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MATTHEW NKOANA |
| Although Matthew Nkoana is renowned in South African intellectual and political history today to have been the most brilliant ideologue of the Pan African Congress (PAC) during the exile period (1960-1990), it is usually forgotten that not only was he a member of the Drum generation writers of the 1950s, but also that his affiliation with this pleiad of intellectuals marked a transition from one moment into another. Drum magazine was edited by four white editors in this ‘Fabulous Decade’ as Lewis Nkosi has characterized it: XXXX (1951-1952), Anthony Sampson (1952-1955), Sylvester Stein (1955-1958), Tom Hopkinson (1958-1961). The editorialship of Sampson is usually designated as the ‘golden era’ of the magazine, and is usually associated with the names of Bloke Modisane and Henry Nxumalo. The early period was the moment of construction and consolidation with Nxumalo, given his experience in the 1940s with R. V. Selope Thema’s Bantu World and American Nego newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier, charting the unfamiliar territory of a magazine cartering to the cravings of the newly urbanised Africans for the chaotic forms of modernity. The stewardship of Sylvester was concurrent with the singular contributions of Can Themba and Ezekiel Mphahlele. Hopkinson in his book, In the Fiery Continent (1962), aligns his editorial moment with the strong work of Matthew Nkoana and Ian Berry. By the time Hopkinson dismissed Can Themba and Jurgen Schadeberg, and replaced them respectively with Nkoana and Berry, the high moment of the magazine over, even though G. R. Naidoo in Natal was still doing extraordinary things journalistically and photographically capturing the heroic struggle of the Indian people in the last phases of modernity in South Africa. Even though Lewis Nkosi, Casey Motsisi, Bob Gosani, Peter Magubane and others were to continue their invaluable contributions to Drum to the end of the decade, the departure of the literary editor Ezekiel Mphahlele to Ghana in 1957, and the tragic death of Henry Nxumalo in the same year, as well as the resignation and the departure into exile in 1958 of Bloke Modisane, marked the point of no return to the hopes and affirmations of earlier years. It is perhaps incorrect to think of the earlier years of Drum magazine as its classical period and the later ones as its bronze age, since the journalism of G. R. Naidoo and Matthew Nkoana more than matched that of Bloke Modisane and Can Themba, and the photography of Ian Berry was on par with that Peter Magubane. What was at issue was not so much individual talent of these remarkable men and women as the fact that the historical forces and tendencies that had coordinated modernity were slowly ebbing away. What was at issue was the dramatic change of orientation rather than the dissipation of intellectual engagements. Matthew Nkoana’s affiliation with Drum magazine was very notable because he brought political passion to his journalism which was in contrast with his predecessors who were satisfied with the poetics of political reportage or of investigatory journalism. Nkoana was much more aware than the others that practicising and professing journalism in South Africa of the 1950s was political practice of the highest order. Nkoana’s attempt to practice politics through journalism may be due to having brought a new orientation to Drum magazine by bringing in the New Africanism of Anton Lembede and A. P. Mda to displace the New Africanism of Solomon T. Plaatje and H. I. E. Dhlomo which had earlier prevailed through the journalism of Ezekiel Mphahlele and Lewis Nkosi. In their conception of the New African, for Lembede and Mda, African nationalism and black nationalism were indistinguishable, as they were for Plaatje and Dhlomo. After the defeat of Ezekiel Mphahlele’s attempt to make Drum an organ of high literary journalism, it was Nkoana’s also defeated attempt to infuse black nationalism into the magazine, that characterized its later years, at the time of Sophiatown Removals and the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960. Frustrated by the magazine and hounded from South Africa, in the 1960s Matthew Nkoana was to write a series of remarkable articles and essays in the London-based New African journal advocating the black nationalism of the New African. As though it were a counter-response to this challenge, Lewis Nkosi, the literary editor of the review, wrote the powerful book Tasks and Masks (1980), postulating the literary modernism of the New African. Given the complementary and the contradictory nature of these perspectives, it is not surprising that of all the exile-based intellectual, political and cultural forums of the 1960s, New African was unquestionably amongst the most vital. When the history of the exile period is written, the review will occupy a prominent place in it. In no small measure, this will be because of the intellectual contributions of Matthew Nkoana. Equally, when the history of the tragedy of PAC during the exile period, Nkoana will be allocated a fascinating and enigmatic position. The intellectual tradition represented by James Thaele, Anton Lembede, Matthew Nkoana and others, within the New African Movement, will one day have to be written in its ample complexity. | |