Special Hearings — Media Hearings — UNKNOWN

DON MATTERA: I think, Ma'am, diversity is a very important facet of democracy although we espouse democracy a bit.  You know, it is not, it is the most crucial, the will of the people and I think diversity is a very important pillar of any, it should be an important pillar of any country that wishes to establish, finally, a non, a truly anti-racist, universalist state where people are people and not, as I continue to abjure, black and so on, and diversity of the media will always be a fallacy, will become a fallacy if those who now have moved into avenues of power want to usurp and grab everything around them and not allow the independent voice, the hand bill, the little newspaper to continue.  	I think it is in the nature of business people to be avaricious, it is in the nature of Governments to look for consensus, but we have a good Government now that allows diversity, that you can talk to and there is a door open and I think that Government should establish a media diversity fund to help to promote people who have their divergent views and may not be the populistic view that all of us want.  I think that, particularly the SABC, has tried very bravely to give voice to so many silenced voices and they must be praised and I think, also, the likes of the Weekly Mail, for which I have worked for, they tried very hard during trying times, I think some flower, some petal should also be thrown to their door for having kept alive, for us, this very important flame.  	Madam, one of the things that I have always deeply felt that this country, this system cheated us of, it was the right to be ourselves, the right to be the selves we choose to be and not the selves that everybody else wants and, for me, that has been the greatest tragedy, the greatest loss to, besides the human life, they have taken away from us the right to be ourselves, the selves we choose to be.  I hope that with this new Government and with other ensuing Governments, the right to be yourself, to be different should be encouraged and, where necessary, if it does not militate against the broader national good, we should encourage it, we should help to plant the seed.  	Like our President, many of us had long forgiven other people who have hurt us, but hurt, as the Jewish people will tell you, has a way of following you wherever you are.  Fifty years on you want to remember. Do not take away the right of people not to remember.  Always encourage the people the right to remember, because Milan Conderras says that the struggle of humanity against tyranny and oppression is the struggle of memory against forgetting.  Let the people remember and let them, through remembering, be humanised so that we can truly take our country forward and forgive creatures like John Horak, Craig Williamson and all these butchers whose fingers are dripping with blood and let us move forward.  I am prepared and I have been prepared to do so, to move forward.  So, I thank you for this opportunity to speak.

CHAIRPERSON: There was still one question from Hlengiwe.

UNKNOWN: Thank you very much.  I have listened very carefully to what you have said, especially about, the things you have said about how we should engage with what we have been hearing over the past three days.  I should think that warning is helpful to us.  Just one question.  You said that white people in this country believed, internalised, naturalised what was constructed, the ideology of the Nationalist Party Government and, as a race group, they began to act, especially in a news room, on the basis of those socially constructed identities.  I wonder whether you think the print media can be used as a medium through which alternative identities could be planted, because it is like something which need to be done over a long period of time.  At this point in time we have a monster in front of us, the Constitution of the country, which does not allow discrimination of any kind.  We have the Government of the day which is, which does, also accommodate ... (intervention).

DON MATTERA: Racism.

UNKNOWN: ... racism, but at the same time on daily basis people, especially when they are brought together, they end up talking about racist practices.  So, it is like, it is something which needs to be worked on vigorously, but what we have heard, especially over the past two days from people like, you have mentioned, like Craig, is like the media was an important platform to make sure that people of this country begin to see the dangers which were coming with liberation movements.  So, based on what you are saying, I do not know whether our media, as an institution as it exists today, is in a position of helping the country to transform.

DON MATTERA: Yes, Mam, you know, during the war in 1939, 1945 war, they instituted the Marshall Plan to try and rehabilitate and reform Europe and save the starving Germans at the time, but what we need in this country, in my humble opinion, is also a Marshall Plan of sorts.  Firstly, if I had been, hypothetically, the editor of The Sowetan newspaper or of The Star, I would stop racial connotations of any kind.  I would not say a black man was arrested for raping a white woman, which seems to be the great norm, it seems to be the big thing these days.  A man raped another woman and that is important.  It is a heinous deed, it is a heinous crime, but if we continue to show racism in our reports, if the media continues to select, as The Citizen does, the white side of the news and if The Sowetan continues to do that with that side of the news, of the black side of the news, we are, again, entrenching the mindsets.  	What the media, new magnets should do, is to seriously engage and de-racialise this country.  Its columns must be de-racialised.  I am a poet, not a Coloured poet and we must continue in that way, we have to engage racism.  This is not happening.  It must be engaged, seriously engaged.  We must thrive seriously to create different mindsets.  I used my poems as swords of liberation.  Now my poems are to play new roles, they have to be balms of healing, they have to act as ointment to heal the contusions and the bruises that my people have suffered, but I must be allowed to be able to come to terms with that horror of the past, so that I can look at the future with a different eye.  	White people must learn to see that future and not see a Black President who is going to kick them out and drive them to Israel, drive them to Australia.  They must see a country in which they can live, in which there is a role for them to play.  So, the media must assist in helping to create different mindsets.	The schools in Eldorado Park are still managed by Coloured teachers.  The schools in Soweto are still managed by black teachers.  The white suburbs are still the white suburbs and they will remain so in ad infinitum if there is not a conscious effort to say some white, some white families will say I want to go and live in Soweto, let me go and see.  They never do that.  What we are saying, we have removed the value of human beings and we have placed them in the northern suburbs.  They must aspire to the northern suburbs, they must aspire to that.  So, our journalism is the journalism of aspiring to power, to money and to position.  All of that has to change.  For our children too, all of that has to change.	Madam, I thank you, but I am rambling and I do not want to do that.

CHAIRPERSON: It then remains for me to thank you Comrade Mattera.  Even an eternal optimist, like myself, must sometimes be disappointed.  I had really hoped that there would be a poem, but what you, a poem.

DON MATTERA: Okay.

CHAIRPERSON: But what I have learnt in terms of the poetry coming out of your lips, I have gained by a presentation that comes from the heart, by a language that is a tool in the hands of a master and I thank you for that.

DON MATTERA: God be praised.