Azania Love Song

Donato Francisco Mattera has been celebrated as a journalist, editor, writer and poet. He is also acknowledged as one of the foremost activists in the struggle for a democratic South Africa, and helped to found both the Union of Black Journalists and the Congress of South African Writers. Born in 1935 in Western Native Township (now Westbury) across the road from Sophiatown, Mattera can lay claim to an intriguingly diverse lineage: his paternal grandfather was Italian, and he has Tswana, Khoi-Khoi and Xhosa blood in his veins. Yet diversity was hardly being celebrated at that time; in one of apartheid's most infamous actions, the vibrant multicultural area of Sophiatown was destroyed in 1955 and replaced with the white suburb of Triumph, and the wrenching displacement can be felt in Mattera's writing.