Can Themba's 'The Suit' - Professor Jade Munslow Ong (University of Salford)

In this lecture, Professor Jade Munslow Ong (University of Salford) discusses ‘The Suit’, a short story by Can Themba that was first published in The Classic magazine in 1963. A key figure in the DRUM generation of Black South African writers, Themba captured the tensions of urban life under apartheid using sharp wit, allegory and modernist technique. Prof Munslow Ong situates The Suit within the broader cultural and political landscape of 1950s and 60s South Africa, which was marked by forced displacements (including from Sophiatown, where the story is set), the rise and suppression of Black literary voices, and Themba’s personal decline. The symbolism, irony and claustrophobic domesticity of ‘The Suit’ tell a story of intimate betrayal and revenge that also functions as metaphor for the psychological and material violence of the apartheid system. ‘The Suit’ is one of South Africa’s most enduring short stories. It has been adapted for stage and film, and is still relevant to conversations about power, displacement, and memory in South Africa today.

Further Reading

Michael Chapman, ed., The Drum Decade: Stories from the 1950s (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2012)

Jarryd Coetsee, dir., The Suit (2016)

Paul Gready, ‘The Sophiatown Writers of the Fifties: The Unreal Reality of their World’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 16.1 (1990), 139-64

Ulf Hannerz, ‘Sophiatown: The View From Afar’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 20.2 (1994), 181-93

Christopher Heywood, A History of South African Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Lelliott Kitso Lynn, ‘The Tailored Suit: Re-Membering and Gendering Can Themba’s “The Suit”’, Black Camera, 9.2 (Spring 2018), 256-76.

Siphiwo Mahala, Can Themba: The Making and Breaking of the Intellectual Tsotsi (Wits University Press, 2022)

Mike Nicol, A Good-Looking Corpse (Secker and Warburg, 1991)

Can Themba, Requiem for Sophiatown (London: Penguin, 2006)

---. ‘The Suit’, The Classic 1.1 (1963), 6-16