PIONEER, EDUCATOR, POLITICIAN, GIANT

Zachariah Keodirelang Matthews was a giant among people. An educationist and intellectual, a pioneer in pushing back the limits presumed of or imposed on black achievement, a politician who proposed the Congress of the People at Kliptown and South Africa’s Freedom Charter, which was passed there.

The University of Fort Hare academic made an indelible mark on the institution but his influence spread across Africa and into the world. He was esteemed by presidents, a humanist and ardent non-racialist and feminist.

Matthews matriculated from Fort Hare in 1919 and went on to become the first black person to graduate from the institution in 1923 and, indeed, the first black graduate from a South African university.

He was a student activist, SRC chair, president of the literary and debating society, editor of the student newspaper, teacher, principal, advocate, attorney, anthropologist, academic, administrator, member of the British Royal Commission into education in East Africa, ANC leader in the Cape and member of the national executive committee, treason trialist, World Council of Churches representative, and Botswana’s ambassador to the United States.

He was also a man of faith, a comrade, husband and father who counted jazz singing and tap dancing among his extra-mural pursuits.

ZK’s ancestral home was Botswana but his father Peter Motsielwa worked on the mines in Kimberley where he met ZK’s mother, Martha Mooketsi.

Born in Kimberley in 1901, ZK grew up in a local township. His first interaction with a white person was with the “location superintendent” who led pass law raids.

A month after the founding of Fort Hare in 1916, he arrived in Alice having won a scholarship to Lovedale College, one of the cluster of missionary schools in the district.

Two years later, he started attending “No-Collegi” as the nascent Fort Hare came to be known, as a matriculation candidate, joining a student body of 40 with three faculty members. He matriculated in 1919 and in 1921 started working towards a BA degree. He graduated from Fort Hare after writing the Unisa external exams.

Regarded by his peers as a humble man, ZK was thrown by the applause over his graduation. “I felt shaken and wobbly and was glad to sit down again until the ceremony was over. I was startled by a deluge of wired congratulations from all over the country,” he wrote in his autobiography, Freedom for my people.

“Word came from Africans, coloureds, Indians and a few Europeans. My father, an undemonstrative man, said little, but his eyes gleamed... years of his life were wrapped up in (my graduation)... and I was glad of the honour I seemed to bring to our home and to him.”

His mother had no reservations about relishing the achievement. “She told me and our many callers how sickly I had been as a child and that I had survived only because of prayer. ‘I knew,’ she told me again and again, ‘that you were saved for a purpose... to do this for your people’,” ZK wrote, adding: “I was a new specimen in the zoo of South African mankind, an African with a South African university degree.”

A few Africans had gone abroad and obtained degrees but Matthews was the first to achieve this distinction at home.

While he established firm friendships at Lovedale and Fort Hare, there is no doubt his connection to the Eastern Cape was entrenched by falling in love with Frieda Bokwe, the daughter of the Reverend John Knox Bokwe and sister of ZK’s close friend.

As SRC chair, ZK was charged with maintaining order among the boisterous students in the dining room. One of the “noisy ones” was Frieda. “I was not much of a ladies’ man and Frieda has since told me that I was looked upon as a prim and serious fellow from whom it was as well to keep away.

“Frieda Bokwe was not shy or awkward. She spoke easily with her acquaintances, she was free and open, full of zest and confidence in herself. In those months working and studying together, walking in the evenings along the river bank, spending hours at the Bokwe home where I became virtually a member of the family, we laid the foundations of our lifelong comradeship.”

ZK’s Christian faith was nurtured by his mother and within the Anglican hostel at Fort Hare, where Bishop William Smyth, 70, was the warden. “I have accepted from religion certain values... this is rooted in ... people who have demonstrated to me what religion can mean in their lives, people I loved and respected and who were not fools. One was my mother. Another was Bishop Smyth.”

Fort Hare faculty members, wrote ZK, “were also judged by us on their racial attitudes, all the infinite and subtle variations of thought, and manner, and tone, to which we were so extraordinarily sensitive. We sensed racial undertones even when they were not there”.

Smyth was “a new kind of European for most of us. We were soon calling him Bawo, which is Xhosa for ‘father’ or affectionately, ‘old man’.”

Smyth had moved into the hostel with his two maiden sisters, slept in the dormitory, celebrated mass every sunrise, even when the students stopped his alarm clock to allow him to sleep longer, and used the same ablution facilities as the students.

“Bishop Smyth actually lived by the principle that ‘what is mine is yours’ and that applied to food and money, and to his learning, and to all things of the spirit.”

The Beda hostel was also the place where ZK’s openness to others was entrenched.

“At Beda Hall lived Africans, coloureds and Indians, in the close comradeship that the bishop fostered. It was impossible to live at Beda Hall under his regime without losing some of the prejudices we all had against other language groups, other races, other denominations and religions.... The Beda Hall tradition became to a large extent the tradition of Fort Hare College itself.”

ZK’s friendship with Smyth was memorialised in a stained glass window commissioned for the university. It depicted Smyth as St Bede and Matthews as a young disciple.

After graduation, Matthews was appointed principal of Adams College in what was then Natal. He was the first African to head a missionary school in the country.

Stints studying at Yale University and the London School of Economics followed before he was appointed a lecturer in anthropology and law at Fort Hare in 1936. He became professor and head of African studies in 1946.

ZK’s involvement in politics was driven by both the disenfranchisement of blacks and the obligation nurtured at Fort Hare that students owed a debt of public service to their families and communities. Both his father and father-in-law had the right to vote in parliamentary elections but this right was removed in 1936.

In 1942 he was elected onto the Native Representative Council, a body created by the government to mediate the expectations of Africans. In subsequent eras of opposition to apartheid, this type of co-option with racist structures was vehemently opposed by liberation movements.

ZK identified the “fundamental weakness” of the body as being its advisory status. It had “no executive functions of any kind”, developing into “a mere talking shop”.

His biographer Monica Wilson noted “there was hot debate on how far and in what way government institutions should be boycotted”, while Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthulezi, who studied under Professor Matthews, said: “I wish I could say he received support as chairman of the Native Representative Council. Instead, he experienced great opposition. The council was having little influence on government, which frustrated ZK enormously. Many called on ZK to resign from the council. Some students at Fort Hare pinned notices to the noticeboard at the college accusing him of being a stooge.”

Among those who opposed his collaboration was Fort Hare alumnus and president of the ANC Youth League, Godfrey Pitje.

Later, as the NP won the 1948 elections and entrenched racist laws, ZK argued “our plain duty is to fight, not for the retention of the present system of representation which we all condemn, but to fight against the entrenchment in South Africa of the idea that the African people are not entitled to a say in the government of the country”.

During the 1950s, Matthews was appointed acting principal at UFH. It was widely held that only the government’s racial policy prevented a full appointment; to have appointed the “persona non grata” Matthews would have been viewed as provocative.

It was while he led UFH in an acting capacity that – despite great opposition – the NP’s “cynically-named” Extension of Universities Act was passed in 1959, entrenching Bantu education and having devastating consequences for the ethos painstakingly cultivated at the open institution over 40 years.

Henceforth, the university fell directly under the department of Bantu education and only Xhosa students were accepted to study there. As a matter of principle, ZK Matthews resigned from Fort Hare in 1959, sacrificing his pension benefits. He was joined by 10 other staffers, black and white.

He later joined the WCC as Africa representative, making a huge contribution to putting refugee matters high on the global agenda.

When he died in 1968 in Washington, Matthews was Botswana’s ambassador to the United States. He was buried in Botswana.

In his own writings and in the memoir compiled by Monica Wilson, ZK’s humanity is clearly evident, as is the extent of potentially dehumanising experiences he encountered.

In the early years at Fort Hare, he was appointed to the royal commission investigating education in East Africa. After three months of work as an equal, black member of the commission, he had to endure the ignominy of returning to South Africa by train, as black passengers were not accommodated at the country’s airports.

Wilson also relates a story of ZK travelling by train from East London to Pretoria in 1960 while under detention without trial and handcuffed to a white policeman. “A black waiter on the train, recognising ZK, offered to bring him food. He replied, looking at his guard: ‘I will only eat if my friend here can’.”

He wrote in his autobiography that “if Fort Hare had done nothing else it had, during 40 years of existence, demonstrated that white and black could work together, without questions of colour discrimination bedeviling their common objectives.”

At the university’s closing ceremony in 1959, Matthews said: “Fort Hare has striven to show during the last 40 years that it is possible for people of different racial backgrounds, different cultural backgrounds, different political affiliations, and different faiths, to live together in amity.

“I believe this unhappy country will not become a happy country until that lesson is learnt. I feel that sooner or later the lesson must be learnt or South Africa will come to disaster. And when it is learnt, when the day does come, I think due credit will be given to Fort Hare.” — rayh@dispatch.co.za