Down Second Avenue

Down Second Avenue is a memoir by Es'kia Mphahlele, first published in 1959 and banned in South Africa for its protest against apartheid, the system of legally enforced racial segregation that governed the country from 1948 to 1994. The book traces Mphahlele's life from his rural childhood in the 1920s through his departure for Nigeria in 1957, chronicling the daily brutalities of growing up Black under white supremacist rule.

In 1924, five-year-old Mphahlele, his brother, and his sister were sent from Pretoria to live with their stern paternal grandmother in Maupaneng, a rural village near Pietersburg. Their parents remained in the city as laborers. The grandmother was imposing and unsmiling, and the landscape, dominated by mountains, tropical darkness, and the brutal Leshoana river, conspired with her to frighten the children. Mphahlele herded goats and donkeys, alternating between herding and attending a school seven miles away, which he detested for the teachers' liberal use of the rod. At the communal fire-place, where men and boys gathered nightly, elders recounted tribal history, conflicts with the Boers, and cautionary tales. Poverty was acute: the family ate porridge with jam, roasted flying ants, or wild spinach, and tea and bread appeared only at Christmas when their mother visited.

Around age twelve, Mphahlele's mother arrived unexpectedly to retrieve the children. The family settled in Marabastad, a Black location in Pretoria, first at the maternal grandmother's house on Second Avenue, then with both parents. Mphahlele quickly discovered his parents' marriage was in crisis. His father, Moses, drank heavily, withheld money, and was violent. One Sunday morning, Moses hurled hot gravy on Mphahlele's mother and struck her on the skull with a pot. She was hospitalized; he was arrested and fined. It was the last time Mphahlele saw his father, in the summer of 1932.

The family moved in with the maternal grandmother on Second Avenue. Mphahlele, now thirteen, took on extensive domestic responsibilities: waking at 4:30 a.m. to make fire, preparing meals, fetching white families' laundry from suburbs seven miles away, and doing homework only after 10 p.m. Marabastad was an organized rubble of tin shacks with one tarred road, no household electricity, a communal water tap where residents queued for hours, and a sewerage works whose smell drifted over the location. Saturday nights brought police raids on illicit beer brewing, one of the few ways families could supplement their income. At thirteen, Mphahlele kept watch while Aunt Dora, his mother's sister, strained beer to hide. When police arrived, a white constable beat him savagely for lying about the hidden beer. Stream-of-consciousness passages the memoir calls "Interludes" punctuate the narrative, capturing the claustrophobic texture of these nights: the curfew bell, police whistles, and the boy's refrain, "Mother I fear police grandmother I don't want police."

Labeled "backward" at his Pretoria school, Mphahlele was placed a grade below where he had left off and ranked 77th out of 80 students. He developed an insatiable reading habit that helped him overcome this deficit. At the Saturday bioscope (cinema), where silent films cost fourpence, other boys relied on him to read the dialogue aloud. He and friends calling themselves the Foxes met on the stoep (veranda) of Abdool's Indian shop. The arrival of Rebone, a fearless girl with big dark eyes, and her father, Dinku Dikae, a hawker, brought Mphahlele his first stirrings of love. The memoir populates Second Avenue with vivid portraits: Ma-Lebona, the self-appointed moral guardian who boasted endlessly about having been a schoolmistress; Aunt Dora, known across the location as the woman who once wrestled the shopkeeper Abdool to the ground over a billing dispute; and grandmother, who ran the household by a strict code of nightly prayers.

Encounters with white racism intensified as Mphahlele grew older. On Dingaan's Day, a public holiday commemorating a Boer-Zulu conflict, whites pushed and struck Mphahlele and Rebone for standing in a parade crowd. Meanwhile, Dinku Dikae trembled uncontrollably at the sight of any policeman, haunted by witnessing police shoot a boy dead during a forced removal in Johannesburg. When a white constable entered the family's home one night and insulted his daughter, Dinku Dikae drove a bread knife into the man's neck. He was sentenced to death, saying only that the constable had insulted everyone who carried his blood.

In 1935, Mphahlele entered St. Peter's Secondary School in Rosettenville, Johannesburg, run by the Anglican Community of the Resurrection. He excelled in English and Latin, discovered the school library, and developed a passion for dramatics. Fellow student Peter Abrahams, later a noted writer, talked about Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-born advocate of pan-African unity. Mphahlele's awareness of racial injustice sharpened as political debates began to frame his scattered experiences. In 1937, he obtained a first-class Junior Certificate pass.

Unable to afford further schooling, Mphahlele worked as a messenger before entering Adams College in Natal for teacher training. A scholarship covered his fees and provided a refund to his mother, who used part of it to divorce his father. After completing training, he took a clerical position at Ezenzeleni, an institution for African people who were blind, near Johannesburg. Over four and a half years he taught typing, studied for his Matriculation certificate, and found stability. He met Rebecca, a young woman his age, at an entertainment for the blind; she recited Wordsworth, and they formed a bond. In the autumn of 1943, his mother had a stroke and was diagnosed with diabetes. She died of a diabetic coma in 1945, weeks before the wedding, at the age of forty-five. Mphahlele and Rebecca married on August 29, 1945.

They settled in Orlando, a sprawling Black township near Johannesburg. Mphahlele taught at Orlando High School, introduced boxing and dramatics, and steered a Syndicate of Artists producing plays for multi-racial audiences. By 1949 he had earned a B.A. through external study. In 1947 he stopped attending church, revolted by what he saw as white Christian hypocrisy: White institutions cited Scripture while maintaining white supremacy, and the Church raised only feeble protest. That same year his first story collection, Man Must Live, was published. In 1950, elected secretary of the Transvaal African Teachers' Association, he publicly attacked the educational system as designed for "a race of slaves" and campaigned against Bantu Education, a government program designed to limit Black intellectual development. He, association president Zeph Mothopeng, and journal editor Isaac Matlare were dismissed from teaching without stated reasons and banned from the profession throughout the country. When students boycotted in protest, the three were arrested, jailed, and eventually acquitted after pupils testified they had been coerced into signing false affidavits.

The following years were bleak. Mphahlele took menial jobs at a fraction of his teaching salary and was forced to queue for a reference book, the hated pass that controlled Black movement and employment. He briefly taught in Basutoland (now Lesotho), where he began studying for his B.A. Honours in English. In 1955 he accepted a position as journalist and literary editor at Drum, a prominent South African magazine. He covered major events including the bus boycott, the march of 20,000 African women to the Union Buildings to protest pass laws, and the Sophiatown forced removals. He joined the African National Congress (ANC) and completed an M.A. thesis on the portrayal of non-white characters in South African English fiction, awarded with distinction in 1957 by the University of South Africa.

By early 1957, Mphahlele resolved to leave. His four-year-old son Motswiri clung to him in terror whenever a constable passed, and his ten-year-old Anthony reminded him every Sunday not to forget his pass. After five months of delays and intervention by an African minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, his passport arrived the day before his September 6 flight to Lagos. Rebecca and their three children followed in December. Writing from a Lagos garden, Mphahlele reflects on what he left behind: his grandmother from Second Avenue, now eighty, kneeling alone to pray; Aunt Dora and her husband, who has tuberculosis, facing another forced removal; St. Peter's School closed by government decree; Adams College seized under the Bantu Education Act. He acknowledges that the anger against poverty and injustice will remain, but also feels release: "I'm breathing the new air of freedom, and now the barrel of gall has no bottom any more."