Siphiwo Mahala’s biography of legendary journalist and author Can Themba paints a harrowing image of a gifted genius who was driven to self-destruction by the evil system of racial segregation and prejudice. (Oupa Nkosi)
Siphiwo Mahala’s biography of legendary journalist and author Can Themba paints a harrowing image of a gifted genius who was driven to self-destruction by the evil system of racial segregation and prejudice.
Although the book Can Themba: The Making and Breaking of the Intellectual Tsotsi focuses solely on the late journalist and author from the golden 1950s generation, it highlights the brutality visited upon gifted, educated African men by racist laws of that era.
What happened to Themba is a fate that befell many African men of his generation and those before him. Theirs is evidence that apartheid’s victims were not only those who were maimed and massacred violently by the system’s police.
Apartheid also waged a brutal psychological war against many other sons and daughters of the soil, who were denied an opportunity to realise their full potential in service of their country of birth.
Themba was part of that generation of African men that were not only frustrated by apartheid, but were also humiliated and scarred psychologically.
It was a generation of men who, regardless of their talents and qualifications, were not allowed to grow beyond a certain level designated and determined by the white creators and supporters of apartheid.
Trapped in this system where they were required by law to be babysat by white men who in most cases were less talented and qualified, they were driven to find solace in alcohol consumption, which led to their early demise, or into exile where they died lonely deaths in horrible conditions.
This is a theme explored at great length in the pioneering book, The Land is Ours: South Africa’s First Black Lawyers and the Birth of Constitutionalism by advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi.
Ngcukaitobi crafts a deep, evocative account of how talented, committed black legal practitioners of the early 1900s were systematically frustrated through petty racial legislation.
Having fought and lost the battle against the authorities who sought to relegate them to the status of just black men with certificates, talented lawyers who were the hope of the oppressed African masses were driven to destruction and early graves.
In Can Themba, Mahala gives this departed genius the dignity he has often been denied by scholars and researchers who always never seemed to interrogate the reason for his decline into chronic alcoholism.
Mahala’s work succeeds where other scholars, who have researched and written about Themba’s life and work, fell short.
Themba has been portrayed largely as a self-destructive alcoholic without a course; an unfair and somewhat harsh portrayal of this man of letters whose writings inspired generations of writers beyond his country’s borders.
Mahala delves deeper and in his bid to reconstruct the circumstances that might have so frustrated Themba that he saw no other way out but to drown himself in booze, brings a new understanding to the deep seated reasons that led to his demise.
“We cannot be content with the simple assertion that he was just an alcoholic without interrogating the reports that when he joined Drum in 1953; he was apparently a teetotaller, yet in a matter of only 14 years he died of medical conditions supposedly brought on by alcohol abuse,” Mahala writes in the chapter titled Destruction and Demise.
Mahala carefully pieces together bits of Themba’s life from his early days in Marabastad, Pretoria, and follows the bright young student up to Fort Hare where he graduated with a BA degree.
He captures his battles with the authorities through numerous letters in which he was pushed to the point of pleading for a certificate of his qualifications so he could earn a salary in line with his qualifications.
But if this battle with the authorities frustrated him, it wasn’t until he joined Drum magazine in 1953 that he began to face even harsher realities in a South Africa that was fast tightening its grip against black people in its quest to entrench white supremacist policies.
Besides facing and confronting the daily horrors of racial segregation laws in his daily personal life and in his work as a journalist, in the newsroom the yoke of white supremacy weighed heavily on him and his talented colleagues.
Apartheid’s colour bar had determined and was brutally enforcing a policy that sought to put black men “in their place”, that no matter their talents or qualifications, they could never be above the white man by position in the workplace or by remuneration.
“He [Themba] knew that no matter how educated or experienced he was, and no matter how well he did his job, he would never gain the recognition of being editor of Drum magazine, nor would he get any salary increase — simply because he was black,” Mahala writes.
He emphasises how Themba’s frustration was exacerbated by the fact that as senior African colleagues were leaving the country to go into exile to escape the hardship and oppression caused by apartheid, he chose to stay in his land of birth where he was judged on the basis of his race and not his talents and abilities, and confronted the monster head on.
“As his experienced colleagues left Drum and the country, Themba remained as the only senior black journalist, and even though his working relationship with [Sylvester] Stein was often acrimonious, it did occur to the latter that Themba deserved more than he received. He was performing the editor’s duties, and, for all practical purposes, he was the editor, even though as a black man he could only rise to the level of associate editor.”
Mahala goes on to quote Stein acknowledging Themba’s contribution, describing him as “the heart of the paper”.
To his credit Stein, who eventually resigned from Drum in a haste following yet another case of editorial interference by the magazine’s proprietor, Jim Bailey, acknowledges that perhaps Themba was the one who deserved to be editor and that his frustration with the system may have led to his erratic behaviour that later saw him fired.
Mahala further notes that personal tragedies such as the loss of his close friend Henry “Mr Drum” Nxumalo, who was murdered in 1955, and later the death in exile by the alleged suicide of another close friend, Nat Nakasa, precipitated his rapid demise into alcoholism.
“The loss of his job, his colleagues and his lover all contributed to his destruction. The apartheid government was also becoming increasingly vicious in dealing with those who contradicted its policies. It was no surprise that Themba leaned more towards drink,” Mahala wrote.
The author notes that the last straw for Themba was his banning under the Suppression of Communism Act in 1966. By then he was living in exile in Swaziland and working as a teacher, while also writing and getting published in South Africa and across the continent.
But the silencing of his voice in South Africa by the authorities, who would not leave him alone even across the borders, broke him.
He died the following year in his room, from what post mortem reports said was coronary thrombosis.
But reading Mahala’s account of the demise and destruction of this truly gifted man, it may not be far-fetched to conclude that Can Themba died of a broken heart.
Can Themba – The Making and Breaking of the Intellectual Tsotsi is published by Wits University Press