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There are a few African writers who have contributed much to the development of modern African literature and have had little written about them. Of the few, the black South African writer, Ezekiel Mphahlele, stands out rather pathetically as a much neglected, generally underestimated and often misjudged writer. Yet his credentials have been most impressive: three collections of short stories, Man Must Live ( 1946), The Living and the Dead ( 1962) and In Corner B (1967); two books of critical essays, The African Image (1962) and Voices in the Whirlwind (1972); his well-known autobiography, Down Second Avenue (1959); a novel, The Wanderers (1972); two anthologies of African writing, African Writing Today (1967) and Modern African Stories (1964) which he co-edited with the Ghanaian writer Ellis Ayitey Komey, and several uncollected essays, short stories, poems and book reviews.During two decades of self-exile which lasted from 1957 to 1977, Mphahlele devoted much of his time and talents to teaching and helping to develop programmes in African literature and the arts, wandering through three continents, intermingling with diverse and complex cultural groups in search of a self-fulfilling commitment to a people and a place, adjusting all the while his uneasy 'burden of freedom'. Apart from his more direct contributions to the new literature in Africa as a creative writer, an anthologist and one-time editor of the influential Black O,pbeus, Mphahlele was a moving spirit in the entire process of nurturing the emergent tradition of written literature in English in West and East Africa. First in Nigeria and later in Kenya, Mphahlele participated in the epochal cultural revival which flourished in these

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