Tribute | Don Mattera, poet extraordinaire, we salute you!
According to a statement released by the family, the man known to many as Bra Zinga passed away peacefully this afternoon, July 18.
He lived up to be the man he’d portrayed in his autobiography, Memory is the Weapon, which was published to international acclaim in 1987. He was a fast-talking “klevah” who shuttled with elegance from formal English - very impeccable - to tsotsi taal. When race classification laws came into effect after the National Party’s ascendance to power, and its promulgation of apartheid laws, young Don Mattera was classified as a “coloured”.In terms of the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, people could not marry across the racial divide. If a white man, however, insisted on wanting to marry a non-white, he might, thanks to the stipulations by the Race Classification Board, lose his status as a white person.
Coloured people, who had lived cheek by jowl with whites, Indians and Africans in Sophiatown were forcibly evicted from this neighbourhood and shunted off to present-day Westbury, Newclare and Bosmont. Mattera lived through it all.Unlike many of his coloured-age mates, Mattera got a good solid education. This was because, from an early age, his grandparents adopted him and sent him to a Catholic boarding school in Durban, only returning to the city of gold when he was 14.
One of the founding members of the Union of Black Journalists, he soon attracted the attention of the apartheid secret police, the Security Branch, who started monitoring his political activities.Because he was loud and outspoken, he stood out among his colleagues and peers. This earned him a banning order from the apartheid state from 1973 to 1982. Three of these years were spent under house arrest, which meant he could no longer work as a journalist.
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