Mathews Phosa is in a good mood. A very good mood. The distinguished man in the suit, with a cardigan on against the bitter Highveld winter, looks a lot like Nelson Mandela did before he discovered his eponymous shirts. The silver hair is the same, the humour, the passion – and the steely resolve beneath.
Phosa’s holding a copy of his latest anthology of poems. It’s his third, but only the first to contain his English poems. His first two were of Afrikaans poems; the late André Brink published 15 of them in the Afrikaans literary magazine Standpunte while Phosa was still at university.
These aren’t Phosa’s only English poems either. Growing up in a family of traditional poets, his first one was published in his high school year book when he was only 15. Many more would be published in Staffrider and through Ravan Press, pioneering progressive literary organisations that tried to shine a light as apartheid repression tried to douse it.
He was inspired by James Matthews, who first enjoined a young Phosa to write in Afrikaans, by Oswald Mtshali, Sydney Sepamla, Don Mattera, Wally Serote, Stephen Grey, Breyten Breytenbach. The Afrikaans writers in particular fascinated and repelled him because they could write of the oppression of the volk by the British and yet in turn become oppressors themselves when they had been liberated.
Notwithstanding, Phosa graduated in Afrikaans and Nederlands at university.
This anthology, Chants of Freedom, is different from everything else. For a start, the poems had been forgotten, unearthed only as part of Phosa’s preparation for his autobiography. Written during Phosa’s exile in 1984 as he tried to make sense of what had happened and beyond, into and onto, but not over, the threshold of democracy, they’re angry, burning snapshots of a bloody civil war that is fast being airbrushed and at worst even ignored.
Phosa’s elder sister read the book just before publication. She told him: “It’s too painful, but I can relate to each point.”
Phosa, who had a legal practice in Nelspruit, was a regional commander of uMkhonto we Sizwe, going into Swaziland every weekend to communicate with the High Command in Lusaka, Zambia, and smuggle arms and ammunition back into South Africa. One day, a friend and comrade was arrested. He was tortured and broke. In a world of need-to-know, he was the only one who knew the true extent of MK activities in the erstwhile Eastern Transvaal and the homelands. Only he could unmask Phosa.
The young lawyer was defending clients in a treason trial with today’s deputy chief justice Dikgang Moseneke when he spotted a yellow Passat slowly travel past his hotel. It was a pre-arranged signal that his cover was blown.
He spoke to Moseneke during the lunch recess: “He said: ‘What’s wrong?’ There had been shoot-outs, front-page headlines in the Rand Daily Mail – ‘Terrorists arrested in Bushbuckridge’. I said: ‘Ernest, listen, I’m involved.’”
He left Moseneke there in court that afternoon. That evening he met with a contact in the security branch. He still didn’t believe that he would have to flee.
“The lawyer in me says now they know I will defend myself. My source said: ‘Listen to me, Mr Lawyer, we are going to kill you, you know Nofomela, Dirk Coetzee?’ They were just names to me. ‘They are going to kill you, this order comes from Compol (Police HQ) Pretoria.’”
He left for Swaziland as usual that Saturday afternoon. Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma was in the country practising as a doctor. That weekend Jacob Zuma, Phosa’s MK commander, happened to be there too. Neither of them were in doubt. They made sure he flew out that night for Lusaka.
From there, it was on to East Germany where Phosa underwent extensive military training before going to Mozambique where he lived for a time with Rob Davies (the current minister of Trade and Industry) and his wife, while shuttling between five other safe houses to avoid being assassinated by security police gunmen.
ANC president Oliver Tambo had wanted him to start a legal practice in Harare.
“I refused. I said there’s no way I can leave home with fresh blood behind me and so many heavy expectations from me and those I had commanded and they hear I’m here making money in exile. I said I prefer to be left in the battlefield. He said: ‘I respect that. I would have preferred that we had many (more) people like you who don’t carry ANC flags so they can reach other parts.’”
There, in Maputo, Phosa started to write. One of his first poems was Comrade you’re not a traitor, about his brother-in-arms who had been tortured to death. He is not named in the poem. Nor does Phosa name him now. He knows how he died. He knows who tortured him. Their names. Their ranks in the police force. What they did. “He was never a traitor. He was my hero,” Phosa says simply.
He would write 30 other poems during that time. Reflections on life in the struggle, on life under apartheid, on the need for sacrifice.
There were no ways to archive them properly. Most were written on the run, in safe houses, under daily threat of death from South Africa directly or by the bombs which killed Ruth First and maimed Albie Sachs, as he ran MK from the key point of Maputo.
It’s difficult though not to find a resonance between the 35-year-old poems and the events of the current times.
Phosa doesn’t disagree.
“When I look at Marikana for example, the shooting of black people by black people and killing them, it brought the guts out of Sharpeville. It scares me, it mustn’t happen again. You don’t want to hear that a human right is being violated in any manner whatsoever, you want to promote human rights all the time.
“We live in a constitutional state, you don’t want to hear that someone is trampling on the constitution. The National Party did that and removed the coloureds from the voters roll. They walked on the constitution, so when you attack the judiciary you start to move in that direction and you have to be careful. People say the faces are black, black managers, but the behaviour is the same.”
With eery prescience, Phosa writes in Boys and Girls are back, 22 years ago, of the work that must be done to create a new society, one of harmony and peace, one of service.
It is the final poem in the anthology.
“It calls on us not to over-celebrate, to understand the meaning of freedom. It means we have a responsibility not to repeat the mistakes of the past.”
Leaders have to identify the needs of their people, he says. Those leaders have to choose between two Ss, serve or steal.
“If you are a leader, I say shut your mouth and open your eyes, and say what do you see as the challenges of your people, that’s what the poem is saying.”
Those same leaders dare not be above the law, particularly in a country where the constitution is the apex law, with jurisdiction over everything including parliament and the laws it makes.
Mandela went to court – as a sitting president – after rugby supremo Louis Luyt sued him. Phosa accompanied him each day.
“Mandela subjected himself to a court of law, he would have been the last in the queue to attack the court. And that was a white court with white judges and prosecutors. Now the JSC is introducing transformation. What business do we have attacking the judiciary? If you differ from a judgment, you appeal.
“If you accept, you live in a constitutional state… that is the final word. It’s the apex court and that court has a say over Parliament and everything that comes out of it and to hell with arrogance of politicians. And that’s how citizens in a constitutional state must behave otherwise there will be no order.
“Now to say ‘we want to see the judges and tell them anecdotes’ is childish. They don’t need anecdotes, they need you to uphold the constitution in terms of your office. Full stop.”
He’s particularly concerned about the fallout internationally from South Africa’s handling of the recent Omar al-Bashir case. “You must respect international treaties or you behave like a delinquent state and if you do so, you won’t get foreign direct investment, you won’t grow economy, lose credibility as a state.”
BEE is another of Phosa’s bugbears. His own solution is ETE; Empowerment Through Education.
“You cannot tell me now that a child in Sub A can benefit from BEE, they cannot.”
He’s vexed too by the xenophobia that racks South Africa. For him, the struggle against apartheid was fashioned not just by his experience of exile and the hospitality he received, but the injunction of the Freedom Charter, the Harare Declaration and the constitution that followed it: “South Africa belongs to all who live in it.”
Most of all though, it’s the failure to be honest to history: “Don’t be afraid of the blood, the stinking guts, the pus. Be honest to the future and give the necessary warnings that need to be given and insist on what is right… the basic values.”
Chants of Freedom holds up a stark mirror to that past. People can make up their own minds about what they see in that reflection.
Phosa doesn’t ask any more than that.