Phaswane
Mpe
Phaswane Mpe was a South African poet
and novelist who was born on September 10, 1970 in Polokwane, in the Limpopo
Province, South Africa. At the age of 19 he moved to Johannesburg
to attend the University of the Witwatersrand,
where he was also a lecturer in African literature.
His debut novel, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, which was published in 2001, was set in a
predominately black area of Johannesburg
known as Hillbrow, where he ended up living due to his lack of money. Welcome to Our Hillbrow was an important work as it was the
first novel to deal with the changes of inner-city life in South Africa in the ten years since
Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk engineered apartheid's demise. Welcome to Our Hillbrow depicts the native black South Africans
facing the new challenges of poverty, unemployment, and HIV/AIDS.
HIV and AIDS were common themes in his work, unsurprising considering the prevalence
of the disease in South
Africa, and before his death he embarked on
doctorate studies on sexuality in post-apartheid South African literature with
a particular focus on these two issues. The novel is based on short stories
written earlier, four of which appear in "Unity in 
Flight: Short Fiction" (Johannesburg: Botsotso Publishing, 2001) and one in
Stephen Gray's (Ed.) "Modern South African Stories" (Johannesburg: Ad Donker,
2002). [Mpe] completed [his] degrees in African Literature and English at the
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg,
and a Diploma in Advanced Study in Publishing at the Oxford
Brookes University,
Oxford.
Mpe died suddenly at the age of 34 on December 12, 2004 from an unknown illness (almost certainly HIV-related),
at the time he was about to begin training as a traditional healer. He left behind a son and a daughter.
Works
Mpe has a number of poems published in different journals:
"New Coin", "English Academy Review", "Botsotso
Magazine", "Blue Fifth Review" and "Popular Culture".
Interests:
Reading, Music and Soccer
Quotes
He said, “I wrote the book to escape the demons of his
depression and to make sense of the chaos around him.”
The only black people who benefited from apartheid, according to
Mpe, were the better educated immigrants from other parts of Africa.
As he wrote in Welcome To Our Hillbrow: “He died, poor chap; of
what precisely no one knew. But strange illnesses courted in Hillbrow could
only translate into Aids.”
My reading diet outside of school set works comprised popular
magazines like "Drum" and "Bona" and, later during my
secondary school days, the works of Enid Blyton, Charles Dickens, William
Shakespeare, Herman Charles Bosman and Kgadime Oliver Matsepe.
My debut novel, "Welcome To Our Hillbrow"
(Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2001), deals with themes of xenophobia -
especially amongst Africans in South
Africa - HIV/Aids, suicide and witchcraft. I
feel that the twin themes of xenophobia and HIV/Aids in the South African
context have to date not received as much attention as they merit, especially
given the high numbers of African internationals in the country and the high
death rate amongst South Africans due to HIV/Aids; I hope that my novel goes
some way in contributing to the quality of discussion and exploration of these
concerns in the meagre relevant literature that exists in the country.
“I was never at the receiving end of apartheid brutality”
“But Mpe was able to laugh. He laughed a lot. ‘I think it may
have something to do with my experience of apartheid,’ he said. ‘I didn’t
experience it in the same way, for example, that people in Soweto experienced it. I was living in a
rural village, Ga-Molepo, about 50km to the south-east of Pietersburg
[Polokwane], in the Northern Province [Limpopo]. And most of the terrible things I heard on the
radio, rather than actually coming into direct contact with them. Apart from
Bantu education, I experienced it indirectly. Part of what that did for me, I
think, is that I never developed bitterness. I just thought about it as
something that we needed to do away with, and move on.’ ”
“Welcome to Our Hillbrow is not autobiographical, the walk
the novel’s hero, Refentse, makes -- from Vickers Place to Braamfontein -- is the
walk Mpe made daily as an undergraduate… Later he lived in Braamfontein, and
didn’t have far to go to campus to do his doctorate, but he remained an
enthusiastic walker. ‘It’s how I find my stories,’ he said”
“ ‘When I began writing the book I initially thought I was just
doing a portrait of Hillbrow. And I realised as I started working on the map,
that actually I can’t have a map with no one to move around in it. That’s how I
ended up putting Refentse into the map.’ ” Refentse was a character from Mpe’s
earlier short stories.
“ ‘but there’s a lot of social life in Hillbrow. I didn’t feel
that in London.
There’s a lot of busyness, but …’ he trailed off, hinting at a loneliness in London’s crowds that is very different from Africa.”
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