Guardian of our heritage
Esme Matshikiza went into exile in London with her husband, the great Todd Matshikiza, and held the family together as they eked out an existence there. Chris Barron looks at the life of this dignified woman who never sought or expected special treatment
RIP Esme Matshikiza
Esme Matshikiza, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 92, was the widow of Todd Matshikiza, the composer of the jazz musical King Kong. The show premiered in the main hall of Wits University in 1959 with their friend Nelson Mandela in the (segregated) audience. The next day he was in court for the resumption of the Treason Trial.
In 1960 Esme and Todd left SA on an exit permit with their two children for King Kong’s UK tour, knowing they wouldn’t be allowed back.
While living in exile in a small one-bedroom flat in Primrose Hill, North London, three years later, there was a knock on their door at 1am and they found Mandela and ANC president Oliver Tambo standing outside.
Esme recalled ushering them into a small room messy with bundles of bedding. Mandela told them about his flight from SA and how he expected to be jailed on his return.
“Then why go back?” she asked. “You should stay here.” She never forgot his answer, she told Mandela biographer Anthony Sampson: “A leader of the people must be with his people.”
She said it seemed to her that Mandela was “ready for martyrdom”.
Esme Matshikiza (nee Mpama) was born on September 1 1927 at Robinson Deep in Johannesburg where her father, Stephen, was a mining administrative agent. He died before she was born and her mother, Enna, a kindergarten teacher, moved the family to Kroonstad, where Esme spent part of her childhood before they moved to Soweto.
After matriculating she went to the Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work where the future Winnie Mandela was a fellow student. They knew each other but were never friends.
While training to be a social worker she was introduced to Todd Matshikiza, the youngest child of a musically talented family, who had recently moved from Queenstown to Johannesburg to train as a teacher but became a journalist on Drum magazine instead.
They married in 1951 and lived in Orlando West. Todd was often away from home doing stories for Drum — which often involved spending time with gangsters — on one of whom he modelled King Kong
— and doing jazz gigs as far afield as Mozambique. For much of the time she was a single mother looking after two children.
She was more serious, reserved and less outgoing than Todd, who was gregarious, jovial and loved a good party. It was a winning combination and a happy, if not always easy, marriage.
In London, life was tough. Subject to racism, they battled to find suitable accommodation. He struggled to find work apart from the odd gig in Soho with a jazz combo, and was often frustrated and depressed. She had to give him constant moral support.
Their mutual friend and former Drum editor Sampson noted that Esme was Todd’s rock. She held the family together while they eked out an existence relying on her salary as a social worker, a job which in SA she’d enjoyed but found depressing in London.
She was more savvy than Todd and kept a tight rein on the family finances, ensuring they didn’t run out of money.
Shortly after Zambian independence in 1964 President Kenneth Kaunda asked Todd to head the Zambian Broadcasting Corporation, and the couple went to live in Lusaka. Esme was ecstatic to be going back to Africa because it made her feel closer to SA.
She was a social worker in Lusaka, where Todd died in 1968 at the age of 46 from sclerosis of the liver. She said he died of a broken heart because he felt cut off from his musical roots in SA.
Three years later she met Andreas Shipanga, a senior South West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo) leader, at a party in Lusaka. Very sophisticated, suave, well travelled and well spoken, Shipanga at the time was Swapo’s foreign affairs “minister”. A month later they married.
In 1976, Shipanga led a group calling for a change in Swapo’s leadership, was arrested by Kaunda and spent two years in jail. Esme worked tirelessly to get him out, writing letters to the Zambian authorities and even then-president of the US Jimmy Carter.
In 1980 her mother, Enna, died. When she and the children tried to get into SA from Swaziland for the funeral they were denied entry.
A couple of years after Shipanga’s release they moved to London briefly, then to Namibia where he was branded by sections of Swapo as a collaborator of the apartheid regime. Esme, who’d been supporting him while working as an English teacher, divorced him and lived in London until returning to SA in 1991.
There she worked for the Grassroots education trust and a small NGO run by an ANC friend and former World Bank economist, Bax Nomvete, trying to source funding for African countries.
As a rights holder, Todd had received a small income from the performing rights society every time something of his was played on the radio. After his death a small trickle went into Esme’s bank account, which, along with a modest pension, frugal lifestyle and a flat she bought in Kenilworth, Cape Town, kept her going.
She kept all the original manuscripts of Todd’s compositions, including King Kong and two choral works. When she returned to SA she turned down an offer of R50,000 for the rights to King Kong.
She never gave up trying to get it back on stage, which finally happened when it was performed at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town in 2017 and the Johannesburg Theatre in 2018.
A quietly religious person who attended St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town every Sunday before she became too frail and short-sighted to drive, Esme Matshikiza was a dignified, self-contained and elegant person who never sought or expected special treatment as the widow of the great Todd Matshikiza, something that she generally kept to herself.
She is survived by their daughter Marian. Their son John died of a heart attack at the age of 53 in 2008.
She was more savvy than Todd and kept a tight rein on the family finances, ensuring they didn’t run out of money