During the early 2000s, the poet James Matthews was frequently seen wandering around Cape Town with a few copies of his poetry books in hand, ready to engage and explain. He cut an eccentric figure and was, in so many ways, ravaged by life. Yet the passion and glint in his eye remained.
He was a regular visitor to what was then the Idasa (Institute for Democracy in South Africa) building at 6 Spin Street in the CBD. It was there that I met him for the first time, when he gifted me his 2005 anthology of 30 years’ worth of poems, Cry Rage: Odyssey of a Dissident Poet. The original Cry Rage, published with Gladys Thomas in 1972, was the first poetry book to be banned by the apartheid government.
Matthews’ death on 7 September at the age of 95 marked the end of an era of those who had given us much of the resistance writing in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
When Dennis Cruywagen interviewed Matthews in 2023, he knew the raging fire within him remained, despite his age. (“At 94, James Matthews’ fire still burns”). How would he like to be remembered? asked Cruywagen. Matthews replied: “I don’t want to be known as a black poet: I’m a poet. A dissident poet.”
Cruywagen concluded: “James Matthews is today as passionate about freedom for all as he has always been. His voice in 2023 remains poignantly true:
‘Freedom’s child you have been denied too long
fill your lungs and cry rage
step forward and take your rightful place
you’re not going to grow up
knocking at the back door
for you there will be no travelling
third class enforced by law
with segregated schooling
and sitting on the floor
the rivers of our land, mountain tops
and the shore
it is yours, you will not be denied any more
Cry rage, freedom’s child’”
Matthews was not only focused on the past but also on the ills of the present democratic government. In the foreword to Cry Rage: Odyssey of a Dissident Poet, another great dissident writer and academic, Neville Alexander, wrote: “Just as his very first poems amounted to a seer’s warning to a decadent ruling class in the previous dispensation, his latest offerings are a cry from the heart directed to the present rulers, enjoining them to avoid this corrupting logic of power and money and to return to the values that had, generally speaking, informed the stalwarts of the liberation struggle.”
Matthews, Alexander wrote, was calling us to be alert.
At Vernon February’s (1938-2002) memorial service in November 2002, Matthews, fiery as ever, sporting a beret and his signature leather waistcoat over his bare chest, asked: “Are the people’s poets/ transformed into versifiers/ For a political party/ Praise singers singing hosannas/ Blanketing their mind/ To the party’s fault/ As they ululate their / Allegiance.”
He was on point then and remains, especially in death perhaps, on point.
Different life trajectories
Another great South African, Pravin Gordhan, died a week after Matthews. Despite their very different life trajectories and ways of seeing, they both were resistant to injustice and spent their lives committed to the ideal of a just society — poetically, in the case of Matthews; prosaically, in the case of Gordhan. Both men were patriots and stubborn believers in the power of democracy.
Many penned poignant and fulsome tributes to Gordhan, a man who had integrity in abundance, who did not suffer fools and whose commitment to transparent and accountable governance was complete. Was he perfect? Like all human beings, of course not. But he suffered the slings and arrows aimed at him by the Zuma administration at great personal cost, even as he and his family faced threats and abuse.
That abuse continues after his death as the cowardly and corrupt peddle lies about and direct hate towards Gordhan. The abuse should be taken from whence it comes. As Justice Malala eloquently said: “No amount of rejoicing over Pravin Gordhan’s death will erase the evidence of his work and the truth of his life. He was a selfless man. He was a man of integrity. Most of all, courage was his name.”
The irony is that Jacob Zuma — who, along with his comrades and associates, captured the state for nearly a decade while lining their pockets to the tune of billions and wrecking institutions — has acknowledged that Gordhan provided him with assistance to leave the country and go into exile in Swaziland (now Eswatini).
“I didn’t have any money so I went to the man who just died. When did he die? Yesterday or when? Those were my cadres,” he said, adding that he didn’t know “where things went wrong”. And Zuma laughed and the crowd laughed along with him.
Of course, Zuma remembers well that he fired Gordhan as finance minister in 2017. And his sole reason to do so was to capture the National Treasury. Unsurprisingly, Zuma remains who he always was: dishonest to the very core. Now we can add callous and inhumane to his list of character traits.
After being fired, Gordhan dutifully took his place as a backbencher and played a crucial role in the parliamentary inquiry into corruption at Eskom.
Shenanigans at Eskom
In my book Turning and Turning: Exploring the Complexities of South Africa’s Democracy (Pan Macmillan, 2018), I wrote about the appearance of former public enterprises minister Lynne Brown (who has silently slid out of the public eye, with a cloud remaining over her head) before the inquiry. It’s worth recounting here:
“It was May 2017 in Cape Town. The public enterprises committee of Parliament was holding its sitting at the Townhouse Hotel. That hotel has become something of a staple for government employees needing accommodation in Cape Town and for NGO seminars and other meetings. The atmosphere was tense, not only in the hotel, but in the country as a whole. The talk was of State Capture: a small coterie of politically connected people had drawn influential leaders into their fold and were allegedly extorting funds and favours from the state. This had a particular significance for the country’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) since they handled billions of rand and were the dispensers of multibillion-rand deals in tenders. What had brought the committee to the Townhouse were shenanigans at Eskom, SA’s power utility and a tempting prize for unscrupulous operators.
“State Capture was by that stage no mere theoretical question. For some time, allegations had been circulating about the relationship between Eskom and the controversial Gupta family. Eskom was, for example, alleged to have assisted Gupta-linked business operations to secure funding to purchase a coal mine that would provide it with coal. The goings-on at Eskom had also been scrutinised by the Public Protector in her ‘State of Capture’ report.
“Concerns existed about the newly (re)hired CEO of Eskom, Brian Molefe, whose appointment was the focus of the committee’s work that day. I attended the committee meeting, knowing that recently fired Pravin Gordhan was now a member of the public enterprises committee.
“This meeting had all the ingredients to make the atmosphere somewhat tense. Then president Jacob Zuma and his ministers who were seen to be facilitating state capture were increasingly coming under fire. And Gordhan himself was still a man scorned and angry after his axing at the hands of Zuma.
“That day, Gordhan’s former colleague, Lynne Brown, minister of public enterprises, was being grilled for irregularities at Eskom. She was accompanied by the compromised board. The committee had summoned Brown to explain the controversial and confusing reinstatement of Molefe as CEO. To say the reinstatement was extraordinary is an understatement. The reasons given for his return shifted multiple times.
“At first we heard Molefe had been spirited back to Eskom after a brief and opportunistic stint as an MP because he had not actually resigned in November 2016. This despite the fact that Molefe himself had held a tearful press conference announcing his resignation and Brown had accepted it that month. After a storm of public criticism, this version changed and the public was then told he had taken early retirement instead. And then, without pause, we were given version three: Molefe might have taken unpaid leave.
“Brown, flanked by the Eskom board and its chair, Ben Ngubane, told the committee that hers was an honest mistake. The board had misinformed her and at all times she believed Molefe had resigned. It all had the whiff of a cover-up.
‘A curious character’
“Brown is a curious character who could seem pure as the driven snow and put on an air of complete innocence in the face of allegations of ‘State Capture’. She had entered into a difficult sparring match with the committee that day, but unsurprisingly knew nothing, remembered nothing and couched all denials in inflated, rather pompous language. She appeared to be someone who had nothing to hide, despite all the evidence in the public domain that suggested the contrary.
“Glaringly, Khulani Qoma, the spokesperson for the Eskom board, for example, had claimed to the parliamentary inquiry into State Capture in November 2017 that he had been told by acting board chairman Zethembe Khoza that action against certain executives in Eskom would likely be stopped since ‘Brown reports to the Guptas’.
“There was a moment during the interaction between Brown and Gordhan when the hostility between the two could be palpably felt: Gordhan, angry; Brown, arrogant and feigning ignorance. Gordhan knew where all the skeletons were hidden. He knew what the board ought to have been doing and what they were not. In one heated exchange, during which Brown was doing what she does best — deflecting — Gordhan looked her straight in the eye and said: ‘Let’s not fool ourselves; we all know what’s going on here.’
“He continued: ‘The public is becoming increasingly aware that you are abusing state property and state resources in the name of yourselves and not in the name of the public. This is about capturing Eskom for the benefit of the few, that’s the reality.’
“Gordhan asserted further: ‘Worse still, what South Africans are increasingly worried about is that we’ve reached a stage in managing governance in SA where there are a significant number of people in bureaucracy and elsewhere who are taking a view that says: “I don’t care if you know what I’m doing; I don’t care how many reports the public protector or anyone else provides because I am protected.” The question is: By whom and at what cost and how will history record your role ultimately in this regard?’ One could hear the proverbial pin drop.”
History will record Gordhan as a patriot who answered the call to build his country again and again. As fellow South Africans, we could not have asked more of him.
The lesson of the lives of Matthews and Gordhan is that democracy does not survive on its own. As freedom’s children, we must continue to do the work of building and rebuilding our democracy and being enraged by injustice everywhere. DM