Henk Rossouw
With the Lid Off: South African Insights from Home and Abroad 1959-2000 by Todd Matshikiza and John Matshikiza (M&GBooks)
In With the Lid Off, his column in the legendary Drum magazine, composer and razor-blade salesman Todd Matshikiza struts the unique language of late-1950s Sophiatown, one that blurs the distinction between jazz and writing. He improvises on dialogue and anecdotes from an era forcibly removed from our heritage, telling the stories of people “burning inside because race happened”.
This first collection of his columns is invaluable both as a literary document and as a legacy for Todd’s son, Mail &Guardian columnist John Matshikiza, to explore further his father’s themes of race, culture and people “outside the rarefied citadels of power” as, 50 years later, he travels the African continent and ventures across divides in the South African psyche.
Todd Matshikiza celebrates language, making up words like “demisemideath” and “perspifrightion”, and reeling off the names of township shops like “Tip Top Tandabantu Traders”, yet is always blunt about his surroundings: “Now, to get to the tap at Edenvale you struggle over ash heaps, ant heaps, sludge, smudge, battling policemen, permits an’ raids. Eventually you get some water.”
Yet Todd Matshikiza’s writing is rooted in a particular time and place now gone, swallowed by apartheid and the “whirligig of time”. Construct or not, he wrote as if his community was his audience with shared humour, gossip, and hardships while still shooting down the harsh absurdities of apartheid with irony and sass. Writing from exile in London in the early Sixties, his language lost its intimacy an intimacy that could not return for, when he died in Zambia in 1968, Sophiatown had ceased to exist.
John Matshikiza ex-exile, iconoclast, eulogist named his M&G column after his father’s in order to “lift the lid on our revolutionary culture of silence and passive assent” and to acknowledge the influence of a truly South African writer.
His “badge of bitterness” was his exile but, unlike his father, he seems most at ease writing on his travels, whether it is to a rain-drenched wedding in the Congo amidst civil war, or a first visit to a white-owned farm. Despite his strong South African identity, his province, as he unravels its issues, is all of an uncertain Africa.
At home, John Matshikiza is insider and outsider, both privy to and distant from the conflicts in a fractured country. He prods our self-satisfied bigotry and skewers xenophobia, crime, and political careerism with black humour, loyal only to an irritable honesty.
Finally, though, what makes With the Lid Off unique is the dialogue, across history, between father and son. “Could our parents have been lying to us?” asks John in Triomf. Around him, there is no evidence of his father’s Sophiatown.
Yet Todd Matshikiza’s words can still recall the rhythm of a neighbourhood after 50 years. In true family tradition, his son pursues this rhythm across a dissonant continent.