World renowned South African poet James Matthews has died at 95. His was the last great voice of an era of writers who worked against South Africa’s repressive and racist system of apartheid, which resulted in him being relentlessly harassed, detained by police and his work banned.
Schooled in District Six, an area of Cape Town where black people were forcibly removed to make way for white development, he was most famous for his poems. But he was also a journalist, cultural worker, short story writer, novelist, proponent of the Black Consciousness movement and a one-man cultural institution who never stopped speaking truth to power, even after the country’s first democratic elections in 1994.
Hein Willemse is an esteemed literature scholar who was a friend of Matthews and who wrote a book on him. He explains why the death of this remarkable man is such a great loss.
