Celebrated South Africa writer E’skia Mphahlele’s iconic book, Down Second Avenue grows new legs up the stage

The play, based on his famous autobiography Down Second Avenue is heading to National Arts Festival in Makhanda scheduled to perform 28-30, 2026, with actor Marcus Mabusela playing the lead role.

By Edward Tsumele, CITYLIFE/ARTS Editor

As a reader of South African literature, even as a casual one for that matter, you must have heard, or even read the late South African literary giant E’skia Mphahlele’s autobiography, Down 2nd Avenue.

If you have not yet read it, you should, because not only will you get an insight into the life and times of one of the country’s gifted writers, but you will also encounter some of the finest writing styles from South Africa. The pages on which he write sang.

Mphahlele had the distinction of writing two autobiographies, Down Second Avenue, being the first one that focuses on his early life, and Afrika, My Music, which gives a deep insight into Mhahlele’s life as an adult, tracing his journey when he worked on the African continent, including being based in Nigeria and Kenya, before moving to the US, where he taught as well as getting a PHD in Creative writing. This is after he acquired a Masters Degree in English from the University of South Africa, after which, he taught for a number of years in Soweto, before moving out into the rest of the African continent.

There is every reason to read this book if, you have not, and if, you have done so, it is wise to re-read it. It will give you a better perspective about the current challenges in South Africa, though the book was written in the late 50s.

The thing is, the 1959 memoir about poverty, displacement and systemic failure reads like today’s headlines.

That experience will assist you in watching a new play, which has been adapted from Down Second Avenue, featuring a 39-year-old South African artist who is taking it to the world stage to prove it.

When Eskia Mphahlele wrote Down Second Avenue in 1959, he was writing about Marabastad in Pretoria. He was writing about forced removals, degrading labour conditions, a state that criminalised Black existence, and a generation of young people robbed of their futures by a system designed to keep them inferior. He was writing about what he knew.

And so, the book is about his life, as broadly it is about the precarious existence of black life during Apartheid.

He was also, it turns out, writing about 2026.

South Africa is currently navigating a crisis of immigration and anti-migrant sentiment that Mphahlele described with uncanny precision — the scapegoating of the foreign poor, the violence of economic despair turned outward, the failure of the post-liberation state to build the solidarity it promised. His memoir speaks to Limpopo farmworkers paid in vouchers rather than wages, to Johannesburg landlords evicting families in the name of gentrification.

This is no coincidence. This is prophecy. And it is perhaps exactly why performer and producer Marcus Mabusela chose this work, at this moment, for this country — and for the world.

“Mphahlele’s work is not history. It is a mirror. And right now, South Africa needs to look into it,” says Mabusela, performer and producer, Down 2nd Avenue

Down Second Avenue chronicles Mphahlele’s journey from childhood under apartheid’s architecture of humiliation through to his emergence as one of the continent’s most important intellectual voices. But the memoir’s power has never been its historical record. It has been its insistence on the full humanity of Black life in conditions designed to deny it — the dignity, the community, the rage, the grief, and the refusal to disappear.

 A 39-year old chose knowledge over celebrity

Marcus Mabusela is not mounting this production to burnish his credentials as a South African cultural icon — though those credentials are considerable. He is doing it because he believes the country is in an emergency of meaning, and that Mphahlele offers something rare: a framework for understanding how we arrived here, and the intellectual and moral tools to build something better.

That Mabusela chose to premiere Down 2nd Avenue in New York before bringing it home is itself a statement. An African story, rooted in African soil, tested first on an international stage — not for validation, but as a declaration that the intellectual wealth of this continent travels. That it belongs to global conversation. That E’skia Mphahlele does not need to be explained before being understood.

“The June 16 generation didn’t just march against Afrikaans,” says Mabusela. “They marched for the right to think. For the right to know. For the right to lead themselves.

Fifty years later, the question is whether we have honoured that. Mphahlele’s life is a test case for what it looks like when you refuse to let a system define the limits of your mind. That’s the leadership lesson. That’s what young South Africans need to see — not celebrity, but intellectual courage as a form of resistance.”

Adapted and directed by acclaimed theatre-maker Mosehlana Mamaregane and performed by Mabusela, the production uses physical theatre, poetry, music, and movement to embody Mphahlele’s autobiography through a figure called simply “The Prophet” — a device that refuses to let the work be biographical. This is not one man’s story. It is ours.

“Mphahlele’s observations about poverty, identity, education and belonging remain startlingly relevant,” says director Mosehlana Mamaregane. “This production creates a dialogue between generations — and asks audiences to consider how the lessons of the past can help us address the challenges of today. Not as nostalgia. As an instruction manual.”

Performance details

Production: Down 2nd Avenue

Venue: National Arts Festival, Makhanda

Dates: 28 – 30 June 2026

Running Time: Approximately 55 minutes

Genre:Drama / Physical Theatre / Literary Adaptation

Production credits

Presented by: Marcus Mabusela

Adapted & Directed by: Mosehlana Mamaregane

Musical Composition: Maxwell Baloyi

Movement Direction & Choreography: Baleni “Ginger” Ernest

Based on the memoir Down Second Avenue by Eskia Mphahlele