Special Hearings — Media Hearings — UNKNOWN

DON MATTERA: I would like to say this, comrade, is that sometimes one wonders when one sees people sitting there, whether these people are ably equipped to handle this issue, whether these people have studies this issue, because I do  not know what the line of questioning was yesterday on people like John Horak, I do not know what the line of questioning was on such people, but I trust you and I trust that you have the bona fides, not only of finding the truth, but being able to examine one of the tragedies.  You know, in Shakespeare there is this piece that something is rotten in the state of Denmark, well, Denmark was rotten, meaning South Africa was rotten and white people, particularly, particularly shared and lived and thrived on that rot.  	They lived, and you count the ones that did not, on your fingers.  You could count Beyers Naude, Helen Joseph, I can go to town on a few of the names, but they lived in the state of Denmark, they shared and perpetuated that rot and that rot sunk deep into every facet of life.  Yes, there were many good people in the white people in the world, in South Africa, as there many black bad people.  So, when you look at me and talk to me you have to see many aspects of this person.  You have to see this person who had been kicked out and robbed of a home in Sophiatown, branded a Coloured despite his objections, his family's objections.  You have to see this person moving into an environment, a political environment, conscientised by the African National Congress through people like Robert Gesha, Trevor Huddleston and be given a new set of values, a new way of life, a new thinking from the thinking of the streets, from the gangster to the poet to the politician to the journalist.  So, I do not think this one session is enough for me if we have to arrive at some truths.	Firstly, the state of journalism cannot be divorced from the state, the rotten state of South Africa as it pertained.  We cannot look at journalism in isolation to the fact of the colour bar, that white people, if there are such creatures, were given a status that was almost the same thing that Hitler gave to his people.  These people began to believe in the whole Arian notion to the point that they internalised it and lived by it and killed for it and destroyed in its name, both politically and in journalism.  I am, I was never naive to suppose that white people were so generous in the media that they would see me coming in and offer me the world.  	I saw the media as another terrain of struggle and it was a terrain of struggle, because since 66, when I was campaigning actively for the release of Mandela and Sobukwe and many others, I never received the publicity for those campaigns.  In 1967, 68 with the launch of the Black Consciousness Movement, I had been conscientised from a  non-racialist who saw the good in white people, who supplicated to white people for the goodness of their hearts, turned to black consciousness.  Conscientised by Steve Biko and still told that black man, black woman, you are on your own.  So, for all these years I had been campaigning as a non-racialist from Sophiatown, campaigning with noesis, trying to change the status quo with Helen Joseph, with many other people.  	I became a different kind of enemy for the State.  The State then began its vilification programme, which I will come to later.  In 1968, with the launch of the Black Consciousness Movement, I ventured into newspapers news rooms.  What did I find at the Rand Daily Mail?  I found black people sitting in a corner, designated for black journalists.  The whites, Clive Emden is here and he will attest to that, Peter Wellman, all of them worked in that white group.  The blacks had their corner, Isaac and many other people, Mayakiso, Moejapelo, these people were put in a corner.  They ate in a separate canteen with iron plates, iron mugs, iron spoons while their white counterparts ate from porcelain.  I found this and I objected to that.  I objected very strongly to that fact that black journalists were allowing themselves to be demeaned.	They were allowed to have representative membership within this white journalist union that was called The South African Society of Journalists.  Blacks were not allowed.  The like of Mayakiso, Gordon Siwane, could not be members.  I objected very strongly to that fact.  Again, I found fawning, cringing black people.  They did not go through the baptism that I had gone through and I could not say to them with the force of whip that you guys were wrong.  	Then the editorials stank, they were stinking.  Particularly, on the issue of the military excursions into the front line states.  Mopping up operations, the one, as the editorial says, the SADF went in and they mopped up, they cleaned up Lesotho, they cleaned up Matolo, they cleaned up Botswana.  They did not say that pieces of flesh were lying on the trees.  It was not their worry.  So, if a thorough has to be done, go into the dealings, the editorials of Alistair Sparks, Raymond Louw, Rex Gibson.  What did they write during the time when we fought this war against these people?  What did they say, what were their views about what constitutes a terrorist and what constitutes a freedom fighter?  We braved that, we spoke out, I spoke out, I braved that and I saw there was a need to start a journalist organisation with Bokwe Mafuna, Willie Lenglapo, Harry Mashabela, Joe Kolwe.  There was a need to set up a journalist organisation that would speak for the people and so was born the term liberation journalism.  Just like liberation poetry, just like liberation theatre.  	The black journalist could not see himself or herself outside of the parameters of struggle and so we formed the Union of Black Journalists, but let me go back.  	Let me go back to when we were preaching the Black Consciousness ideology.  Young people like Ramaphosa, Terror Lekota, Popo Molefe, I can go on, a long list of young people that were conscientised into the stream, making them understand that there was a war, not only that the black people had to fight physically, but there was a war that had to be fought internally and I became one of the proponents of that law, having left the Coloured Labour Party, after being conscientised by Steve Biko to move in that area.  So, the other programme began.  The programme of vilification. 	Now, this John Horak, that you guys love so much, that now has the, has membership of the African National Congress, who is this creature?  This is the creature that worked at The Rand Daily Mail and started terrible whispering campaigns schooled in the art of vilification and dirty tricks, this John Horak.  This is the man that said watch out for Clive Emden, he is an informer, watch out for Dennis Beckett, he is an informer, watch out for Tony Holliday, he is an informer, watch out and he continued his vilification and his dirty tricks at The Rand Daily Mail.  The same man, if he is a man, who said Peter Magobane was the nigger in the wood pile, that Winnie Mandela had sold out on Nelson Mandela and had given Nelson Mandela away.  This is the same John Horak who joined The Star and came with that same programme of vilification.  Be careful of Don Mattera, he is not banned, he is an agent, he is a CIA agent.  Be careful of Roshid Tjopdat(?), be careful of Joe Nazir, be careful of Riaan Malan.  This same man, this same creature went on on a spree of vilification.  	This same man found me crying in the toilets when I had received from detention a roll and, a toilet roll written with agonising details of torture.  This same man wanted to grab this toilet roll for me, from me and I pushed him away.  I phoned somebody called Beyers Naude and I said I have this toilet roll, please come and fetch it.  He came and took it from me.  Eleven o' clock the cops raided me.  I was detained in front of The Star, beaten and taken to John Vorster Square.  "Waar is die kakpapier?" they said.  Where is the toilet roll?  So, who is this John Horak?  Who is this man, now, that comes here and tells you that he knew about agents.  His work was vilification.  His work was to destroy a whispering campaign, a campaign that resulted in almost 350 raids on my house, 150 times detention.  This is the agony of what the black journalist went through.  	So, for us black, journalism became part of the liberation movement.  We had to exert all our energies, all our strengths, all our brains to fight this enemy.  Liberation journalism became that.  Bokwe Mafuna, Tenjiwe, many such young people moved, Harry Mashabela, whose neck was broken by the security police all because creatures like that.  	Now, let me take you back to some history.  Are there Jewish people here?  Thank you Clive.   The likes of Heinrich Himmler, the likes of Goebels, the likes of all the people that helped to destroy and murder so many people throughout the world had their informers planted in all kinds of places.  Pastor Niemolan, the Protestant, knew of that.  These people were sent to their executions and death by the whisper of some agents who did not like a certain family, who did not like, the same thing occurred here.  There was a holocaust of the truth and the holocaust of black lives in South Africa in a way that beggars description, in a way that made us being picked up and killed and tortured.  	One such torturer, Olivier, Col Olivier, said to me in 1977 after I had been detained for the toilet roll, Mr Mattera, it is people like you who will cause the Kaffirs and the whites to kill each other, a person like you.  The poems which you write, the poetry, the books which you write all lead to the destruction of the white nation in South Africa and we will never allow that.  That piece of shit paper, I have to keep to that word, because that is the only way to describe this kind of person, because that is the term that they used for the toilet paper, we want that and we want it now.  This young man that had written to me was terribly tortured, he was broken and they wanted his name and I said I will never give his name to you.  	He hit me.  I hit this dog back.  I was hand-cuffed behind my back and beaten and I came out with a vengeance for  anything that represented the cops and anything that represented this stinking state of Denmark, in which white people, particularly, remained silent while the atrocities against their brothers and sisters were perpetrated. 	I would like to say this.  If it had not been for Nelson Mandela helping to bring this country to a peaceful resolution, John Horak would have been dead by my hand.  He is the kind of creature, the kind of animal that helped to destroy and vilify us.  It did not buy with the black community, because the black community knew who we were, but here the whispering campaigns among these white liberals and their friends tortured and destroyed the mindsets of many people and I was one of those.  	I came to The Star in 1973.  I entered on the second of January with a man called Tony Deegan, a junior by many years, a very talented and humane human being.  Three months after that Tony Deegan was given a position on the news desk.  I am a wordsmith, I have handled the English language in a way that other people cannot handle it, because this has been my gift, but I found that at The Star you had to be a white person and a white Rhodesian, most of all, to mean something and this whiteness, this claim to superiority and biological, I do not know what it is, played  a very important role.  I saw myself helping to open up the columns to black people, black readers, interviewing SASO, bringing them closer to understanding and using the newspaper, to prosecute the BC ideal.  	I saw that there was no place for me and when I was banned in 1973, let me just go back to the 30th of September.  I had been campaigning with Joe Variava, Abue Asvat and many people in Lens for the setting up of a non-racial creche in an all Indian area, because we felt that the women who worked in service for the people there needed a place to bring their children there.  So, we helped launch the Tamaray Creche.  On the evening of the launch, the reading of my poetry, the main speaker, four shots were fired at me and a Volkswagen owned by some doctor who ran to Canada.  A man called Bowa, security police, phoned The Star, spoke to Ron Anderson to say we have been informed that Don Mattera has been shot and he is lying in a ditch and I was standing next to Mr Anderson.  	So, who knew that I was going to speak at this meeting?  Many people, but Horak also knew.  So, I could have been killed and I was banned and house arrested for first three years, taken out of the newspaper and told to stay home while Mr John Jordie and Tyson campaigned for my return.  During that time I could not come to town, I could not go into a bookshop, I could not attend my daughter's birthday, I could not go to church, I could not attend my cousin's funeral, I could not do many things and so the raids began and increased.  	When the Booysens Police Station was bombed I was raided from Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday, Easter Monday by Haystack and his crew.  Not once did it appear in the paper.  Not a single Rand Daily Mail, Star newspaper, Beeld, Rapport, nothing had appeared.  So, comrade, when I told you that I have to have the whole day, ten days it is to tell you that security agents not only had a free run.  Horak carried a gun at The Star.  He was allowed to come with a gun into The Star newspaper from 1973 when he came to work, I think, in 1974 and 75.  	Mrs Bondishio worked in the library.  She was a confirmed spy.  Nel, the farming editor, was a confirmed spy.  There was a cloud and a question mark over Tony Sterling.  John Horak's whispering campaign in the newsroom that vilified people, his own colleagues, that led to the banning of my poem Protea in the terror edition of Newsas, which used my poem, The Protea, in the silhouette of the policeman beating the student and so these young provocateurs were allowed to continue their dirty tricks, their vilification during that holocaust.  	So, I am sure you have some questions to ask me and I can go on and on just to tell you that we had formed the Union of Black Journalists and what we did was take the SASO Constitution which said black student and we took out the word student and we put the word journalist there and so liberation journalist, then, was born and we continued in that way, sacrificing, playing the role that others were afraid to play.  So, I will await your questions.