By Ryan Fortune
The House of Truth was born sometime in the mid-1950s, at the height of the National Party’s repression of black South Africans. It was really the living room of one Can Themba, the Drum journalist and short story writer who lived in a tiny house in Sophiatown, the multicultural neighbourhood in Johannesburg that gave rise to the likes of Dolly Rathebe, Don Mattera, Miriam Makeba and other iconic struggle artists, poets and writers.
The House of Truth was where Joburg’s burgeoning black literati would gather to listen to jazz, drink beer and whiskey, and fiercely debate the most pressing social and political issues of the day.
Everyone was welcome and many of the topics discussed there made their way into Drum Magazine which, back then, was not the insipid gossip rag it is today. When the Nats razed Kofifi to the ground and scattered its inhabitants to the four corners, many thought it was the end of the House of Truth.
But the spirit of passionate debate and argumentation that infused the place never died, and would reappear in various guises throughout the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, wherever progressive people huddled together to dream of a different kind of South Africa to the one they were living in. It’s what filled up Coffee Society in Yeoville in the ‘90s, spilled out onto the sidewalks and lit up the whole neighbourhood with a certain joi de vivre that was felt by everyone who set foot there.
The late cultural activist Peter Makurube gave it a home at Jahnito’s when he started Monday Blues there, a place for music, spoken word poetry and genuine cross-cultural interaction beyond the boring diktats of cultural hacks. Several now famous musical groups got their start at Monday Blues, including Blk Sonshine, which was Neo Muyanga and Masauko Chipembere.
In Cape Town, a city famously resistant to racial integration, it was the spirit of the House of Truth that brought Cafe Camissa on Kloof Street to life every Monday evening in the years from 1998 to 2000. As co-host of this offshoot of Joburg’s Monday Blues, I was among those who bore witness to unforgettable poetry performances by the likes of Sandile Dikeni, Zenzile Khoisan, Jethro Louw, Malika Ndlovu, Weaam Williams, Diana Ferrus and many others. Zolani Mahola first started performing here, before becoming the lead singer of FreshlyGround, the Afrofusion band that would one day collaborate with Shakira on the 2010 World Cup song, Waka Waka - It's Time for Africa. Way back in the late 90s, Monday Blues was a safe space for black people to express their suppressed pain and anger at past injustices, their frustration at the slow pace of change. As long as it didn’t end up in fisticuffs, everything and anything was allowed to be said, even if it offended the sensibilities of white South Africans who hated being confronted with their own bigotry, and post-racial blacks who hated seeing whites offended.
Needless to say, things sometimes got so heated that the cops had to be called in to calm tempers, but luckily no-one ever got arrested, and we would often go on to resolve our differences over tumblers of Johnny Walker at Don Pedros in Upper Woodstock, another place that for years also embodied the spirit of Can Themba’s famed living room. As the new century took hold and we saw our dreams of a genuine Rainbow Nation dashed on the rocks of government corruption, mismanagement and the hyper-commercialism of the mass media, it continued to flicker, albeit dimly, at places like Spiros (later Poppies) and Xai-Xai on Melville’s famed 7th Street, Bob’s Bar in Troyeville, and Tagore’s in Observatory, Cape Town’s bohemian student suburb.
All those spots may now be dead or dying, taken over by drunks and deadbeats, but even as South Africans continue living within the bounds of the political compromise — some would say betrayal — of the 1994 transition, the candle of fearless intellectual discourse lit by Can Themba all those years ago can still be found in the most unexpected places: the willingness of the EFF’s parliamentary caucus to confront white power without fear or favour, the book launches and poetry events put on by Andre Marais at his Surplus Radical Bookstore in Mowbray, Ntone Edjabe’s Chimurenga events in Woodstock, Bra Steve Mokwena and Coco Merkel’s revived Afrikan Freedom Station in a resurrected Sofiatown and Sanza’s Yeoville Dinner Club. These are the kinds of places and spaces that all progressive South Africans must support, because true healing only comes when you rip the bandage off the wound, and give it fresh air.
Ryan Fortune is the CEO, Ryan Fortune Communications. For more of his writing, visit: https://ryan-fortune.company.site/
Saturday Star