In praise of Don Mattera

Iconic anti-apartheid South African poet, Donato Francisco Mattera, affectionately known as Don, died on Monday July 18, 2022. I only heard about it through the SABC who covered his burial. I have had to put aside what I have been writing for this week in order to pay homage to Don.

I want to celebrate Don through his poetry and less through my own words, because poetry was his life and he loved his people. In an interview with the City of Johannesburg, he was asked how he would like to be remembered. He replied: “I would like to be remembered as a man who loved his country and his people.”

He had a way with words and he wrote with deep passion about freedom, friendship and the dream for a better South Africa in which people of all races coexisted.

Don’s case is very interesting if you consider the situation in apartheid South Africa. He is of a diverse heritage, having been born to an Italian grandfather, a Xhosa grandmother and a Tswana mother. He was classified as coloured. Nevertheless he became very strong in the anti-apartheid movement.

It is apparent that he felt he had got caught up between the races. No wonder his son said at the cemetery, “Don was not a nationalist. He was an African!’

Don Mattera was born in Sophiatown where he also grew up. From 1973 to 1982, he was banned and for part of that period, he was under house arrest. He had been tortured and abused for his anti-apartheid activities in South Africa, which included being one of the founders of what became known as the Black Counsciousness Movement.

The South African poetry of the Black Consciousness movement, for which Don was part, has innovative shifts of language-register, image and rhythm, ranging from contemplative verse to deep irony, from global references to tsotsi-taal.

This is the poetry of what has been called the South African urban writers. This refers not to writers in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, but to writers particularly in the black satellites; Soweto, Langa and Kwa Mashu.

These poets include, but are not limited to Mongane Wally Serote, Sipho Sepamla, Oswald Mtshali, Mafika Gwala and others.

These poets were variably spurred on by the political ideals of anti-apartheid popular movements. South Africa during the 1970s was fertile ground for a literary revival of the silenced black voices withering under state repression.

This was a defining period for the evolution of political consciousness among blacks and all non-white South Africans. Later in life, Don also joined the African National Congress Youth League. Sophiatown was a vibrant place culturally as Don grew up. In his very emotional autobiography “Memory Is the Weapon,” Don writes: “Sophiatown also had its beauty; picturesque and intimate like most ghettoes…. Mansions and quaint cottages … stood side by side with rusty wood-and-iron shacks, locked in a fraternal embrace of filth and felony…. The rich and the poor, the exploiters and the exploited, all knitted together in a colourful fabric that ignored race or class structures.”

This “multiracial fabric” did not conform to the separatist policies of apartheid and so the suburb was destroyed and the people forcibly removed.

The Black Consciousness Movement poetry, which Don was a part of, is characterised by a focus on the experiences of the downtrodden of apartheid South Africa and relevant themes. Much of this poetry is characterised by an examination of the historical place of the black people of South Africa with regards to the future. This poetry asks the question: where has the black person been and where is she going?

Don was awarded the PEN Award for his poetry collection Azanian Love Song in 1983, and the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa for his children’s book The Five Magic Pebbles in 1993. His much acclaimed autobiography Memory is the Weapon was awarded the Steve Biko Prize when it was first published in 1987.

He has worked as a journalist on The Sunday Times, The Sowetan, and The Weekly Mail (now known as the Mail and Guardian) and trained over 260 journalists.

Don was deeply rooted in poetry although he participated in other artistic forms. In one of his iconic poems, he demonstrates that his poetry was part of his being and the way he felt and responded to the world:

I feel a poem
Thumping deep, deep
I feel a poem inside
wriggling within the membrane
of my soul;
tiny fists beating,
beating against my being
trying to break the navel cord,
crying, crying out
to be born on paper
Thumping
deep, so deeply
I feel a poem,
inside

He felt deeply. He was passionate about the world around him. You have an idea that by the word poem, Don meant an idea, an opinion dying to be spelt out so that one feels at peace again with his environment. In that poem he is also suggesting that poetry is his form of choice.

Don was a committed poet, more like David Diop and Agonstinho Neto. Don often felt that, if need be, the poet, the artist, may just have to pay the supreme prize. Coming from a background of strife, segregation, arrest, banning and many ills during apartheid, he saw art not as a luxury but something that often brought the artist to the brink. He felt that “the poet must die”:

“The poet must die
her murmuring threatens their survival
her breath could start the revolution;
she must be destroyed
Ban her
Send her to the Island
Call the firing-squad
But remember to wipe her blood
From the wall,
Then destroy the wall
Crush the house
Kill the neighbours
If their lies are to survive
The poet must die.”

In that piece above, written for James Matthews and Gladys Thomas, Don says that after killing the poet, you may as well destroy the environment which has actually given birth to the poet and her ideas. This was tantamount to saying that while the system may deal with the individual poet or activist, the ideas cannot be equally destroyed because ideas are organically rooted amongst people. An idea whose time has come cannot be killed.

Don himself went through the worst. He said, “My house was raided more than 600 times, I was detained more than 200 times, for one hour, for 10 hours, for three months. I was tortured on more occasions than I can remember – electrical wires were put into my penis and anus, two ribs on both sides of my chest were broken, my fingers were smashed.”

In his autobiography, Don indicates that since he was coloured, he tended to receive the worst treatment from both the blacks and whites in apartheid South Africa. They tended to see the result of their violent contact enmeshed in him! He writes more elaborately about it:

“I had many brushes with the police. Like the time I alighted from a train on a visit to my mother in one of the African townships. A tall, African policeman stopped me. His huge hands gripped my belt, pulling my trousers against my private parts. ‘Pass’, he shouted, so that others heard.

“I’m a Coloured,” I answered, knowing this to be the password of privilege and temporary safety and immunity. It would work now, as it had several times before.

“Half-caste Boesman, is what you mean,” he said in Afrikaans, tightening his lethal grip, so that my testicles moved into my bladder, and consciously aware of his power, he pressed harder. Urine ran down my thigh, wetting his hand. A blow stunned my senses. Half-blinded, I sagged and his grip loosened. As I was coming to another shot crushed into my ribs. Darkness. When I looked up there was a Boer policeman poking his baton at my exposed testicles.

Don’s mother told him that he was lucky to be a coloured man in South Africa because it was humiliating to be black but Don told her that he would give anything to be considered black. In his desperation, Don prays for both black and white people. His lines show that he sometimes shed tears over this matter:

“God bless the children
of South Africa,
the Black and the White children
but more the Black children
who lost the sea and the sand
that they may not lose love
for the White children who took the land
Sea and sand
my love my land
God bless Africa
but more the South of Africa…”

Don wrote with a sweet sadness about his dreams for freedom and that of seeing people of all races of South Africa coming together. When he thought he could die before the birth of a new South Africa, he wrote words that have become iconic and have been read across the world to describe the spirit of sacrifice:

“Remember to call at my grave
When freedom finally
walks the land
So that I may rise
To tread familiar paths
To see broken chains
Fallen prejudice
Forgotten injury
Pardoned pains.
And when my eyes have filled their sight
Do not run away for fright
If I crumble to dust again.
It will only be bliss
Of a long awaited dream
That bids me rest
When freedom finally walks the land.”

Mattera wrote beyond poetry. Besides his autobiography, he wrote plays and children’s stories. For the record, Don was awarded the Steve Biko prize for his autobiography The University of Natal offered him an honorary doctorate in literature (DLitt). He was a gifted orator who also worked as a master of ceremony at different events.
Now that he is dead, his poem “Departure” has a totally new meaning:

“I grow tired
and want to leave this city
seething in unrest and injustice
I am leaving
No I have left
Look for me on the banks of the Nile
or under some spreading palm
I shall be sleeping the sleep of freedom
Do not wake me
leave me to dream
my dream of departure
from a city of seething unrest
void of pity
for I have grown weary
of eating the brine
and long for jungle fruit…”

South Africa and all Africa are poorer without Don Mattera! Poetry has lost one of its giants.

Memory Chirere