My father, Todd Matshikiza, who was known at times to be a difficult and suspicious person, in true Xhosa spirit, nevertheless opened his heart without reserve to people he grew to trust. Anthony Sampson was one of those, and the friendship between them, starting with a collaboration in the early years of Drum magazine, was something that bordered on love. It was an infectious, mutual admiration, so much so that even we children had absorbed him into our spirit long after he had left South Africa in 1955 (when I was a year old, by the way.)
I always called Anthony ”the Godfather”, because, even though he was not one of my official godparents, he had been present at my christening in Johannesburg. My father insisted on giving his son the middle name of Anthony in his honour. Sampson was to remain a close family friend for all the years that followed.
He arrived in South Africa by ship, on a reckless adventure inspired by the late Jim Bailey, to be editor of the magazine Drum, aimed at a potentially vigorous black market. By his interaction with the black journalists he came to admire without reserve, who took him, as he said, on what was to become an ”opportunity for a personal and consistent investigation — through a microscope, rather than a telescope”, into the nature of the black experience of South Africa. He entered into a lifelong association with the politics, the highways and the byways of black life. He knew the top politicians and intellectuals of the age, but was also known to find himself leaping out of the window of a township shebeen to avoid a police raid, along with the hoi polloi.
He left South Africa, as I said, when I was only a year old, and he left, as he had arrived, on a ship, sailing slowly out of Durban towards the English port of Tilbury. He returned some years later, travelling by air this time, covering a story for The Observer. The old relationships were struck up once more. We must have gone to see him off at the old Jan Smuts airport on his departure. So some of my earliest memories involve looking up into the sky each time an airliner flew overhead and shouting ”Goodbye, Unca Tony, Goodbye, Unca Tony!” — a game of the imagination that absorbed all the kids of the neighbourhood in those backyards of Orlando West, who had no idea who this ”Unca Tony” was. We all jumped up in excitement every time this wonder of a flying machine passed over us in the sky, personalising it into the name of one of my dad’s best friends.
As I said, my parents had given me the middle name of Anthony — just because of Anthony Sampson. So strong was the affection between him and my dad, in fact, that I could always tell whether I was in my father’s good books or not by the way he referred to me. Most of the time he would call me Tony, or Tonnels, for short. When he was getting a little bit stern he would narrow this down to Anthony. And when he was really mad, he called me John.
We children waving up at a passing airliner over Soweto could scarcely imagine that we would one day be inside one. But in 1960 the Matshikiza family found themselves boarding a Boeing airliner headed for London via Leopoldville. It was a step into an exile whose duration we could not imagine at the time.
Anthony Sampson, loyal to a fault, was there to meet us on the other side. He was our gateway to London, and he went far beyond the boundaries of friendship to make our arrival pleasant. He vacated his lovely Kensington flat for two whole weeks so that we could find our feet. I’ve no idea where he stayed during that time, but we even had a whole English cleaning lady to ourselves.
During school holidays we sometimes spent time in his cottage in Walberswick in Suffolk. He and my dad once went out on a typically crazy African adventure, taking Anthony’s tiny yacht out into the menacing North Sea and getting caught in a storm, which they barely survived.
It was also in the Walberswick cottage that Todd completed Chocolates for my Wife, his autobiographical account of life at home and hilarious and alarming adventures during the first months of exile in London, under Anthony’s friendly, prodding, editorial eye.
Anthony remained a strong family friend, just as he remained a friend of the South Africa that had done so much to form him, until the end. He always acknowledged that writing his first book, Drum: An African Adventure and Afterwards (which he was preparing for republication at the time of his death) was the work that launched his fortunes as a writer. The Drum experience and the particular verve of black urban life of those times was a constant inspiration.
I last saw him in London in October of last year, and we spent some time deliberating over Zola Maseko’s film, also called Drum, which had given us much food for thought. Anthony wrote a press release, aiming to set the record straight, and to give what he thought was a truer representation of the individuals who had made such an impression on him in the 1950s, and had formed the famous and infamous Drum generation.
No visit to London would have been complete without spending time with Anthony and his wife Sally. I am grateful that we had a few moments together a few months before he died. I shall miss him. And part of me will always be that small child in Orlando waving at a passing airliner and shouting, ”Goodbye, Unca Tony!”
This is the text of the speech given by John Matshikiza, one of the speakers, together with Nelson Mandela and Nadine Gordimer, at a memorial for the late Anthony Sampson, Mandela’s official biographer, which was hosted by the Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg on February 8