John Matshikiza:WITH THE LID OFF
I ran into my old friend, Tiger, in Yeoville the other day. Tiger is looking pretty good, wearing a suit and tie with all the trimmings nowadays, and Ray-Bans that never leave the bridge of his nose.
But he still has that foxy, township tic of never looking you in the eye when he talks to you, his head swivelling up and down the road on the constant lookout for trouble or temptation. This is body language that marks you as a clever, rather than a moegoe.
A clever will never be caught out, whatever is coming down in the location. A moegoe will end up in jail, or on the end of some guy’s knife.
So even though Tiger still lives in London, he has never become an Englishman. His clever mannerisms have never left him.
There was a strong sense of the moegoe/ clever relationship between Tiger and me when we first met in London in the mid- 1970s. But which of us was which?
Tiger had just arrived in town as a singer/ dancer with the “Bantu-in-the-City” operetta Ipi Tombi. I was a weed of some 19 summers, and a rather serious student of classical theatre. I was also a member of the movement’s youth committee in London, and one of our earnest tasks was to picket Ipi Tombi until it died the death.
This, we yelled at the uninterested British theatre-going public, was exactly what we were talking about when we said our people were being oppressed. It was white folks portraying black folks as happy-go-lucky prancers from some non-existent village idyll, whereas we were actually an upright, politically astute, urbanised people – clevers, in other words.
Final proof, we said, that this was sell- out culture was the fact that the show had had such an easy ride in South Africa, and was able to travel abroad without restrictions, while our true culture was being banned and its exponents harassed and assassinated.
So, as you can see, I and my colleagues easily had the upper hand over Tiger and his crew. We held the moral high ground of the exile-clever, while they represented unreconstructed collusion in their own moegoe oppression. Simple.
On the other hand, there was the real world.
As activists we had a duty not just to picket, but to engage with the Ipi Tombi cast in order to influence their thinking. However, in social settings like the dingy 100 Club on Oxford Street (where Thursday nights were South African jazz nights, and anything could happen) revolutionary discipline was apt to come unstuck.
We tended to find ourselves back-footed in an arena where the music was loud and loose, and where these moegoes who had just stepped off the boat were proving to be at least as sharp as we were. They might not have been politically sophisticated, in the accepted Westernised sense. But in terms of the ever-changing culture of clevergeid back home, they were a lot more up to date than we were. They were staff-riding the system like we had forgotten how. They were in Ipi Tombi not because they loved it, but because they were surviving.
So the moegoe/clever position switched back and forth between guys like Tiger and guys like me. Our star was up when we started winning the information battle, and shows like Ipi Tombi finally began to lose their appeal. (In New York this campaign went off even better, because the black sisters and brothers took on the issue not in the gentlemanly fashion we had adopted in England, but with their own brand of African street culture. The show didn’t die, it was murdered in cold blood before it could even stand up.)
But guys like Tiger continued to survive after Ipi Tombi closed. Some of them activated contacts in the heavily unionised stage crew sector and started doing well- paid work backstage. Some slipped into chorus lines in other West End shows like South Pacific, disguised as Polynesians. Some even took the Ipi Tombi theme to its next logical step and set up a tribal village in one of the safari parks that were becoming popular around southern England.
So (providing the weather held up) the British could load the kids in the car, pop off to Longleat, see real lions walking around and see real Zulus dancing real war dances, and still be back home in time for Coronation Street. Clevers from South Africa were feeding the unending British thirst for Tarzan fantasies. What the hell, it was survival.
Nostalgia and a sense of common identity brought us together, in spite of that shaky start. The moegoe in me was certainly sharpened up by interaction with the likes of Tiger. And they in turn respected me, in spite of my lack of street credibility. We were all part of the same thing.
The real question is, which of us is the moegoe today? Tiger has stayed on in London, earning a living in hard currency and popping in and out of South Africa like it’s a safari park. Me, I’m sitting here, trying to do noble things at rand rates. Sometimes I wonder.