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Poet and journalist, gangster turned community activist, Don
Mattera, voice of compassion, has personified his community for decades.
Don Mattera - poet and journalist
A few minutes in to my interview with Don Mattera, it became plain that
he was going to decide what the questions were to be, and, if I was
lucky, I might squeeze in one or two of my own.
Larger-than-life Mattera has for decades been one of the most
prominent community activists in the working class areas of Bosmont,
Westbury and Newclare. "My mission is to remove pain and suffering from
people's lives," he says.
Variously Catholic schoolboy, gangster, political activist,
poet and author, father, journalist, Muslim, and motivational speaker,
Mattera sits behind a small cluttered desk in a large, sparsely
decorated office. Behind him on the wall are several unframed
photographs of some of his nine children.
He is a well-built man, his physique accentuated by his small desk, but relaxed and at ease with himself.
Mattera was born in Western Native Township (now Westbury) in
1935 and grew up in the city's black areas, notably the ghetto town of
Sophiatown - and is decidedly a son of the city.
Minutes into the interview he picks up his autobiography, Memory is the
Weapon, written in 1987, and starts quoting from it. The book tells the
story of the early part of his life in Sophiatown, and it's a powerful,
earthy account of life in the cosmopolitan suburb in the 1950s before
it was dismantled in the name of apartheid.
Asked how he would describe himself, Mattera doesn't hesitate:
"I am a genius." And judging by the number of literary and humanitarian
awards, local and international, he has received for his writings and
community work, other people think so too. The award he most treasures
is the one he received in 1997, the World Health's Organisation's Peace
Award from the Centre of Violence and Injury Prevention.
Mattera, 67 and greying at the temples, talks often of
compassion, saying he is a compassionate man - "the highest religion is
compassion" - giving enormously of his energy and time to
lesser-privileged youngsters. He says: "My mission is to help remove
pain and suffering from people's lives, to remove an invisible chain.
My work is a shadow of my actions."
Besides his autobiography, his writing includes an anthology of
poems, Azanian Love Song; a collection of short stories, The
Storyteller, and The Five Magic Pebbles; and plays that include
Streetkids, Apartheid in the Court of History, and One Time Brother,
which was banned in 1984.
He says he has completed another section of the autobiography
but still needs to work further on it. He is "not in a hurry" to
complete the work, but is confident one of his children will take it up
if he doesn't finish it.
He was classified "coloured" under apartheid. Coloureds were
the last to be removed from Sophiatown and were not taken 25 kilometres
away to Meadowlands in Soweto, as their African neighbours were.
Instead his family were among those moved to the nearby suburbs of
Bosmont, Westbury and Newclare.
He recounts his childhood. As an eight-year-old he was sent off
to "become a man" to St Theresa's, a Catholic convent in Durban. His
grandmother believed that he "was chosen", and he was sent to a school
where he would not receive a lesser "apartheid" education. His
grandfather was an Italian immigrant and his grandmother was a
Khoisan/Xhosa woman from the eastern Cape, and some time after their
marriage they settled in Johannesburg, where Mattera's father -
classified as an Italian - was born.
His heritage is important to him. He considers himself Italian
- his full name is Donato Francisco - and can understand the language
although he doesn't speak it. He speaks Afrikaans, English and
Setswana. His grandfather adopted him as his son, and Mattera was
largely brought up by his grandparents.
Mattera came home from boarding school in Durban to Sophiatown
at the age of 14. He continued his schooling in another suburb of the
city, Pageview, whose residents were forcefully removed in the 1960s
and '70s. During his high school years he was a gangster, the leader of
the Vultures, one of the most powerful gangs in Sophiatown.
He describes in his autobiography the viciousness of the
streets and how the gangsters butchered each other, in the process
destroying their own lives. "And as I look back sometimes, my heart
goes out to my friends and enemies, for while we were destroying
others, we destroyed ourselves."
He was stabbed and shot at, and lifting his sleeve now, shows
one of nine nasty scars scattered around his body, several in his
chest. "I had a sharpened pipe pushed through my chest - it went four
and a half inches into my lung and missed my heart by two centimetres."
He was charged with the murder of a rival gang member and spent time
awaiting trial in jail. But he was acquitted, and at about the same
time - he was 20 - became a father for the first time.
After leaving Sophiatown he became politically active, joining
far left movements. He was banned for almost nine years, from 1973 to
1982, three of them under house arrest. Of this period he says: "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."
Is he bitter? "I have a right to be bitter but I glorify God
for giving me the resilience and power to withstand it. The experience
made me stronger and I can use it to make others stronger."
He has worked as a journalist on The Sunday Times, The Weekly
Mail (now the Mail and Guardian), and The Sowetan, and has trained over
260 journalists, he says. He has a doctorate in literature.
Nowadays Mattera is a Muslim, and deeply involved in the
community in which he lives, Eldorado Park, just south of Soweto. He
interacts with 1 000 young people each month, and counsels street
children, gangsters and ex- prisoners. He says: "There is no leader who
can claim to do this."
It's clear in conversation with him that he is a deeply
spiritual man and through his community work has got to the point of
"finally knowing God through humanity, by co-mingling and
inter-mingling. God moves in people and nature".
He is involved in 143 community organisations, and is a patron
on some 50 trusts, but what he is most proud of is establishing the
Harvey Cohen Day Centre for Mentally and Physically Handicapped
Children in Eldorado Park.
He is also proud of the fact that he has made "young people understand that nobody owes them anything".
The word "transcendence" appears often while talking to Mattera,
who says that "a person is truly a person when that person has found
himself in others. We are one with God, one with all people".
There is another side to Mattera. "I like to laugh, I love
teasing and telling jokes. I should have been a clown in a circus," he
concludes. Mattera often works as a master of ceremonies, and usually
squeezes in one or two recitations of his poems. His recitations are
powerful, and once you have heard him recite a poem, reading the poem
from a book is never the same.
As MC he tells sad-funny stories of the apartheid government's race
classifications, of officials putting pencils in people's hair and
judging a person's race by whether the pencil remains in the hair or
not. He laughs and says: "Some of my friends dashed off and had their
heads shaved clean." He says now: "If you don't laugh, you die."
Despite laughing and clowning, it's clear that the pain of
apartheid and the struggle against it still lives with him - in the
two-hour interview he laughs only once. He talks about "post-liberation
stress" for which there is "no overnight cure", and "lots of
disgruntled people". But what's important to Mattera is what one does
with bitterness. "We need to transmit it positively and walk with heads
held up high."
Towards the end of the interview, he says that people are "not
dealing with an ordinary human being" when dealing with him. He recites
his powerful poem Man to Man, which challenges God to meet him on even
terms.
I ask for a picture, and he lifts his arms to either side in a generous gesture, and gives me a broad, happy smile.
At the end of the interview, I ask Mattera how he would like to be
remembered. He replies: "I would like to be remembered as a man who
loved his country and his people".
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