Es'kia Mphahlele's Down Second Avenue revisited

Book: Down Second Avenue

Author: Es'kia Mphahlele


The author of this great work, Pa Es’kia Mphahlele breathed his last after a long fruitful life (he was almost 90 when he departed this world) Mphahlele was celebrated as one of the greatest writers Africa has ever produced.

Over the decades he was an academic, journalist, editor and international professor. As early as 1959 he published his classic, Down Second Avenue which made the literary world to drool.

Down Second Avenue details the early years of the author’s life how he incredibly made good for himself despite coming from a background of great poverty. We learn all the hard things that happened to him and his family when he was very young but how he decided to be different.

It was his love for the written word – for reading and writing – that came to the author’s rescue. From a very early age he relished reading books and in fact went through virtually all the books in his local library easily. He began to explain things to his friends and contemporaries; things he had learnt from books and the early cinema in those days.

We see the strength of women in those days of apartheid – the strength of mothers, foster mothers, aunts, etc who despite grinding poverty were always ready to help one way or the other. The young Es’kia did well at school, became a teacher, and later a celebrated journalist and editor at Drum.

For a man of his great intelligence and awareness, apartheid era was completely unacceptable, so Es’kia decided to go abroad, to west Africa which was of course then much freer than South Africa. Here he began to blossom as a great creative writer and critic…
- K.A Motheane