Don Mattera

Donato Francesco Mattera was born in 1935 in Western Native Township, now Westbury, in Johannesburg, to a father of Italian descent and a Tswana mother, and was largely raised by his grandparents. A boarder at a Catholic school in Durban, he returned at the age of fourteen and, as a teenager, was a gang leader. Won over to the fight against the removals from Sophiatown, then to Black Consciousness, he was banned from 1973 to 1982. A journalist at the Sunday Times and the Sowetan, he died at home, in Protea Glen, on 18 July 2022.

In the catalogue 1

• NarrativeMemory Is the WeaponDon Mattera · 1987Literature