Literature Review
Can Themba was born a Black South African in a country where his race comprised of the majority. His status in the population did not reflect the living style that would commonly be associated with someone who would be living in the land of his ancestors. Instead, Themba was constantly on the receiving end of the prejudices, hostility, and control the White people of South Africa directed towards the Blacks in that country. He did not remain silent, though. Themba educated the next generation of his people as a means of defying the inferiority that the White people were insisting to define the Black people by. He also wrote about the brutalities of the apartheid regime in various South African newspapers. The world that surrounded him did not get better in his lifetime, though. As the struggle between Blacks and Whites continued, Themba and many of his companions turned to alcoholism and a party life to cope with the bigoted intolerance they had to face amidst their race’s fight for freedom. It was not long before the consequences of this lifestyle caught up to Themba, and he felt it was best to leave the country. Swaziland became Themba’s temporary home and, not long after, his permanent one as well when he died there at the age of 44. At the end, Themba lived up to the maxim that him and his peer writers of apartheid South Africa had for living in the days of apartheid South Africa: ‘Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.’
Leaving South Africa at this time was not an uncommon path taken by many Black South Africans including many renown political figures that were on the forefront of the anti-apartheid government. These figures, like Themba, never stopped speaking out against apartheid no matter what corner of the globe they were at. This enraged the South African government. They would often send out search parties to bring these people back. Themba was no exception to this. Father Ciccone mentions the times when he had to hide Themba from the people the South African apartheid rule sent to find him. ‘The South African secret police were hellbent on making his stay here unbearable as they snooped around trying to catch him,’ Father Ciccone says.[xlvii] Whether due to their failure in catching Themba or not, in 1962, around a year after he had left the apartheid government, the apartheid regime declared him to be banned, along with all his works on the basis that they were communistic and promoted an unsupported form of governmental reform[xlviii] , from South Africa.[xlix] Not many works of Themba’s could necessarily be considered as revolutionary. Most of them gave facts and an emotional viewpoint into the lived of a Black South African. They were written to make people realize the tragedies; they did not necessarily dictate what approach should be taken to prevent these misfortunes. However, the apartheid regime claimed that they did. Two things came out of this. The first was that Themba’s voice was effectively subdued in South Africa. The second, though, was that it became a rallying force for all the people who wanted to fight against the conditions that Themba’s works portray. The White South African government had made a martyr out of Themba’s writings.
As the initial struggle to end apartheid was coming to an end so did the ban on Themba’s voice in South Africa in 1982, fourteen years after his death.[lii] Around two decades after this, on September 27, 2006, Themba was awarded The Order of Ikhamanga[liii] in Silver for ‘excellent achievement in literature, contributing to the field of journalism and striving for a just and democratic society in South Africa’ from the president of South Africa at that time.’[liv] During the time that he was alive, Themba had also received another award: Henry Nxumalo[lv] Award for journalism from the Writer’s Association of South Africa.[lvi] The struggle still goes on to fix all the broken pieces of Themba’s land that was once so peaceful. However, as the process continues, the world must not forget the men like Can Themba. The men who lived and died fighting this battle without ever getting to witness the light at the end of the tunnel.
Significance of the Study
Can Themba’s key literature books were banned one discusses literature of South African apartheid Cam Themba should be mentioned and recognized as a key South African Author during this dark time in South Africa. These Collections were buried in the sands because it was a topic that South Africa does publicly mention on a global scale. Can Themba books were banned because he was considered a Communist or Non National Rebel in the eyes of the South Africa Government
The Will to Die
In this collection of previously banned short stories, Can Themba shines a light on the racism and systemic violence suffered by Black South Africans during apartheid in the late 1950s. Written during Can Themba’s career as an investigative journalist for South Africa’s revolutionary magazine Drum , these seventeen short stories capture the atrocities of apartheid as he witnessed and experienced them first-hand. In Themba’s most famous short-story, ‘The Suit’, a couple living in poverty struggle to find freedom from oppression and from each other. Set in Sophiatown, the tales preludes the South African government’s decision to bulldoze the homes of Black residents and make way for a white-only suburb – an event that personally devastated Can Themba and shaped the rest of his writing career. This is the essential collection of his most impactful stories, written in defiance of the injustice he witnessed.
The Suit
The story of The Suit takes place in Sophiatown, a Johannesburg township, and centers on Philemon, who works for a middle class lawyer and his wife Matilda. He loves his wife and seems happy with his life until he finds out that she has been seeing another man. He surprises her with her lover who leaves in a rush leaving his suit behind. Philemon then devises a rather unique form of punishment: the suit must be treated as an honored guest and the wife must take it wherever she goes as a reminder of her betrayal. William Nadylam plays a husband in full control of the situation, only revealing true emotion at the end when he holds her dead in his arms. Beautiful Nonhlanhla Kheswa’s Matilda, whose choices in life are so limited, comes alive when she can sing or love.
Literature Sample Collection
The Suit:
FIVE-THIRTY in the morning, and the candlewick bedspread frowned as the man under it stirred. He did not like to wake his wife lying by his side — as yet; so he crawled up and out by careful peristalsis. But before he tip-toed out of his room with shoes and socks under his arm, he leaned over and lieered at the sleeping serenity of his wife; to him a daily matutinal miracle.
He grinned and yawned simultaneously, offering his wordless Te Deum to whatever gods for the goodness of life; for the pure beauty of his wife; for the strength surging through his willing body; for the even, unperturbed rhythms of his passage through days and months and years — it must be — to heaven. Then he slipped soundlessly into the kitchen. He flipped aside the curtain of the kitchen window, and saw outside a thin drizzle, the type that can soak one to the skin, and that could go on for days and days.
He wondered, head aslant, why the rain in Sophiatown always came in the morning when workers have to creep out of their burrows; and then blistering heat waves during the day when messengers have to run errands all over; and then at how even the rain came back when workers knock off and have to scurry’ home. He smiled at the odd caprice of the heavens, and tossed his head at the naughty incongruence, as if: “Ai, but the gods!” From behind the kitchen door, he removed an old rain cape, peeling off in places, and swung it over his head.
He dashed for the lavatory , nearly slipping in a pool of muddy water, but he reached the door. Aw, blast, someone had made it before him. Well, that is the toll of staying in a yard where tw’enty . . . thirty other people have to share the same lean-to. He was dancing and burning in that climactic moment when trouser-fly will not come wide soon enough. He stepped round the lavatory and watched the streamlets of rain-water quickly wash away the jet of tension that spouted from him. That infinite after-relief. Then he dashed back to his kitchen. He grabbed the old baby bath-tub hanging on a nail on under the slight shelter of the gutterless roof-edge.
He opened a large wooden box and quickly filled the bath-tub with coal. Then he inched his way back to the kitchen door and inside. He was huh-huh-huhing one of those fugitive tunes that cannot be bidden, but often just occur and linger, naggingly, in his head, and the fire he was making soon licked up cheerfully, in mood with his contentment. He had a trick for these morning chores.
While the fire in the old stove warmed up, the water kettle humming on it, he gathered and laid ready the things he would need for the day: brief case and the files that go with it; the book that he was reading currently; the letters of his lawyer of a boss which he usually posted before lie reached the office; his wife’s and his own dry cleaning slips for the Sixty-.Minutes; his lunch tin solicitously prepared the night before by his attentive wife. And, to-day, the battered rain cape. By the time the kettle on the stove sang (before it actually boiled),he poured water from it into a wash basin, refilled the kettle and replaced it on the stove.
Then he washed himself carefully: across the eyes, along the nose bridge, up and down the cheeks, around the ears, under, in and out the armpits, down the torso and in between the legs. This ritual was thorough, though no white man a-complaining of the smell of wogs knows anything about it.
Then he dressed himself fastidiously. By this time he was ready to prepare breakfast. Breakfast! How he enjoyed taking round a tray of warm breakfast to his wife, cuddled in bed. To appear there in his supremest immaculacy, tray in hand when his wife comes out of ether to behold him. These things we blacks want to do for our own . . .not fawningly for the whiles for whom we bloody-well got to do it.
He felt, be denied that he was one of those who believed in putting his wife in her place even if she was a good wife. Not he. Matilda, too, appreciated her husband’s kindness, and only put her foot down v/hen he offered to wash up also. “Off with you” she scolded him on his way.
At the bus-stop he was a little sorry to see that jovial old Maphikela was in a queue for a bus ahead of him. He would miss Maphikela’s raucous laughter and uninhibited, bawdy conversations in fortissimo. Maphikela hailed him nevertheless. He thought he noticed hesitation in the old man, and slight clouding of his countenance, hut the old man shouted back at him, saying that he would wait for him at the terminus in town. Philemon always considered this morning trip to town with garrulous old Maphikela as his daily bulletin. All the township news was generously reported by loud-mouthed heralds, and spiritedly discussed by the bus at large.