my father ….
John Matshikiza:WITH THE LID OFF
So, why With the Lid Off? Well, it’s a great title, isn’t it? It says what it means to say. But I don’t claim to have been witty enough to have thought it up by myself.
Column titles churned around inside my head for many a sleepless night (well, some few couple of them, at least) but the one that kept coming back was this one.
The reason is not hard to find. My main business at this moment in time is the restoration of my father’s legacy, and With the Lid Off was the column he wrote for Drum magazine when it was still a zesty voice across the continent.
He was the one who thought up the title. It expressed everything he wanted to be about as a writer in the late 1950s in South Africa.
Just as his friend and colleague Henry Nxumalo was busy lifting the lid on the horrors beneath the hard surface of official apartheid, so Todd Matshikiza chose to lift the lid on the more personal side of life.
People were his thing, and he saw the weird and the wonderful side of all the different species who crossed his field of vision.
It was funny, it was off the cuff, it was informal and it was acute. As well as lifting the lid on other people, it also lifted the lid off the top of his own head, a head that was always on the point of exploding with suppressed outrage or too much creativity.
I certainly can’t claim to be able to create a column that can do all of those magical things. But taking on the title of his column is part of the process of keeping my relationship with my father alive, and also of keeping his relationship with his motherland alive. It was a relationship that should never have been killed off in the first place, but it was. Because of you-know-what.
I’ve written elsewhere in this issue about another side of the man, the side that composed the seminal musical King Kong.
So here, to make this a very busy week of mulling on Todd Matshikiza for you, I leave you with two small but crackling chunks from the original column.
December 1959:
Ya. December is here again. Holiday time. Wonder where I can go? Think I’ll try Durban. No, I’m scared of Durban. I met a man at the snake park who said if I see you here nex’ December I’ll shoot you dead an’ throw you into those reptiles to eat you up, you dirty kay.
I think he was cross ’cause they didn’ separate us. All colours went in by the same gate.
I was walking behind this man at the park. He came first. Paid. Went in. Stood watching me as I paid and was allowed to go in. Then he turned to his wife an’ said: “God, are they also allowed? God, I’m not coming here again.”
Then he went to the cashier an’ said, “Gimme my bloody money back.”
But the cashier said they don’t give money back an’ the man can go in an’ see the snakes for himself. He needn’t be scared.
The man came back to me an’ said: “If I meet you here nex’ December I’ll shoot you, dead, dead, dead. An’ what’s more I’ll throw you in there, let the snakes an’ things eat you up.”
On the way home we thought, shucks, cross people can spoil the holiday for you an’ for them. Oo, I don’ want to think what happened to me as I saw that cross man. Water came out of my body like it comes out of a sponge, wet, wet, wet. They call that water perspifrightion.
September 1959:
I am a communist. Or didn’ you know? Yes, I’m a raging, raving, devastating young red. I’m from Moscow. I eat people alive. I write in blood an’ I blot with my tongue. Enemy of the people. I’ll hunch you, I’ll bunch you, I’ll crunch an’ I’ll munch you. I’m Fumanchu. I’m a no-good-double-dealing-dirty-dog.
Dealing in Africa with Moscow.
How did I discover this? Well, one Saturday I went to buy coal for my house. On the way a street collector begs a shilling out of me. She then pins a ticket on me an’ my jacket reads, “African Women’s Self-Help Society”.
At the coal shed a white man looks at my ticket an’ decides, “Ya, another one. You also commie, hey? Well, what the H are you doing with that African business on your coat?”
I say, “But …”
He says, “But me no buts, you blinkin’ son …”
By this time I am surrounded. It is white before me, and black (with coal) behind me.
I am called all things, some of which I have recalled above. I exit. We exit. We pour into the street. I escape by the narrow exit of my pants, an’ I vow I’ll never wear a badge again.