Remembering Don Mattera

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In an essay titled The I in Writing in Listen To Your Footsteps  (Pan Macmillan), I wrote about how, many moons ago (some time in the early 00s), I ended up on the receiving end of a mini, impromptu lecture by Don Mattera where he lamented the tendency of young poets and writers to centre ourselves in our writing with “I” repeated ad nauseum. This truth, especially when it comes to my own writing, has hovered over my shoulder incessantly as I have tried, unsuccessfully, to change my ways and, today, the irony is not lost on me that I am writing about that very same person, in relation to the impact he has had on my life.

Anyway, on reflecting on Don Mattera – I have never known what to call him, because for the various people around me, he is Papa Don, Bra Don or, simply, Toppie – I realise that, while they overlap, there are three versions of Ntate Mattera that have loomed, each in their own way, large in my life has a young – to him – writer.

I first came across the name, growing up in Maseru, either at home or in high school. My father was a collector of books from various parts of the continent and the world – including the African Writers Series – and my high school was wonderfully diverse in its reading subject matter, despite being a British school. For an extended essay for English, I wrote about “writers in times of oppression” and referenced both American and South African writers, of which, if memory serves me correctly, Don Mattera was included.

The first version of him was this larger-than-life poet and writer, who wrote poems of pain and struggle and love and hope. 

In moving to Joburg in the late 1990s and finding myself in a burgeoning poetry scene trying to define itself in a country that was changing, where poets no longer had the injustice of apartheid and the struggle for liberation as a central point, I was in a couple of situations where Don Mattera was present. And whenever he was present, he was always extremely forthcoming about what he felt were the missteps by us young poets, but also very willing to share his wisdom and knowledge, practically and metaphorically. 

I would often sit on the edge, listening, absorbing. He was the accessible – relatively – elder at whose feet many aspiring writers sat. Version two.

To Gerrard, a close friend of mine, Don Mattera was family. Seeing Papa Don through his eyes, I saw a man who, in essence, was father to a community. A man whose own children had to share him with countless other children. A man who cared deeply for these many children. Having had the opportunity to meet and get to know some of these children, including his “biological” children, version three was from the outside, looking through a lens tinged by their perspective. 

These are just three versions of a man who was made up of so much more. I, for example, didn’t know that, at various stages, he was arts editor at Daily Mail and training project development officer for Mail & Guardian’s former self Weekly Mail.

What I do know is that Don Mattera manifested his truest self, always. He spoke truth to power regardless of the consequences, didn’t mince his words and refused to fade quietly into the background, allowing those distracted by the trappings to. He was compassionate and passionate. He was not perfect in the way that none of us are but was exceptional in ways that some of us hope to be, one day. 

I, for one, am better for having been able to linger on the fringes of his orbit. RIP Don Mattera. 

Kojo Baffoe – www.Kojobaffoe.com/book