Ezekiel Es'kia Mphahlele (born 1919) was a South African writer. His first book of short stories, Man Must Live, was published in 1947. Banned by the apartheid government in 1957, he emigrated to the United States, where he earned a doctoral degree from the University of Denver and taught at the University of Pennsylvania. Mphahlele returned to South Africa in 1977 and joined the faculty of the University of the Witwatersrand.