On the Beat: Black Humour in South Africa, 1943–1963

Humour is a useful lens for understanding changes in black South African culture in the mid-twentieth century. Here I explore how three influential African writers–R. R. R. Dhlomo, “Msimbithi the Kitchen Boy” and Casey Motsisi–deployed humour as a medium through which to reflect on social realities  in the grim atmosphere of repression and (self-)censorship which distinguished mid-twentieth-century South Africa. While Dhlomo’s trajectory as  a humourist after 1943 reflects the reduced aspirations and ambitions of his aging New African cohort, I argue that Motsisi and Msimbithi (perhaps  the pseudonym of K. E. Masinga) responded to the challenges of the apartheid era in creative and revealing ways. Msimbithi’s popular and linguistically inventive column called for the renewal of a culturally conservative African identity that could preserve collective dignity in the face of exclusion. Motsisi, on the other hand, through his “Bugs” and “On the Beat” columns, forcefully rejected respectability discourse, simultaneously celebrating and critiquing urban space as a hedonistic and atomizing domain.