Maishe Maponya’s Letta

Exploring Es’kia Mphahlele’s African Humanism as a Mediation of the South African Exile Experience

Abstract

Taking Maishe Maponya’s biographical play Letta as a starting point, in this article, I explore how exiled Black South African artists who moved to North America in the 1950s and 1960s mediated their yearning for home by finding solidarity with their American counterparts. In Letta, Maponya constructs a historical narrative based on the singer Letta Mbulu’s life to comment on the lives of South African exiles forced to migrate because of apartheid. Unfortunately, Mbulu has not written a biography on her experiences. Due to the nature of close relations while in South Africa and in exile, it is helpful for analysing Maponya’s play that Mbulu features in the biographies written by Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, who also narrate the experiences of a small number of South African artists who formed the core of the exiled group. Upon interacting with Maponya’s play, as well as the texts by Makeba, Masekela, and Keorapetse Kgositsile, it becomes apparent that the exile experience was multilayered (both unhomely and strengthened by solidarity in social and cultural interactions). I propose that Mphahlele’s philosophy of African humanism can explain how Black South African artists were able to navigate and ultimately harmonise their sense of rootlessness as individual immigrants by being part of a mutually supporting, if modest, community diaspora. This enabled them to create a body of work that is still relevant in South African culture.