John Matshikiza, who died suddenly on Tuesday night, had a gentle mind that struggled to make sense of the absurdity, and the brutality, of the country to which he returned in 1991 after 32 years in exile.
John was born into the African cultural aristocracy. His uncle, Meekly Matshikiza, was a pioneer of South African jazz. His father, Todd Matshikiza, made a name for himself at Drum magazine and as the composer of the great African musical opera King Kong.
King Kong‘s acclaimed journey to London’s West End in 1961 launched the careers of Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela and shaped the narrative of John’s life. John was seven when he accompanied the show to London.
Todd never returned; he died in exile in 1968. John grew up in London and Lusaka, attached to the struggle for freedom but always focused on returning home.
John had many careers and accomplishments — The Guardian this week called him a polymath. He was a poet, an actor, a director, a broadcaster, a scriptwriter and an activist. He was a cosmopolitan South African.
He trained with the Royal Shakespeare Company. In the United Kingdom he performed on stage and screen in roles that were wildly diverse. He was Toad in Toad of Toad Hall at the National Theatre and a doctor in the television series The Singing Detective. He donned a white coat again for his last film role, Wah Wah.
One of his funniest performances was as Zulu in Leon Schuster’s slapstick Zulu on My Stoep. In a famous scene, at a clandestine meeting of the right-wing supremacist group TURD, Zulu — disguised as a white man — starts to sweat and the white paint peels off his face, with disastrous consequences.
In 1998, as editor of the Mail & Guardian, I was on the lookout for new writing talent. John and I had worked together on a television series and become friends. He told me one day that he was on the verge of giving up on South Africa because, despite his many talents, he couldn’t find a steady job. He had tried everything: movies, the theatre and television, and had become extremely disillusioned.
No one had wanted to hire him as a journalist when he first came back, so he no longer considered it an option. I asked him to write a long feature for us about King Kong and it was so good that I hired him as a columnist without even a trial run.
He named his column With the Lid Off, after his father’s Drum column 40 years earlier.
John’s strength was not just his fine command of the English language. His was an original mind. The columns he wrote were such a refreshing change from the intellectually lazy and predictable themes whipped to death day after day on the editorial pages of South African newspapers.
John’s writing had an underlying sense of humour and irony, like the sparkle in his eye every week when he talked about his latest idea for a column.
The acuity of John’s observations was shaped to some extent by the fact that, as a returning exile, he didn’t feel that he quite belonged. At times he seemed to stand slightly back, seeing things that the rest of us had grown used to. It was through his writing that he struggled to come to terms with his country.
”I have no idea why I allow myself into all these insane situations. Except that I have chosen to live in South Africa. Which means that every tangled bit of it is mine,” he wrote. ”That is the birthright I have fought for.”
John fought for the rights of King Kong. His great quest in life, now sadly unfulfilled, was to resurrect it. He fought to reclaim the Queenstown property that the family lost through the Group Areas Act. He fought to recover the Oregon pine front door that was stolen from his home and turned up in an antique dealer’s showroom. He railed against Chinese masseurs who would not treat black people.
He remained indignant long after the rest of us shrugged our shoulders and walked away. He railed against our ”revolutionary culture of silence and passive assent”.
He had a fundamental subtlety of mind, and a soft-spoken diction, and he never lost his posh accent.
He cared, for his country and his children and his mother, Esmé, and his friends.
His columns were often filled with outrage but he never crossed the boundary into self-righteousness.
And he never lost the capacity to be surprised or shocked by South Africa’s demons and the mad city he was living in.
In the end it was those demons that did him in. A few months ago he was beaten up and robbed in the driveway of his Melville home. A close friend said: ”I realised that when that happened to him, something snapped. John felt incredibly violated.”
By the time of his death this week, at the age of 54, the distance had gone. He was no longer just an observer. He had become part of the story. He had come home. — Phillip van Niekerk
Remembering John
Mandla Langa, author, poet and columnist
”The John I knew was a man generous to a fault. It is very hard to speak about him in the past tense. John was an uncompromised intellectual. This is a great loss for South Africa because we are at a point where we need a sharp mind like John who could give critical analysis of a situation without putting his own personality into it.”
John Kani, actor, director and playwright
”John lived a bloody good life. I met him in London in the 1970s; he was young and very English. He had an incredible vision for South African theatre, lifting it from the struggle to world-class theatre. John always wanted the art to speak and didn’t want the message to be an excuse for bad theatre.
”For years John wanted to rewrite King Kong, and the people who owned the rights to it would not let him. He didn’t give up on it, he kept on trying and when I got a message that he had died I thought to myself, ‘God, he didn’t do King Kong’. The theatre scene has lost a teacher and I have lost a friend.”
Professor Willie Kgositsile, poet
”John was many things to me. He was a younger brother and a colleague with admirable principles. John was extremely humorous, which was a characteristic often translated in his writing. He was allergic to nonsense.”
Eric Miyeni
Apart from the fact that he generally liked telling jokes, John was the kind of guy who would make a joke out of a serous situation, just to make a point. He would always give you something to laugh at yourself about.
Pat Matshikiza
John was my cousin but he spent most of his life overseas. What I do know about him, though, is that he is a man of his word and an Englishman; really, he expressed himself a lot like an Englishman. He and I had different tastes in the arts but we were similar in many ways. As I grew to know him I learned that he was a straightforward person, just like me, and because of his straightforward personality he wasn’t going to pamper me because I am his cousin. I received a lot of brotherly support from him, though.
Ronald Suresh Roberts
John liked a good all-out democratic brawl, like me. I’ll miss his sometimes raggedy punch lines. It is a great loss to a great family long and strong at the frontlines of African cultural self-assertion. My thoughts are with his mother in particular. It must be doubly painful to bury a child.
Phillip van Niekerk is a former editor of the Mail & Guardian