The problem of imagination in South African writing … is illustrated by the career of Ezekiel Mphahlele, scholar, teacher, lucid provocative critic, wanderer, and creative writer, a man whose experience in a rough world (badly treated even in independent Africa) has turned a deeply compassionate view of humanity into a conviction that only guns and violence can cure the cancer of apartheid in Vorster's Republic. It is not that Mphahlele lacks imagination. Far from it. Various collections of short stories such as In Corner B and Let Live, and The Living & the Dead, and a substantial though highly autobiographical novel The Wanderers … are evidence enough of an imaginative gift. Nor were the strengths of his first major critical book, The African Image, which added a wholly new dimension to African critical debates especially as they concerned negritude, underestimated, to say nothing of his most recent work, Voices in the...