Sam Mathe | Remembering James Matthews: The unyielding voice of South African struggle literature
Renowned poet, writer and political activist James Matthews, whose work was banned during apartheid, has passed away in Cape TownJames Matthews was a chronicler of his times and a bard who chose to heed his conscience rather than the dictates of society. A poet who used his pen to challenge authority, he was unwavering in his stance against injustice and inhumanity.
Raised in a family of modest means, books were not part of his upbringing. His father could hardly read and write while his mother read, in his own words, ‘two thin paperbacks from the UK which could hardly be considered as literature’. There were no libraries at his schools and in the community. The only public libraries in town were reserved for whites, a situation that was not encouraging for an aspirant writer.
These ranged from western writers such as Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, Doris Lessing and George Orwell to Russian masters like Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. It’s a cruel irony that he couldn’t read his first book. It was published in Swedish, a language that was Greek to him. The local publishers wouldn’t touch his works and that’s how they eventually found an outlet in Malmo, Sweden where a local publisher, Cavefores translated and published themwas also translated and published into Swedish in 1963. This meant that his first two important literary ventures in book form were of no consequence for the local publishing industry, critics and readers.
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