Ramaphosa leads tributes for James Matthews

President Cyril Ramaphosa has paid tribute to Cape Town poet and author James Matthews as an impassioned but elegant chronicler of the struggle against apartheid.

Matthews, regarded as one of the early Black Consciousness poets, died in Cape Town on Saturday. He was 95.

“James Matthews’s voice will ring in our consciousness following his departure and we will remain captivated and inspired by the rage and elegance with which he articulated the stark struggles of the oppressed,” the president said.

“We will be comforted by the many works he has left for us to revisit and by our memories of his appearances at rallies, ghoembas, the frontlines of the street protest and intimate circle of kindred creatives where, beret askew on his head, he would feed the souls and fighting spirit of those around him.”

Matthews was called “a true artist” whose writing gave a voice to those who were silenced by apartheid by the Western Cape government. 

“As prolific and talented as James Matthews was, he was so much more than just a writer and poet; he was integral to the anti-apartheid movement, giving a powerful voice through his writing to the oppressed. He was an important part of our province and country’s artistic fabric,” premier Alan Winde said. 

Matthews was born in 1929 and grew up in District Six in what he described as a house without bookshelves.

He attended Trafalgar High School where a teacher named Miss Meredith proclaimed that he was a writer after marking one of his compositions. 

“She announced to the class that I had written a short story and not a composition. She marked it 21, one mark above the accepted 20 and informed the class that I was a writer,” he recalled in 2016 when he accepted an honorary doctorate from Rhodes University.

After leaving school, Matthews found work as a messenger at the Cape Times. Library access allowed him to explore literature properly for the first time, and he began crafting short stories that were published in the arts pages of both that newspaper and the Cape Argus.

As his teacher predicted, it “spelled out the realisation that I was working towards becoming a writer,” Matthews said. 

“It was ironic; except for Jack Cope, who was a sub-editor, none of the reporting staff had short stories published. I was serving them tea on night shift.”

Matthews’s journalism was published in Drum and the Muslim News. His poetry and short stories mapped the scars that poverty and racial oppression left on the psyche of ordinary people grasping for dignity.

His stories were published in Europe in the 1960s. His first anthology of poetry, Cry Rage, appeared in 1972. It was banned by the apartheid government. Black Voices Shout followed in 1974. 

Two years later, he was detained for months at Victor Verster prison in Paarl and subsequently repeatedly denied a passport.

He managed to travel to Germany and the United States in the 1980s and was awarded a fellowship by the University of Iowa and given the freedom of the cities of Nuernberg and Lehrte.

Matthews published nine volumes of poetry, a collection of short stories, The Park and Other Stories, and a novel, The Party is Over.  

He was a founding member and patron of the Congress of South African Writers and set up two publishing houses, BLAC Publications and Realities.

Matthews lived in Cape Town all his life.

He was awarded the national order of Ikamanga in 2004.