As you know I “went home” to Columbia and the MU campus for the Obama rally on Thursday night.  I was an active student there, a member of the Campus Democrats before I attended my first class, and an anti-apartheid activist who bordered on militancy.  I was one of the students that set up the shanty town on the quad where Obama spoke, and occupied it and pressured the university to divest from companies that did business in South Africa.  Know why I have never let myself give in to defeat even when things were their darkest in 1994 and 2000?  Because I won the early battles I took up and fought – both MU and WSU divested, yielding to student pressure, and when I got to MU I was charged up having already won one – Warren Armstrong caved early at WSU.  

Thousands of people like me raising awareness led to millions of people boycotting products, and economic pressure led to Nelson Mandela – who was still a prisoner on Robin Island when we started agitating – not only being freed, but becoming president of the nation that held him as a political prisoner for over 25 years.

One of my guides through that era was Es’kia Mphahlele, who passed away Monday at his home in Lebowakgomo, South Africa.  His 1959 memoir, “Down Second Avenue,” was required reading for all serious anti-Apartheid activists in the mid 80’s.  The image of injustice he painted in that book made our blood boil with righteous indignation and strengthened our resolve to deliver justice to our brothers and sisters in South Africa who suffered under the yoke of race-based oppression.  

Although Mr. Mphahlele (pronounced Mm-pah-FAY-lay) wrote essays, short stories and novels, he was best known for “Down Second Avenue,” a searing account of his boyhood and early manhood. Its depiction of traditional rural life, and of violence and oppression in a black township in Pretoria, reflected the experience of countless thousands of his fellow black South Africans.

“He was in many ways the father of modern black South African writing,” said Leon de Kock, the head of the school of literature and language studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. “His death closes a certain bracket in our literature, what we used to call protest literature, literature in the resistance mode that included exile and return.”

In an essay in The Star, a Johannesburg newspaper, the journalist and editor Barney Mthombothi wrote, “If Nelson Mandela is our political star, Mphahlele was his literary equivalent.”

He had a strong luminous voice, and he raised it, and in so doing, he changed the world.  We need more Es’kia Mphahleles, but as of today, we are down in the count.