "he took up a teaching fellowship" until 1968 and began "a Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of Denver, Colorado" (Woeber and Read 1989); of Zambia from 1968 to 1970; of the 1970 to 1974 return to Denver; of continued involvement in academia at the University of Pennsylvania from 1974 to 1977; and of post-1976 apartheid South Africa since his permanent return to South Africa in August 1977.