African literature cannot be completely told without a mention of one Can Themba. This was the kind of journalist he was. In defiance of racist laws, Themba attended white church services; he was yanked out of church, beaten and arrested for trespassing.
Canodoise ‘Can’ Themba was born in 1924 in Marabastad, a township outside Pretoria, the capital city of South Africa. Themba wrote for the South African black magazine called Drum, in Johannesburg, in the 50s, a publication that spawned a generation of talented young black journalists. Because of his man-about-town manner Themba was popular among thugs and educated alike in Sophiatown, the now defunct suburb where both black and white lived. Themba called his abode, at 111 Ray Street, the House of Truth where his friends gathered to carouse and debate. They called him the ‘shebeen intellectual’.
Essop Patel, the late South African judge and poet, wrote about Themba’s house of truth and drink in a book he edited, The World of Nat Nakasa. Nakasa, a Harvard graduate who later died in exile in America, was Themba’s colleague from Durban; Themba welcomed him to Johannesburg.
“For those with the Karamazovian lifestyle led by Can Themba and his ‘pards’ in a room called the ‘House of Truth’ in Sophiatown, Nat’s initiation must have looked like leading a lamb to the slaughter-block. The curious and interesting thing is that while Nat conducted himself as something of a dilettante from the word go, there was plainly nothing bogus about him. He cheerfully sank into the Bohemian life with Can Themba and his crew in Sophiatown and later drifted into the twilight world of ‘mixed gatherings’ and ‘mixed parties’ in Hillbrow,” writes Patel.
Siphiwo Mahala, who has never touched a drink, is a scholar of Themba’s work and African literature. He wrote a new play about Themba, along with veteran actor Sello Maake kaNcube. He of all people knows that Themba would have chuckled at the thought of a teetotaller writing play about his life half a century after his death.
Last winter, Mahala premiered the bio-play The House of Truth at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. Maake kaNcube depicts the little known story of talks Themba had with Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu while they were students at the University of Fort Hare – a cauldron of African nationalism, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. The politicians asked him to rally his journalism colleagues behind their movement, the African National Congress, but Themba made it clear he would choose alcohol over politics.
“I am a student of African literature. I remember distinctly when I first encountered Can Themba it was obviously his most popular short story – The Suit. I read it from an anthology by different South Africans called To Kill A Man’s Pride. What struck me about the book, until that moment I had not read a book that depicts a township life like I know it. In the same book I read The Music of the Violin by Njabulo Ndebele. I was probably in standard eight or thereabout, around about 1992. Ultimately, when I finished school I wanted to study literature, because when we grew up most of these writers’ work wasn’t available in our school syllabus,” says Mahala.
Mahala’s interest and devotion to the work of Themba was by chance when he was a master’s student in creative writing at the University of the Witwatersrand, in 2002.
“I presented my short story called Mpumi’s Assignment in the creative writing course. During feedback people kept on saying it reminded them of Can Themba’s The Suit. At that point, I wasn’t sure whether to take it as an offense or take credit. Somewhere it felt like they thought I have plagiarized. There’s a scene there where a woman finds an earring that is not hers in their bedroom. So, she asked her husband whose earring this is, he says it’s his and he is trying to be hip. So, she says okay put it on. And this guy happens to be a teacher and is forced to wear the earring to school. So, they took that and associated it with The Suit.”
Mahala reread The Suit to examine the similarities. In the process of reading, he thought the story needed a conclusion.
“We last heard of the adulterous man when he ran away clad only in underwear. That’s where I thought of writing The Suit Continued, which was published in 2002,” says Mahala.
The Suit Continued didn’t only become the introduction of the introverted Mahala in Johannesburg’s literary scene, he made it his academic project, uncovering Can Themba’s oeuvre. It bothered Mahala that the story of Themba was largely told from the time he worked for Drum.
“Now we have established this connection between Siphiwo Mahala and Can Themba. There are so many academic papers and reviews linking us. So, I felt obliged to know better about Can Themba, the person. I spent a lot time with ‘Bra Willie’ Kgositsile who used to regale me with stories of his own upbringing and life in Sophiatown and encounters with Can Themba,” he says.
Mahala, the author of a novel When A Man Cries (2007) and a collection of short stories African Delights (2011), said the late professor and vice chancellor at the University of Fort Hare, Mbulelo Mzamane, challenged him to immerse himself in Themba’s work.
<div id="attachment_31488" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31488" class="wp-image-31488 size-large" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Siphiwo-Mahala-172-1024x681.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="681" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Siphiwo-Mahala-172.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Siphiwo-Mahala-172-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Siphiwo-Mahala-172-600x399.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Siphiwo-Mahala-172-768x511.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Above: Siphiwo Mahala with actor, Sello Maake kaNcube</div>
“He had been pushing me to go back to school to study towards a PhD on Can Themba. In 2013, he said to me: ‘You already know so much about Can Themba, and chances are, your supervisors wouldn’t know as much you know about Can Themba’,” he recalls.
In 2014, Mahala enrolled for a PhD at the University of South Africa. His research sent him back to where it all started, at the University of Fort Hare, and Grahamstown, where he was born, in the Eastern Cape. From the university Mahala retrieved Themba’s correspondence with the Transvaal Department of Education. Themba, who studied English but wanted to teach, had a long and miserable run-in with the education department. He was refused promotion because he lacked a teacher’s qualification. There’s a rich archive on Themba’s life at The National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown, lying just 20 kilometers from Mahala’s home in Joza township.
“Fortunately, I didn’t struggle so much. Now I am depicting a real character as opposed to crafting a fictional character. I had to reflect on Can Themba’s life as much as possible, this including the kind of music he listened to, his behavior in general. The play goes beyond the carbon character that has been created about Sophiatown. You see Can Themba in love, you see Can Themba as a family man, you see Can Themba frustrated. The issues of his troubles with the education department were never written about. I didn’t have to be creative that much, the creativity was demanded mostly in packaging the story,” says Mahala.
The idea to have the story of Themba in film was hatched in those interactions with the poet and professor of English, Kgositsile. The film A Teacher in the Newsroom features the scholars and writers; Kgositsile, Pitika Ntuli, Don Mattera, Nadine Gordimer, Joe Thloloe, Muxe Nkondo, wife Anne and daughters Morongwa and Yvonne Themba.
Mahala thought it would be unfair to compare Themba to his privileged contemporaries like the prolific Nadine Gordimer, a friend of Themba.
“Nadine in many was ways was privileged as a white person despite identifying herself with the struggles of the black people. The major distinction here is that fact she lived until her nineties, Can Themba died at 43, she had over 30 years to write after Can Themba had died. She could establish herself even further. I think for a man of his talent, his capabilities, his potential wasn’t fully explored.”
The Suit was published in 1963 in the inaugural issue of The Classic, a literary journal founded by Nakasa and Gordimer. Three years later the politically-charged story was banned after the apartheid government declared he was a “statutory communist”.
The following year, Themba died in exile in Swaziland without a book to his name. Thanks to his friendship with Italian catholic priest, Angelo Ciccone, Themba was the first non-priest to be buried at St Joseph’s cemetery in Swaziland.
Playwrights Barney Simon and Mothobi Mutloatse adapted The Suit to theater production which Maake kaNcube performed at Johannesburg Market Theatre at the dawn of democracy. A French adaptation followed in 1999, and the play toured the world between 1999 and 2014. Former President Thabo Mbeki posthumously bestowed Can Themba with the Order of Ikhamanga, in 2006.
The 50th anniversary of Themba’s death will be celebrated with his stage work The Suit, Crepuscule, and The House of Truth, around South Africa.
“I think from 1993, during the South African transitional period, more and more people started knowing about Can Themba. During that period, many of the exile people were coming back and many of them knew Can Themba,” says Mahala.
Mahala had merely expected Maake kaNcube to lend his theater expertise.
“But the wonderful surprise was that he didn’t only like the play but wanted to perform it. So, the full-cast play had to be changed to one-man play per his advice.
“So, when I wrote this, I knew Sello is the real person that feels and knows Can Themba. I have dealt with so many academics and people who are related to Can Themba, but they don’t feel him as much as Sello does,” says Mahala.
“Can Themba, if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be the actor I am now,” says Maake kaNcube.
You can be sure the man himself is raising a glass to Mahala and sees the irony in the playwright teetotal chronicler – wherever he is.

The Literary Bon Viveur  Who Drank,  Fought  and  Wrote  Furiously

In the Africa I know, we sing and dance when we are happy, when we go to the battlefield, and in times of bereavement. We did it at the memorial service of 86-year-old South African female jazz trailblazer, Thandiwe ‘Thandi’ Klaasen on a warm January day. She died a week before, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.
Could we have celebrated the colorful and illustrious career of Klaasen without the music and renowned Sophiatown style, the multiracial suburb she lived in until it was cleared away by apartheid?
Born in 1931 in Sophiatown, Klaasen and her contemporaries used music to fight the oppressive system and patriarchy. Tired of being an appendage to male bands, she formed a female vocal quartet called the Quad Sisters that shot to stardom with a hit song Carolina Wam, in 1952. They influenced the formation of younger female groups, including Miriam Makeba’s The Skylarks.
On this Wednesday afternoon at the memorial service at Germiston City Hall, east of Johannesburg, songs intertwined with messages of condolences from politicians, musicians and family. One outstanding tribute was the family band’s adaptation of Louis Armstrong’s hit, What A Wonderful World.
&nbsp;
I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself Mam’ Thandi,
Was a beautiful soul, A great dancer
and entertainer, If you agree just clap
your hands, Say how did you do.
&nbsp;
This classic was followed by words of Lorraine Klaasen, the image of her mother.
“I was a good observer of my mom. When I grew up I wanted to be like my mother, I wanted to travel the world like my mom and make people happy with my music. And I am really living the promise I made to myself… Music made my mom very happy… She travelled with me as artists but she played that role of a mom…,” says Lorraine, a 2013 Juno Award winner for World Music Album of the Year in Canada.
“What I am going to miss about my mother is her big heart and courage to start something and see it to the end. She taught me to trust in God. She was hardly in hospital. She was a very strong woman and a disciplinarian,” adds her son Roger Phambane.
The snazzy great-grandma’s penchant for wine drew chuckles.
Klaasen’s spells of inebriation were rarely boring. A friend and protégé, Abigail Kubeka, told tales of cooking and empty bottles.
“After all, she was a mother, a housewife and everything. She loved cooking her mutton curry for her husband, Lucas. One day she didn’t realize a cloth fell into her pot. So, she dished out for her husband and Lucas was eating with a fork, but the fork couldn’t pick up the meat. He called her: ‘Thandi, what have you cooked? You said you wanted mutton curry, that’s mutton curry. Ja, mutton curry, but this is a dish cloth,’” says Kubeka to raucous laughter.
Klaasen, among other things, was a magician. She would make a wine disappear in a second, says Nandipha Ndlovu, a granddaughter who called her a role model. Ndlovu is a young doctor in Germiston.
All the speakers agreed on Klaasen’s stoicism and resilience, mentioning how she survived the horror of 1977 when someone – maybe a rival – threw acid in her face. She was in hospital for almost a year.
“That day the fire was set to put an end to her rising star, but they were wrong. That was the day she was truly born. Everyone has got their turning point in their lives. We can rather choose to pursue it, chase your dream or you can turn back, or you can fail. But she didn’t choose to fail,” says Ndlovu.
She would tell people ‘they can burn my face, but they can’t burn my voice,’ says Khubeka.
She also used to joke that she never had one wrinkle in her face. Clearly she never lost the love and respect of her family, nor her sense of humor.

They Can Burn My Face, But They Can’t Burn  My Voice

More than 60 years ago, brutal authorities choked the life and jazz out of a vibrant corner of Africa.
They called it Sophiatown – the Chicago of Africa – a free-wheeling, musical, multiracial community close to the heart of Johannesburg and the birthplace of many an African musician. Too close, according to the apartheid authorities.
“We won’t move!” was written on the walls. Police made sure people did on a February morning in 1955. Before sunrise, they drove out 110 families with nothing but hastily packed belongings. This foreshadowed almost two decades of forced removals of thousands throughout South Africa.
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One of them was 14-year-old Don ‘Bra Don’ Thinane who had grown up with Indian and Chinese neighbors – “a mixed bag” he says. He recalls his father leaving to search for a new home two days before the trucks and bulldozers arrived to take him away. “He knew that in about a day or two days they are going to demolish the place,” says Bra Don, who found himself dumped in Meadowlands, Soweto, with his grandmother and uncle, because of his race.
We go for a drive in search of memories from 60 years ago. Bra Don tells me this was his playground where he used to rollerskate: we are on 5th avenue heading towards Sophiatown. “Hey! Isn’t that Xuma’s place,” he exclaims as we pass the home of the first black South African to become a medical doctor, former ANC President A.B. Xuma. One of few places that survived the nationalist government’s wrecking ball.
We drive on looking for Gerty Street, where Bra Don used to live. I spot the name, barely visible, worn and stencilled in black. We turn right into the street, immediately the mood in the car changes, and so does Bra Don’s face; his eyes widen and light up as nostalgia washes over.
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“I used to scale this wall,” says Bra Don when we get to the barrier that stretches from Gerty into the Melville Koppies, a place where he spent his afternoons, and one of the few things left. “There’s nothing that can show me our house here! They literally broke it down,” he says as we carry on looking for anything familiar.
It was also in Sophiatown that he found the discipline of boxing, under the strict coach Harry Mikela. In playing the trumpet, he learned from the elder brother of Stompie Manana, one of the fathers of African jazz. It helped him escape the rough streets and in 1980, through study, he became a lawyer. Now, at the age of 71, he is one of the best known black advocates in the land.
Bra Don is one of many happy to see Sophiatown back on the map. The apartheid administration renamed it Triomf – meaning triumph in Afrikaans. In 2006, it was rechristened Sophiatown.
The jazz that died under the ugly din of bulldozers, removal trucks and police batons, is also back.
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Back To The  Future In The Streets Of Soul

There she was, wearing a woven two-piece suit, with earrings hanging like chandeliers, flanked by empty chairs on either side.
This was at the United Nations (UN) in New York on July 16, 1963. In parts of the United States, a black person couldn’t even sit down at restaurants freely. Yet, here was an African singer from the beer halls of Sophiatown and Soweto sitting confidently before the most powerful leaders in the world, telling them of the ills of apartheid South Africa.
“I ask you and all the leaders of the world, would you act differently, would you keep silent and do nothing if you were in our place? Would you not resist if you were allowed no right in your own country because the color of your skin was different from the color of the rulers, and if you were punished for even asking for equality? I appeal to you, and to all the countries of the world, to do everything you can to stop the coming tragedy. I appeal to you to save the lives of our leaders, to empty the prisons of all those who should never have been there,” said Miriam Makeba calmly.
At the time, 31-year-old Makeba was a revered singer and activist. She was among the first female African singers to achieve international success and used this to become a powerful voice in the anti-apartheid movement.
Rivonia trialist Denis Goldberg, who faced the death penalty with Nelson Mandela, had been arrested just five days before Makeba’s speech.
“The talent of a black musician made South Africa sit up and take notice. During apartheid, it was rare to see such an outstanding woman like Miriam Makeba,” says Goldberg.
She left the country when the apartheid government banned black musicians from performing in halls and theaters, and paid a terrible price.
It was in 1960, when Makeba tried to return to South Africa for her mother’s funeral, that she was told her passport had been revoked. This was punishment for her appearance in the documentary Come Back, Africa that exposed the inequities of living under the rule of the nation’s oppressive government. She lived in exile for three decades.
When she spoke at the UN, her citizenship was taken away all together.
In 1964, Makeba spoke again at the UN. This time before the decolonization committee, where she pleaded for the release of female political prisoners in South Africa. In an interview with Bomb magazine from the United States, in 2000, she says it was the African National Congress (ANC) who asked her to use her popularity for the cause.
Makeba remained in exile until the end of apartheid in the early 1990s. During Mandela’s tenure as the country’s president, she was a member of Parliament between 1994 and 1999. She became the first African woman to win a Grammy Award, sharing the musical honor for best folk recording, with Harry Belafonte for their anti-apartheid album, in 1965. Belafonte had helped Makeba settle in the United States, where she had a successful singing career.
Makeba died of a cardiac arrest in November 2008 after a concert near the town of Caserta, in southern Italy. Her final performance was to campaign for journalist Roberto Saviano, who had received death threats for writing about organized crime.
To the end, Mama Africa, as she was affectionately known, sang in the cause of those under the heel of oppression. Millions remember her unique tongue-clicking music, sung in her mother language of Xhosa; songs such as Qongqothwane, popularly known as the The Click Song, Pata Pata and Malaika. She also made appearances in musicals King Kong and Wait a Minim!.
But maybe millions more will remember her for her brave words on a summer’s day in 1963.

Tag: Sophiatown

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

The Literary Bon Viveur Who Drank, Fought and Wrote Furiously

They Can Burn My Face, But They Can’t Burn My Voice

Back To The Future In The Streets Of Soul

The Song Bird Who Changed The World