JOHANNESBURG – On the last day of Heritage Month, the family of Can Themba were joined by Minister of Arts and Culture, Nathi Mthethwa, as well as journalists like Mathatha Tsedu and Joe Thloloe, to pay tribute to the writer 50 years after his death in exile in Swaziland. Themba was a major intellectual of his time, admired by his peers and those who came after.

The 1950s was a turbulent decade in South Africa, both politically and culturally. It was the period just after the official consolidation of white supremacy in the National Party’s electoral victory in 1948. Yet, the decade would also see a resurgence in African nationalism, which gave rise to the Defiance Campaign, and the Women’s March on the Union Buildings.

As the musical “King Kong” returns to the South African stage nearly seventy years later, the end of Heritage Month was marked by the official unveiling of the tombstone for Can Themba in the West Park Cemetery in Johannesburg.

READ: Can Themba’s ‘The Suit’ hits film festival circuit

Themba was a significant figure in what has become known as ‘the Drum Decade’. He graduated from the University of Fort Hare with a first class degree in English and Philosophy. Themba became a high school teacher just as the repressive apartheid government began gutting Black education across the 1950s. He entered the inaugural Drum magazine short story contest, and was offered a position as a writer.

His journalism covered the urban Black experience of the time, focused on Sophiatown. This was the home of South African jazz, a cluster of culture under threat from the white supremacist policies of the time. 

Figures no less than Trevor Huddleston helped the community resist the proposed forced removals of the regime. Yet, Sophiatown was also a vibrant space, which gave the world figures like Dolly Rathebe and ‘Mama Afrika’ herself, Miriam Makeba. And it was this cultural life that inspired Themba, and which he contributed to.

Themba was part of a generation of Black intellectuals who laboured under increasingly repressive conditions. He worked alongside figures like Henry Nxumalo, an early investigative journalist known colloquially as ‘Mr Drum’,  who was eventually murdered in 1957. 

Some of his other contemporaries were Nat Nakasa, Todd Matshikiza, and the photographer Jürgen Schadeberg. Their work not only captured the popular culture of the time, whether in the work of musical artists or of popular beauty contests, but also uncovered the inhumanity of the apartheid regime’s treatment of Black people across its first decade in power.

Lewis Nkosi, who had worked with Themba, but later became a novelist and literary critic in exile, thought that the ravages of apartheid had wasted the genius of his colleague. His death, Nkosi felt, was evidence of apartheid’s cost to humanity, reducing a man of such talent in his final years. 

As his tombstone was unveiled, his daughter Morongwa Themba reminded everyone that, having been buried and exhumed twice now, she hoped this would be his last resting place, next to his wife, Anna Sereto Themba, not far from the Sophiatown he had chronicled so eloquently.

eNCA