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="(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

There is not much to do in the quiet village of Simon’s Town, Cape Town, best known as where South Africa’s naval fleet lies. It is the sort of home where you go fishing, walking on the beach, or else watching the penguins waddle onshore. It’s the sort of place where a news headline is a handful of break-ins over Christmas.
That’s just the way journalist Claire Robertson, 2014 Sunday Times Fiction Prize and a South African Literary Award author of The Spiral House and The Magistrate of Gower, likes it.
“It feels like you are hiding away from life here, but then you write a book and you get dragged back into life,” she says.
“It shocked me rigid with all the attention&#8230; I thought I am not selling my writing to anyone anymore. I am writing for myself. I started doing that in my journalism, instead of writing the news story.
“A news story is Nelson Mandela made his long-awaited return to Robben Island yesterday, this time surrounded by a company of international news media. The real story is we trailed him around the island, and when we got to the quarry that had damaged his eyesight, where he worked for so many years breaking stones and the reporters yelled out ‘dance for us’. You saw him sigh and sink slightly and then he started his shuffle into this expected shosholoza dance. That is actually what happened. When you get old enough you start writing it.”
<div id="attachment_31636" style="width: 693px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31636" class="wp-image-31636 size-large" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/IMG_5522-683x1024.jpg" alt="" width="683" height="1024" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_5522.jpg 683w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_5522-300x450.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_5522-600x900.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_5522-200x300.jpg 200w" sizes="(max-width: 683px) 100vw, 683px" />Claire and her chair</div>
Meeting Robertson at her home, on the slopes of Jackson Road, is a real treat. We sit under the shade of a grape vine with sunbirds flitting through the leaves to the sounds of dustbin men at work.
For the 54-year-old, standing at the edge of the gentle lapping shoreline of Waters Edge Beach, a few hundred meters downhill from here, was the defining moment that led her to abandon the stressful urban streets of Melville, Johannesburg, five years ago.
“[Melville] was getting tough to go walk around at any time of the day or night, which is what I like to do. It was getting less and less safe. You know that feeling when your freedom is being curtailed in South Africa. Certainly everyone has a bloody minded moment and you can’t bear being hemmed in. I thought I wanted to find a place that I can walk at any time of the day, and it was here.”
The quiet life here is a world away from the height of Robertson’s career as a hard news political journalist in the 1980s.
“To be a reporter during the height of the dying days of apartheid in South Africa was the greatest privilege in my personal profession. There was nothing like it. Every story mattered,” she says.
Some stories where harder to write than others, one of them being the reclassification of races which under The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act and the Immorality Act, had denied families living together.
“Already as a young person you are trembling at the injustices of the world. Meanwhile you are working in a society where this is just being thrown at you all the time. Following that through to watching a country talk about how it is going to shape itself,” she says.
“Then you are reporting something like the Dutch Reformed Church not allowing black people to join in a service. They would open the [priest’s] garage for the services and shove the old tyres aside as a Christian duty.”
Other stories send a chill down Robertson’s spine on this hot Simon’s Town morning.
“I remember meeting with the commandant in the Pretoria Central prison and hearing this unearthly singing. And he said ‘oh, that it was condemned men singing on the night before they are due to be hanged’. I remember shaking.”
Robertson lived the reshaping of South Africa; she cradled her firstborn daughter the day Nelson Mandela walked out of prison; she also covered the negotiations at Kempton Park which led to South Africa’s Constitution.
These days, it’s the calm of Simon’s Town. Robertson, the novelist, has just come back from a walk on the beach with her Scottish terrier, Henry, and a family breakfast. Her mind is more focused on her third book. The Magistrate of Gower (2015) – a prisoner of war in the South African War, disgraced in an illicit affair, who is now forced to confront his past as a magistrate 30 years later – is sold out and is now in its second edition.
“It’s about the rise of nationalism and what is the response when you see it rearing its head again. It’s very seductive. It takes the good that people have, in this instance the noble suffering during the Boer War and heroes of the Great Trek, it takes part of that and twists it into something else, which is what happened in Afrikaner Nationalism.”
It is rare to find an award-winning author who doesn’t punt their novel with pride. But Robertson’s pride is a small wooden chair in her lounge, finished by her own hand.
“It’’s quite comfortable actually and it’s made from some very cheap wood. I wanted to test out the design before I made one from oak. I am quite happy to say that no one has broken it yet either.”
She points to a wall of saws and power tools, glinting in the skylight, where the chair, two book shelves and a wardrobe were crafted by her from lumps of wood; a hobby she picked up at her parents’ knee.
Included in this home of self-made furniture is a portable writing board; filled with scribbles and doodles, one reading ‘push towards the problem’, and a sticker of a porcupine.
“It’s something prickly, that’s low slung who is just determinately going about on his way.”
Only a journalist would feel the need to say they write their stories longhand, like it’s a bad habit picked up after years of writing shorthand.
“I get lovely notebooks and sit down and write it in longhand. If you start by typing it out you are going to keep correcting yourself, you lose all your momentum and you have no record of your ideas. Things have to be aesthetically pleasing.”
“What I do is start with an idea. With The Spiral House, what was it like on a South Africa slave plantation when these two ideas of science and enlightenment are clashing. It was told through a French naturalist in my head, but what it became was a young female freed slave, whose voice spoke out.”
Robertson has always gone for the road less traveled. She was one of the first South Africans to go to Soviet Russia on a South African passport in 1988. The trip came after one of Robertson’s stories published in The Washington Post. She asked American teenagers what they thought Russia looked like, and Russian teens, in Moscow, what they thought America looked like. The newspaper liked the story so much they nominated it for a Pulitzer.
“You could see the world was changing. You could see that the ANC was starting to talk to people in South Africa. We thought lets just try it.”
“One thing that stuck, was in Leningrad, on one of the big roads, there was a department store. There in this glass case, enfolded in red satin, was a single disposible razor. It loooked like it had been carved out of a lump of Bakelite.
<div id="attachment_31637" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31637" class="wp-image-31637 size-large" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/IMG_5547-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="683" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_5547.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_5547-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_5547-600x400.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_5547-768x512.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />&#8221;it shocked me rigid with all the attention&#8230; I thought I am not selling my writing to anyone anymore. I am writing for myself&#8221;</div>
“They could build space rockets, and amazing awful armaments, but they could not bring a milk Glut and the cereal Glut to the market at the same time. Everything was just screwed up. It was that kind of economy. People wanted consumerist stuff so badly they would spend a fortune on American jeans and sneakers.”
Her journey through the Siberian tundra also foreshadowed where she would end up.
“I found recently an old diary from the late 80s. I said what do I want to do? I want to live by the sea, sub-edit and then write. I had completely forgotten about that. Having got down, unpacked my books to discover I wrote this blissful thing. Clearly I was working this through my system.”
Working on her first novel, through the night at her brother’s home overlooking the sea in Kalk Bay was also an existential moment.
“I remember the book going so well and being so wrapped up in the book. It was suddenly four in the morning. I was working furiously away at my laptop and I heard this guguguggugug, it was the fishing boats heading out before dawn. When you have made a big change in life, and things are uncertain, and you don’t know how things go, it feels like you are getting some form of confirmation. If you are working and the fishermen are working.”
It has been a long journey to a favorite chair in Simon’s Town, from the raging streets of Africa, to walking with Mandela, to a razor in Leningrad.

IMG_5560

Claire And Her Chair

More than a year ago, the literary world lost a towering figure, the English writer, Doris Lessing. The writer died in her London home on November 17 2013, six years after she became the oldest person – and the 11th woman – to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Born in 1919 to English subjects in what was then known as Persia, Lessing’s father, lured by the prospect of riches through maize-farming, moved the family, to what is now Zimbabwe, in 1925.
Lessing famously described her childhood as an “uneven mix of some pleasure and much pain”. She ran away from school in Harare (then Salisbury), and her family, at 14, effectively bringing her formal education to an end. She, like many female colonial writers of her time, took over her education and styled herself as a self-educated intellectual.
In 1949, a political and outspoken Lessing was forced into exile by the 1st Viscount Malvern, then Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia, for her “subversive activities” and “upsetting the natives”.
She moved to London where her legendary debut, The Grass Is Singing, was published, beginning her career as a prolific writer.
Lessing was a self-proclaimed recluse. She told the BBC in a rare 1993 interview:  “I very much like being by myself&#8230;I am practical, I think I’d very much enjoy being a castaway.”
But despite the love of being by herself, Lessing gave back. Her parting gifts to Zimbabwe, the only world she had known in her younger years, were 3,000 titles from her personal collection to a leading public library in Harare.
In her Nobel Prize speech in 2007, she hinted at this saying: “Everybody I met [in Zimbabwe], everyone, begged for books.”
The writer was 94 when she died.

BRITAIN NOBEL PRIZE LESSING

True To Her Word

<h4>Ghana Must Go</h4>
<h4>by Taiye Selasi</h4>
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Afropolitan Taiye Selasi has a way with words, not words themselves, but their emotional coloring when they are woven into syntax. Her vowels shape into afternoon orange, her consonants thread into hues of an exposed heart, wounded pale pink. Memory, with all its good and all its regret, is the main theme of Selasi’s delicately modulated book. Ghana Must Go is beautifully convincing in its flashbacks and forward-thinking dialogue – the romance and rot of the West combine when seen through the eyes of uprooted immigrants. America is noisy, angular and assuming. But gradually it is muted as Selasi’s characters come into the foreground. In essence, this is a consciousness novel, yet the shadow of immigrant insecurity hovers over it. When one of Selasi’s protagonists looks back at “a world that considered her irrelevant with a look that said she considered the world irrelevant, too”, we understand the baggage. It is a collective past; Selasi carries the history of Africa in her lyrical, yearning prose.
<h4>The Shining Girls</h4>
<h4>by Lauren Beukes</h4>
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Winner of science fiction’s prestigious Arthur C Clarke award, Lauren Beukes is probably one of the continent’s best genre writers. The Shining Girls, her third novel, is a thriller about a time-travelling serial killer. It transcends the simulated thriller style, however, because Beukes finds a way to express the realism underneath the murder and sci-fi. At its most basic level, the excitement of the story is in how creative Beukes’s writing can be. Her descriptions and rhythms, the expletives, the improvised twists and turns make The Shinning Girls an authentic global novel, in a way that allows us to realize just how much writing is an art.
<h4>Endings And Beginnings</h4>
<h4>by Redi Tlhabi</h4>
Redi Tlhabi has an extraordinary gift for jotting down personal truths that read like arias. In her quasi-autobiography, Endings and Beginnings, she relates scenes from her childhood that sing from the heart. Tlhabi’s story of her youth and befriending a local gangster, Mabegzo, a 20-something murderer and rapist, is miraculously unfussy. She tells it, not from an embarrassed corner, but out in the open, with none of the flourishes that tend to bog down South African writers of the new millennium. By purifying Mabegzo of stereotype, she brings his character a unification of soul. Their relationship feels so real in its brokenness, their characters so close, that we dare not take our eyes off the page.
<h4>We Need New Names</h4>
<h4>by NoViolet Bulawayo</h4>
NoViolet Bulawayo’s freshness, her sense of ideological ingenuity and her innate understanding of the corruption of Africa’s innocence, gives her debut novel a unique radiance. Her sentences are emotionally strenuous: “leaving their umbilical cords underneath the soil, leaving the bones of their ancestors in the earth, leaving everything that makes them who and what they are, leaving because it is no longer possible to stay”. And they place her firmly among irresistibly visceral writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Bulawayo’s thoughts are open to the reader, yet she seems unconcerned by our needs. Like a cat, she is working out her own catharsis. The immigration/refugee question pervades all African writers in one way or another, but the Zimbabwean writer re-conceives the issue by relating it from millennial eyes. One of her protagonists is pre-teen Chipo, raped and pregnant. She is no pan-Africanist lioness. She is innocent, yet subtly unprincipled, overtly conscientious and shallow, yet wise. Bulawayo’s narrative pits readers as naïve outsiders who are no match for the nightmares and hopes that encapsulate this continent. We Need New Names was shortlisted for the 2013 MAN Booker Award, one of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes.
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<h4>Sister-Sister</h4>
<h4>by Rachel Zadok</h4>
Sometimes writing needs come from a place of improvisation instead of consciousness. Rachel Zadok reads not like a writer, but like an instin-ctive storyteller. Her second novel, Sister-Sister, unfurls like an intriguing journey of self-discovery. It relates the story of twin sisters, Sindi and Thuli, who are forced to leave their village and return to their mother’s home, a place of hostility, fear and dark superstition. The narrative sounds simple, yet it is dreamlike and impromptu; it lets loose the subliminal. That is what makes Zadok’s book such a surreal series of surprises. Here is a writer who feels free enough to reach into herself, who listens to her inner voice and who understands the mystery of what it means to be characteristically South African.
<h4>Kabu Kabu</h4>
<h4>by Nnedi Okorafor</h4>
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At first Kabu Kabu, which takes its title from the name given to Nigeria’s illegal taxis, plods along easily, but it quickly becomes about the fantastic and the mystical that sit snugly in the recesses of reality. Nnedi Okorafor is an acclaimed Nigerian fantasy and sci-fi author. This, her debut short story collection, is difficult to get out of your system. Be warned: her pseudo-folktales, which are simultaneously fantastical, sensual and emotionally violent, are likely to upset some readers.
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Tag: Literature

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

The Literary Bon Viveur Who Drank, Fought and Wrote Furiously

Claire And Her Chair

True To Her Word

African Renaissance: Women You Need To Read