“A Black Rather Well-Known South African Recently Arrived in London”: Critical Responses to Todd Matshikiza’s Chocolates for My Wife

ABSTRACT

This article studies the intersections between Todd Matshikiza’s celebrity in South Africa and in Britain and the critical reception of his autobiography, Chocolates for My Wife (1961). Matshikiza’s renown as the composer of the South African jazz musical King Kong, staged in Britain in the early 1960s, contributed to the development of his only full-length literary work, while the ambivalent and frequently racist media discourse around King Kong reverberated into readings of his autobiography. By exploring how Matshikiza’s writing was perceived and presented by his publishers, alongside an analysis of the responses by British and South African literary critics, this article shows how Matshikiza and his writing served as a site for debates about the role of literature in relation to apartheid. Matshikiza’s exile and banning necessitated a new, British audience for his work, and also resulted in a deferred re-issuing and re-reading of his writing in the early 1980s, when Chocolates for My Wife was unbanned. This study contributes to the growing body of knowledge about the complex roles of exiled South African cultural figures and intellectuals in relation to international resistance to apartheid from the early 1960s onwards.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-apartheid
• protest
• celebrity
• transnational literature
• South African exiles
• publishing
• racism
• Todd Matshikiza

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See, for instance, Sachs 1991; Ndebele 1986.

2 Jazz trombonist Jonas Gwangwa suggested that the plot of the musical did not tell the whole story: “The problems that arose were … you cannot really tell the truth, you know? It was alleged that [Ezekiel Dlamini] committed suicide, but we believed that he was killed in prison and thrown into a dam that was being built. […] That was just the whole apartheid South Africa … that couldn’t allow people to tell the real story” (quoted in Ansell 2004, 103).

3 Nevertheless, Matshikiza’s lyrics, in the opening number, “Sad Times, Bad Times”, were perceived to include coded messages of support to the Treason Triallists, as the trial was just beginning when the production premiered. Nelson Mandela apparently expressed his appreciation to Matshikiza for this message of solidarity at the musical’s opening night in Johannesburg (Matshikiza 1999, 96).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.