Down Second Avenue
Language: English
Pages: 222
ISBN: 0571097162
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Down Second Avenue ASIN: 0571097162
Six Records of a Floating Life
All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs
night and police whistles; Saturday night and screams; Saturday night and cursing and swearing from the white man’s lips. Yet one never seemed to get so used to it that the experience became commonplace and dull from beginning to end. And I was only thirteen. My aunt was straining the last few pints of beer to pour into a gallon oil tin; and I was keeping watch outside in the yard. It had to be like this always. ‘Go and watch outside, my son’; ‘Dig the hole deep, my son’; ‘Stamp hard on it, my
wilderness that he would turn into a platform for his educational mission and literary prophecies. Prophets are driven. They never give up dreams. The dreams of Prophet Es’kia Mphahlele are forever engraved in Down Second Avenue. Reading it reunites us with the spirit of Mphahlele, the exile, who never stopped dreaming of home for all. NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O NOTES I. Based on the First Annual Es’kia Mphahlele Memorial Lecture given at Polokwane, Limpopo, South Africa, on August 25, 2010. 2. James
screwed up, eyes squinted. Sometimes they tossed me an orange. I never got used to being examined like that. I resented it but at the same time feared that any moment the children might decide to tell their parents that I was undesirable. Apparently they didn’t. But after a time I just went straight to lean against the side wall of my mother’s little room and waited until she should come out of the big house. She continued to work for English families. She always refused to learn Afrikaans and
with him. She worked as a servant in a suburb. A large number of my classmates worked in town as messengers. A number of them had got thoroughly soaked into Marabastad life: the Columbia; Sunday afternoon ‘stock-fair’ parties where clubs entertained themselves after pooling their wages to give to each member in turns; week-end soccer and tennis, and so on. There was a students’ association to which I still belonged. We met every year in the December vacation, to organize a ‘daybreak dance’ on New
parliament, the Native Representative Council. ANC: You broke away from the alliance to start with. AAC: How could we stay in it when you refused to boycott dummy institutions and toy telephones? ANC: Trouble is you theorize too much and you’re out of touch with the masses. When are you ever going to act? AAC: We’re not adventurists and careerists like you. ANC: Cowards! AAC: You’ve got to educate the masses politically first. ANC: Who’s to say when they’ll be educated? AAC: When they’ve
