In 1956, Matthews had advanced to the position of reporter at the Golden City Post in Cape Town, where he was on the payroll of Drum Publications. While the “Drum Boys” such as Bloke Modisane, Can Themba and Lewis Nkosi were causing havoc with their piercing writing in Sophiatown, the District Six foursome of Matthews, Richard Rive, Alex La Guma and Peter Clarke were doing the same in Cape Town. In 1958, he published The Park, a short story that I consider his magnum opus.
The Park was my first encounter with Matthews’s work, back in the 1990s. The story was featured in the collection, Hungry Flames and Other Black South African Short Stories, edited by Mbulelo Mzamane, who was the vice-chancellor at the University of Fort Hare at the time. In his introduction, Mzamane said of The Park: “Matthews brings out the inhumanity in the practice by showing its effects on a young ‘Coloured’ boy who is prevented from playing on the swings in a park that is reserved for Europeans. The spirit of the Defiance Campaign catches on as the boy steals to the park by night, defies the ‘Coloured’ caretaker, who decides to let sleeping dogs lie.”
This story typifies Matthews’s humanely revolutionary writing. He once wrote: “The stories always depicted my background. Though not overtly political, the characters reflected the disadvantaged surroundings in which they were placed and how they related to them.”
Matthews’s revolutionary writing came at a high price, as it led to his persecution, detention and banishment by the apartheid regime. Against this backdrop, Matthews switched from writing literary prose to verse. Poetry, unlike prose, is more difficult to censor as he could read and distribute it in small gatherings. In 1972, he published his first book, Cry Rage, a highly politically charged collection of poetry. He once told me that after collecting copies of Cry Rage from the printers, he couldn’t wait to get home. He sat on the roadside near a park, opened the box and upon seeing the first copies of his book, he was filled with so much joy he started laughing until he cried. However, that excitement was short-lived, as he later wrote that Cry Rage was discussed in parliament by the lawmakers because they could not “decide if it was poetry or a petrol bomb. They banned the book.”
Publishers grew reluctant to publish his politically charged content, knowing that it could end up in the hands of the censorship board. Matthews established his own publishing house aptly named BLAC, an acronym for Black Literature, Arts and Culture. His first title was Black Voices Shout, which was instantly banned.
In the 1970s, Matthews was the major proponent of black consciousness in poetry. In one of my visits to his house, he told me that Steve Biko once visited him under the cover of darkness, to ask him to formally join the black consciousness movement. Matthews was never interested in becoming part of formal structures, because he wanted to maintain his “identity and not allow others to make decisions for me”. This is palpable throughout his work.
In his poem, “Freedom Owns the Poet’s Soul”, he writes: Freedom owns the poet’s soul/ He shall not be garbed/ In a cloak of ideology/ His voice not laced by/ Legislation
Echoes of a dissident poet
Author and academic Siphiwo Mahala pays tribute to James Matthews, who died this month at 95
Image: Leila Dougan
James Matthews was a dissident poet gifted with a long, rich and fulfilling life.
Born on May 24 1929 in District Six, he exhibited extraordinary writing abilities from an early age. At just 10 years old, he wrote a composition for which his teacher gave him 21 out of 20. She felt he had crafted a short story rather than a simple composition.
In 1946, at the age of 17, he published his first short story in the weekly newspaper, The Sun. From that moment, he never ceased writing and has been a perennial feature in the South African literary landscape for a remarkable seven decades.
In high school Matthews had an accident that left him suffering from concentration and memory lapses. This forced him to stop schooling in standard 8 (grade 10) and start selling newspapers on street corners to supplement the income of his parents.
After his inaugural publication in The Sun, he published more short stories in the Golden City Post, The Cape Times Magazine, the Cape Argus and The Muslim News community newspaper. In the book, More than Brothers: Peter Clarke and James Matthews at 70, Hein Willemse writes that Matthews also wrote “under the pseudonym S. Matt [and] he published Westerns in the journal Hi-Note”.
In 1956, Matthews had advanced to the position of reporter at the Golden City Post in Cape Town, where he was on the payroll of Drum Publications. While the “Drum Boys” such as Bloke Modisane, Can Themba and Lewis Nkosi were causing havoc with their piercing writing in Sophiatown, the District Six foursome of Matthews, Richard Rive, Alex La Guma and Peter Clarke were doing the same in Cape Town. In 1958, he published The Park, a short story that I consider his magnum opus.
The Park was my first encounter with Matthews’s work, back in the 1990s. The story was featured in the collection, Hungry Flames and Other Black South African Short Stories, edited by Mbulelo Mzamane, who was the vice-chancellor at the University of Fort Hare at the time. In his introduction, Mzamane said of The Park: “Matthews brings out the inhumanity in the practice by showing its effects on a young ‘Coloured’ boy who is prevented from playing on the swings in a park that is reserved for Europeans. The spirit of the Defiance Campaign catches on as the boy steals to the park by night, defies the ‘Coloured’ caretaker, who decides to let sleeping dogs lie.”
This story typifies Matthews’s humanely revolutionary writing. He once wrote: “The stories always depicted my background. Though not overtly political, the characters reflected the disadvantaged surroundings in which they were placed and how they related to them.”
Matthews’s revolutionary writing came at a high price, as it led to his persecution, detention and banishment by the apartheid regime. Against this backdrop, Matthews switched from writing literary prose to verse. Poetry, unlike prose, is more difficult to censor as he could read and distribute it in small gatherings. In 1972, he published his first book, Cry Rage, a highly politically charged collection of poetry. He once told me that after collecting copies of Cry Rage from the printers, he couldn’t wait to get home. He sat on the roadside near a park, opened the box and upon seeing the first copies of his book, he was filled with so much joy he started laughing until he cried. However, that excitement was short-lived, as he later wrote that Cry Rage was discussed in parliament by the lawmakers because they could not “decide if it was poetry or a petrol bomb. They banned the book.”
Publishers grew reluctant to publish his politically charged content, knowing that it could end up in the hands of the censorship board. Matthews established his own publishing house aptly named BLAC, an acronym for Black Literature, Arts and Culture. His first title was Black Voices Shout, which was instantly banned.
In the 1970s, Matthews was the major proponent of black consciousness in poetry. In one of my visits to his house, he told me that Steve Biko once visited him under the cover of darkness, to ask him to formally join the black consciousness movement. Matthews was never interested in becoming part of formal structures, because he wanted to maintain his “identity and not allow others to make decisions for me”. This is palpable throughout his work.
In his poem, “Freedom Owns the Poet’s Soul”, he writes: Freedom owns the poet’s soul/ He shall not be garbed/ In a cloak of ideology/ His voice not laced by/ Legislation
James Matthews, leading light of South African poetry and journalism, dies at 95
This sense of independent activism permeated his work even during the post-apartheid era. Much as he received recognition from the government, including the Order of Ikhamanga from president Thabo Mbeki in 2004, Matthews remained critical of both the government and society at large. In his foreword to Matthews’s collected works, titled Cry Rage: Odyssey of a Dissident Poet, Neville Alexander wrote: “His latest offerings are a cry from the heart directed to the present rulers, enjoining them to avoid this corrupting logic of power and money and to return to the values that had, generally speaking, informed the stalwarts of the liberation struggle.”
In 2007, when I was working for the department of arts & culture, I had the privilege of travelling with Matthews to Cuba alongside other poets, including Keorapetse Kgositsile, Lebo Mashile, Khanyi Magubane and Phillippa Yaa de Villiers. Flying from Cape Town to Johannesburg, he couldn’t find his ID and produced the cover of Cry Rage instead, which had his name and face, and he got away with it. He would later praise the fringe benefits of being a senior citizen, reciting his poem, Age is a Beautiful Phase, in which he embraced old age.
In 2012, ahead of his 83rd birthday, I was sitting by my daughter’s hospital bed and, with only pencils and a scrap paper within reach, I sketched his portrait. I had not drawn anything in over a decade. I framed it and handed it to him at the Centre for the Book in Cape Town. I later visited his house, only to find out that he had photos from legendary photographer George Hallett, and paintings by prominent artists such as Gerard Sekoto and Clarke. I regretted ever showing him the sketch, let alone giving it to him!
What I don’t regret, however, is celebrating his contribution when he was still with us. In 2019, I asked Matthews to give me permission to feature The Park in my own collection. I published the story alongside my own reimagining of it, The Park Revisited, in my collection titled, Red Apple Dreams and Other Stories. The book featured works by the giants on whose shoulders I stand, including Matthews, Themba and Njabulo S Ndebele. This collection came out 73 years after he published his first short story. If anything, featuring Matthews in my collection bears testament to the endurance of his voice as well as his intergenerational appeal and influence.
It is fitting that his exit occurred during Heritage Month and on the eve of International Literacy Day, as he made a tremendous contribution to our literary heritage. Death will neither silence him nor erase his memory, for his thundering voice will echo beyond the grave.
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