Nat King Cole and Natalie Cole; Frank and Nancy Sinatra; Aristotle and Christina Onassis; Bob and Ziggy Marley; Alexandre Dumas pere et fils; George and George W Bush Jnr; Muhammad and Layla Ali …
The father/son, father/daughter thing has finally hit this column. With the Lid Off has gone into book mode. All (or almost all) the Lid Off columns that there have ever been since 1959 have now been collected between the covers of a sexy-looking, soft-backed volume, and is ready for your delectation, in
advance of the pre-Christmas and post-Ramadan celebrations.
It is, indeed, a father/son thing. Older readers (those who were already literate before at least February 1999, that is) will remember that I introduced this column by saying that I took the title from the column my father wrote for the classic Drum magazine between 1959 and 1960.
Since that revival, this column in your favourite read has taken on a life of its own, and hopefully come to express some of the most unspeakable views of some of the people of South Africa, and even, perhaps, the world at large.
It has, in the words of the late Abe Lincoln, pleased all of the readers some of the time, and some of the readers all of the time, but probably never all of the readers all of the time. But it has always (again hopefully) taken the lid off some tricky corner of our reality, some unacceptable part of the pot of our collective identity, allowing the writer (and, vicariously, the reader) to let off a little steam. And this country certainly finds a way to make you build up a little steam between the ears most days of the week.
The earlier incarnation of With the Lid Off, the one famously penned by Todd Matshikiza from February 1959, did much the same thing, in different times.
What the two generations of columns have in common is, I am told, a kind of irreverence regarding preconceived notions, a certain lack of political correctness, as it were.
In this respect, the two halves of the book, the Todd half and the John half, certainly betray a kind of family resemblance. This has been the aspect that most readers, at first glance, have pounced upon.
But looking at it with as much objective distance as I can muster under these peculiar circumstances, I have gradually come to see it differently.
Between the launch of the book in Johannesburg last Friday, and the launch in Cape Town on Wednesday, my own perception of the book has started to change. And it all has to do with breaching the one taboo that this column has not yet dared to breach: the very South African taboo of redefining your relationship with your elders – in this case, with a parent.
When I wrote my first pieces of journalism, for The Times of Zambia and The Zambia Daily Mail when I was a 15-year-old exile living in Lusaka, there was hot commentary among friends and associates on two counts. There were those who said I was too young to have been able to write this kind of stuff, and therefore, as one so-called family friend put it, the articles that appeared under my name must have been written by somebody else – probably my mother. (My father had died two years earlier.)
And then there were those who said that if I did really write them, who did I think I was, anyway? I had a father who was already famous for his writings (not to mention his music) and if I thought that I would ever be a match for him, I was sorely mistaken.
These were painfully South African misconceptions – or maybe they are universal. But we Ubuntu people do have a nasty way of putting each other down, and varnishing the put-down with the term “respect”.
It put me in mind of an unexpected confrontation I had with the venerable, moustachioed figure of the late Comrade Uncle Moses Mabida, leader of the South African Communist Party in exile, in Lusaka, somewhere in the mid-1970s.
Mabida was a grave and familiar figure in the midst of the South African exile community, and I saw him and spoke to him frequently at exile gatherings. On this occasion, however, my manners were found somewhat lacking, and I was brought up short and sharp.
I was rushing round a corner of the building that housed the liberation movements when I literally bumped into Comrade Mabida coming the other way.
“Good morning, comrade,” I said to him, with a respectful smile on my face.
“Good morning, uncle,” he corrected me. “You must always call me uncle, young man,” he continued. “You and I will never be equals.”
It was quite a revelation, especially coming, as it did, from the leader of the actual communist party – the party of equality, as I had been led to believe in my impressionable youthfulness.
I recount this episode because the publication of my work in a joint volume with my father’s brings into many minds, first and foremost, this idea that, like Oedipus, I am somehow challenging his status as a father figure. This could not be further from the truth – but you try proving that to some of these uncle characters when, in spite of a visibly greying beard, you are still a laaitie in their eyes.
As I tried to explain in my launch speech in Cape Town, apart from the obvious respect I have for my father as a father, there is also, independent of that relationship, a respect for his exceptional qualities as a writer.
The greatest tribute so far has come from a perceptive lady who saw the differences, rather than the similarities, in the perspectives of the two authors of this book.
I like to think that it is these different yet complementary perspectives on the same subject that make this unlikely collaboration interesting.
But then again, who am I to talk? The final judgement is up to you. Go buy, go read. Especially, go buy in bulk for this Christmas. And the next.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza