Remembering Phaswane Mpe

by Adele on Mar 19th, 2008

When Phaswane Mpe died in 2004, South African writers, publishers and artists cried out as one, lamenting that the life of such a talent could be cut short short so prematurely, at the start of his career. Mpe was 34.

His first novel, Welcome to Our Hillbrow had been published three years earlier by UKZN Press, and received not only great critical acclaim, but also commercial success, becoming a local bestseller.

“The novel is extraordinary in several respects. First, there is probably no South African author his age who has written such a nifty and ballsy work of fiction that mirrors immediate societal complexities… As a work of literature Welcome To Our Hillbrow ranks alongside such classics as Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me On History,” remarked the Sowetan at the time.

UKZN Press is soon to release Brooding Clouds, a collection of Mpe’s short stories that underscores just how exciting the voice was that we lost.

Remember Phaswane Mpe’s voice, and life, through these three obituaries by Liz McGregor, John Matshikiza and Michelle McGrane:

Phaswane Mpe

Young novelist of post-apartheid South Africa

Phaswane Mpe, who has died aged 34, was one of South Africa’s most promising young novelists. His debut work, Welcome To Our Hillbrow (2001), was the first to record the huge changes that have transformed its inner cities over the past 10 years. It grappled with the struggle of black South Africans to create a post-apartheid identity after the collapse of the old racial hierarchies; the process was complicated by the arrival from elsewhere on the continent of thousands of black Africans, who were often more confident and better educated. Mpe belonged to the generation who grew up with the humiliations and deprivations of apartheid and expected to enjoy the fruits of freedom under democracy. Instead, they were confronted by new social ills: unemployment, poverty and HIV/Aids.

He was born and brought up in the northern city of Polokwane and went to Johannesburg in 1989, the year before Nelson Mandela was released, to study African literature at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), which had only recently opened its doors to black students.

Liz McGregor’s complete obituary in The Guardian

To burn so bright and die so young

They stand aside, and they say that these things just trickle off your tongue. To burn so bright, and to die so young.

Phaswane Mpe never told us this, not in so many words, anyway, but what he was writing out was the process of his own possible dilemma. His one and only novel, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, turns out to have been a warning, a commiserating, an all too powerful statement about the present that we are living in.

It is rich and living, and was also talking about conflicting spaces and about living and dying. And it was also an elegy for his own life, a life filled with potential and wonder in the urban jungle of a wonderful new world that was to unfold before his very feet as he walked it.

John Matshikiza’s complete obituary in the Mail & Guardian (Google cache)

A Letter to Phaswane

15 December 2004

Phaswane

You sat next to me on the airport shuttle from Cape Town International Airport to the hotel we had been booked into for the duration of Turning the Page 2004, a slightly-built man who wore glasses. All I knew about you then was that you had written a book called Welcome To Our Hillbrow which had been received with acclaim locally.

During our two-day stay in Cape Town for the writers’ conference hosted by the Centre for the Book I had the opportunity to get to know you a little better. The more I talked to you, the more I liked you. You were unassuming, easy to communicate with, and quietly intelligent.

Michelle McGrane’s complete letter at Litnet

Book Details