Listening to the silent majority

[48]

Frankly, after having read his book, I hesitated to meet with Don Mattera. Our minds seemed immeasurably far apart. But Solly Rataemane encouraged me to go and see him anyway; and how right he was. I met Don in the African Writers' Union office in Braamfontein.^32.

‘The imperialists and colonialists,’ said Mattera, ‘always tried to wipe away the memories of people by removing homes and vestiges that could remind them of who they really were, and where they came from. That way, you destroy an entire history. But you cannot bulldoze memory. Memory is the weapon that will sharpen the minds of the children and prepare them for the frontiers that are coming. No matter which country it is. In America, they tried it with the natives, the red Indians. They tried to wipe out every bit of their history, but they are still there. Hitler tried it with the Jews. But people remember. As long as people have memories: you know what the great writer Naruddine Farrah has said: “The struggle for freedom in this world is a man's fight against forgetting.” I paraphrase him. When the Afrikaner government of the Nationalist Party removed the people of Sophiatown, one of the things that Hendrik Verwoerd said was that he wanted to wipe from the face of the earth the memory of Sophiatown, because Sophiatown was a place of social and political interaction, as well as cultural and artistic interaction between people. Those days, when the people of Sophiatown were removed, the government did not act out of love for the people. Yes, there were really bad homes and bad housing. My fight would not have been, if they had said, “All those, who live in bad housing, let's

32. I was told I was the first Dutch writer to visit them

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move them out to better homes, and those in good houses let them stay”. But no, apartheid at the time had to be justified by taking from the one group and giving it to the other, like in a game of chess. And always the unarmed people were the victims. Therefore, memory is a weapon. It is a weapon against forgetting. It is a weapon against being cheated out of your rights to live as other human beings in other parts of the world, and to be free. There is no beauty in a dead-heap human being. You have a right to live where you want. You have a right to be happy. You have also to become a responsible person to make society a more civilized and more sane place to live in. Memory is not just my weapon. It is the weapon of all the people.’

‘Memory usually falsifies,’ I tried to put forward. ‘No, no, memory cannot falsify!’ replied Don, raising his voice. ‘It cannot!’ He corrected himself: ‘It should not falsify.’ ‘Maybe it should not,’ I said, ‘but it does all the time.’ Mattera: ‘No, no, no, no. If you have a hidden agenda, you would falsify. For example: if there are some good white people, I would like to remember their goodness. And, if I then would write a book, and say “there are no good white people”, that would be a lie. People would find me out that I was lying. You can't falsify the fact, that Germans put people into ovens, and so on. You can't falsify either, that there were some good Germans, like pastor Niemöller, who were against those things.’

‘No-one intends to falsify the memory of Hiroshima,’ I replied, ‘but then, there is also an aspect to memory, that should enable people to amend and cure their traumas in order to move onwards to a next stage, adopting wounded minds to changed conditions. There are no gaschambers any more. The roughest times of apartheid now lie behind us.’ Mattera: ‘The memory of Emperor Hirohito and the bad things the Japanese did during the war, the people have the prerogative to remember. Whether they want to forgive or not, that is their privilege.’ ‘But hanging on to past mistakes, or past crimes, turns people into bitter and stifled human beings, or even creates mental cripples,’ I suggested. ‘Well, that is another quality,’ said Don. ‘Let's look at Afrikaner people. There are so many good people among them. And yet, how can a good man, a good person, design laws that destroy other people? There are lots of paradoxes in the human psyche. There are lots of paradoxes in the application of the quality of mercy and compassion. I think I am a very compassionate person. I have lived that compassion. I have

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practised that compassion. The streets may have swallowed me as a child. But that experience I have overcome with God's help and the help of other caring and sympathetic people. I have received another chance in this world. I would not like to see Afrikaners destroyed. But if any person wants to destroy me, or my people, he is asking to be destroyed.’