Mandela Day was punctuated by the end of a great life. The great Don Mattera passed away, aged 87.
“Bra Zinga”, as Mattera was known to many of his contemporaries and those close to him, has been described variously as a poet and an activist.
But to many of us who were close enough to him for him to call us “my laaitie”, we knew that he was much more than that.
In his younger days in Western Native Township, now called Westbury – where he was a prolific soccer star for Sophiatown African Morning Stars and, later, a gang leader – Mattera was known as a no-nonsense klevah (streetwise) who disciplined those he considered to be out of order.
He bliksemmed those who were ill-disciplined so hard that his “Zinga Special” was soon the talk of the town.
But it would be a mistake to think of Mattera as just a pugilist. Rather, bringing out the Zinga Special was just a way to demonstrate how prepared he was to defend what he believed in.
Throughout his life, his commitment to certain principles shone through. One of those was his seemingly bottomless desire to empower young people.
Realising that there was inadequate training for young black journalists, Mattera started running a journalism programme at local newspapers.
In 1986, I was among a group of young black journalists from all over Africa that Mattera helped to spend a couple of months in Boston, Massachusetts, on a journalism leadership exchange programme.
Many of the more established black journalists today are his former students.
His desire to improve the lives of black journalists was further demonstrated when he became one of the key players in the formation of the Union of Black Journalists (UBJ) – at the time when black journalists were under attack from the apartheid white minority regime in the late 1970s.
However, his love for writing was not limited to journalism only. He was a wordsmith par excellence, and also loved poetry.
The now-defunct Skotaville Publishers published a brilliant collection of his poetry – covering a period from 1971 to 1982 – in the form of a book titled Azanian Love Song.
Of course, as a devout member of the Islamic faith, Mattera also believed in and advocated Pan Africanism.
He was also a great storyteller who enjoyed retelling his life under apartheid in Sophiatown, the forced removals of the 1950s, and the hardships black people experienced in those years.
In short, he was a man with a deep, varied and complex history. That is what made him special. But above all, he was simply a great South African.
Mooi loop and rest well, Bra Zinga. Your laaities will forever remember you.
