Can Themba

Daniel Canodoce "Can" Themba (21 June 1924 – 1968) was a South African short-story writer.

Temba was born in Marabastad, near Pretoria, but wrote most of his work in Sophiatown, Johannesburg, South Africa. The town was destroyed under the provisions of the apartheid Group Areas Act, which reassigned ethnic groups to new areas. He was a student at Fort Hare University College, where he received an English degree (first-class) and a teacher's diploma.

After moving to Sophiatown, he tried his hand at short-story writing. Temba entered the first short story contest of Drum (a magazine for urban black people concentrating mainly on investigative journalism), which he won.

He subsequently worked for Drum, where he became one of the "Drum Boys," together with Henry Nxumalo, Bloke Modisane, Todd Matshikiza and Casey Motsisi. They were later joined by Lewis Nkosi and Nat Nakasa. This group lived by the dictum: "Live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse."

Part of Drum's ethos was investigative journalism. One of the aims was to show the realities and inequities of apartheid. Themba decided to see how white churches would react to his attending services.

Growing frustrations with the restrictions of apartheid, caused him to move to Swaziland where he worked as a teacher. In 1966, he was declared a "statutory communist", as a result of which his works were banned in South Africa. His literary output was only readily available in the 1980s with the publication of two collections The Will to Die (1972) and The World of Can Themba (1985).

In his stories, he described the frustrations of the university-educated urban black people; unavailable to realise their true potential because of the racial restrictions of apartheid and trying to balance their modern urban culture with the historical rural tribal one.

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