Listening to the silent majority

[54]

I asked Don Mattera whether he felt that his book, Memory is the Weapon had contributed in any way to the liberation of blacks in South Africa. ‘Yes, very much,’ he said. ‘It tells the children what they have and what they are. They didn't fall from the sky. They came from a long line of people. People that have contributed to their consciousness. Our experiences are continuous reminders of a time and place, when we were dehumanized. My book says to them, “when you have power some day, do not repeat these things”.’

‘Do you believe, Don, that the situation is changing for the better?’ I asked. ‘Nothing is changing,’ said Mattera, ‘You know when people will really change? When thousands of white people are lying dead in the streets. That will change them. Only then will they come face to face with the reality of death. I don't wish this to happen. I don't want it.’ I asked him if he considered it unavoidable. ‘I wouldn't like it. I still think it will be avoidable once sanity takes a hold. There is a price to sanity. There is a price to memory. There is also a price to insanity. It's a whole long journey. This is a beautiful country in which black people, coloured and Indians, if you like, have no economic stake, but to be shedders of labour and consumers. White people and foreigners own almost 96 percent of the South African economy. Blacks own perhaps only 1 percent. Coloureds, Africans and Indians perhaps another 1 or 2 percent. Greed is a psychosis, as fear is. How can you justify the fact that the Oppenheimer conglomerate owns 66 percent of the stocks in this country? How is it possible that foreigners can come here and live like kings? How can you justify that a yesterday's foreigner coming into South Africa can buy a home anywhere he wants, and for peanuts? You want me to say to my children, white people are good? Or, Europeans are good? And therefore they should be loved all the time? In the meantime, we are facing deaths, detentions, jailings, states of emergencies, and all this is being done, because we are loved? How can I remember something truly good from all this evil? I must let my mind be my weapon. I must write about my memories to sharpen the resistance of my people and say to them, this is it. This is what they made us. This is what

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we are. Some of us have fought hard to come out better, but at a heavy price of bannings, house arrests and vilifications by the state. To retain sanity in this country or normality of mind becomes an art. So, what is really changing, my friend?’

I asked him whether he had kept notes or a diary to enable him to write this memoir. ‘Oh no, not at all,’ he replied. Mattera: ‘One sociologist who read my book said it was written from careful, knowing observation and memory. Because, as there are gifted scientists, there are ordinary people that God has created with a delicate mind. I remembered what I wanted to remember. I could not put my entire life in there. I just believe, that God now and then sends a bit of genius into this world. They say that the muses have come. My muse has been the muse of careful notification of memory.’

Prudently, I tried once more to impress upon Don Mattera that brains don't copy reality like a Canon or Kodak camera. Our minds are rather ‘camera obscuras’ that befoul, confuse, and rather obscure the reality of past events, than record the truth. Of course, it's a fact that the world of our thoughts exists at the courtesy of our memory. William Bradbury termed memory even ‘the most essential function of the brain’.^40. Without storing and again reproducing memories, we wouldn't know our life history. Our ego would not exist without this magnificent machinery in our heads. But how reliable are our recollections? As an organ of the central nervous system memory is notorious for its untrustworthiness. Psychologist Daniel Goleman warned that scientific research into personal memories demonstrated how memorizing is being influenced by forces that most freely fantasize, that falsify and at times erase images, that should have been linked to the psyche. Goleman gave his article in the science section of the New York Times the caption, ‘In memory, people re-create their lives to suit their images of the present’.^41.

I harboured serious doubts that Don Mattera had done just that in his book Memory is the Weapon. I reminded him that memories too often border on the pathological, like Samuel Beckett once declaring that he memorized the actual moment of his birth. Mattera: ‘I can believe that.’ I replied, ‘Anybody who says he remembers leaving the womb

40. The Mystery of Memory, Life magazine, November 12, 1971

41. The New York Times, Science section, June 23, 1987

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should have his head examined.’ Mattera: ‘Who are you, and who is the psychologist or psychiatrist to question a gift of God or the human mind and its power?’ I said, ‘The human mind, colleague Mattera, is in my view the most damaged tool in the entire creation.’ Mattera: ‘No, no, it is what you do with the mind that counts. How do you explain dreams then?’ I asked, ‘What do people really know about their own brains?’ ‘As we are becoming older, we become discerning creatures,’ answered Don. ‘But we are still ignorant about the neuro-physiology behind thoughts and feelings, opinions and convictions,’ I said. Don: ‘We are allowed to discern. We are not disallowed books to help us check our minds. We are not given gutter education that destroys us. We are not robbed of homes. We are not robbed of the right to live decently as human beings. Obviously, things change. So, all your postulations about what constitutes electro-chemical activity in brains, I overlook these things. To me, what is important is that I am not here to question the feasibility or non-feasibility of how people think, or how they respond and so on. I remember dates, breath, faces, smells. You know every time I smell an aster flower, I see a cemetery, because my aunt used to make wreaths. She made them of asters and sold them on Sunday. I used to stand there helping her sell her bouquets.’