SOURCE: A review of Poetry and Humanism: Oral Beginnings, in Research in African Literatures, Vol. 19, No. 1, Spring, 1988, pp. 117-21.

In the following review, Masilela discusses Mphahlele's controversial return to South Africa and concludes that the problem with the author's Poetry and Humanism “is its blissful happiness in the sunshine of bourgeois liberal humanism, when that ideology has decayed at the dawn of a new ideological age in South Africa.”

It has been difficult for any South African for the past ten years to write dispassionately and nonpartisanly on the creative and critical works of Ezekiel Mphahlele or Es'kia Mphahlele. Both these names designate different historical moments: each defining a particular ensemble of political and literary relationships. The demarcation line was the return to South Africa of Mphahlele a decade ago after spending twenty years in self-exile. It is this return of the prodigal son that has completely polarized...