At a Glance
Fort Hare and the Inheritance of a Political Tradition
Joe Matthews grew up in the world of Fort Hare University College in Alice in the Eastern Cape — the institution that educated more leaders of African independence movements across the continent than any other single institution, and that was the intellectual heart of the African political tradition in South Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. His father, ZK Matthews, was a professor there — a man of extraordinary intellectual range and political seriousness whose career at Fort Hare made the institution a centre of African political thought as well as of academic life.
Growing up as ZK Matthews's son meant growing up surrounded by the leading figures of the African political tradition — people who came to Fort Hare to teach, to study, to consult with ZK, and to engage in the ongoing political conversation that the ANC and its affiliates were conducting about the future of South Africa. Nelson Mandela had been a student at Fort Hare; Oliver Tambo had been a student there; the Eastern Cape more broadly was the heartland of the ANC's organisational strength and intellectual culture. Joe Matthews came of age in this environment and was shaped by it in ways that his subsequent political journeys, however contradictory, never entirely erased.
ZK Matthews was himself a figure of enormous importance — not only for his intellectual contributions to African political thought but for the specific act of imagination that led him to propose the Congress of the People. At the ANC's Cape provincial conference in 1953, he suggested that the Congress Alliance organisations should convene a representative gathering of the South African people to draw up a Freedom Charter — a document that would articulate the rights and aspirations of all South Africans in a form that could serve as the foundation for post-apartheid governance. The Congress of the People, held at Kliptown in June 1955, was the realisation of that proposal, and the Freedom Charter that it adopted became one of the most important documents in the history of the liberation movement. Joe Matthews carried the weight of this inheritance — the son of the man who proposed the Freedom Charter, a member of the generation that adopted it.
The Youth League and the Programme of Action
The ANC Youth League, which Joe Matthews helped found in 1944, was the organisational expression of a generational impatience with the cautious, petition-based politics of the ANC's older leadership. The founding generation of the Youth League — Mandela, Tambo, Sisulu, Anton Lembede, and others — believed that the ANC needed to move from requesting reform to demanding it, from polite petitioning to confrontational mass action, from a politics of moderation to a politics of militancy that reflected the urgency of the liberation struggle.
Joe Matthews was part of this generation and shared its political formation. His friendship and political association with Mandela and Tambo from the Youth League years was a founding relationship that shaped his political identity and that persisted, through the subsequent divergences and complications of their political careers, as a thread connecting his various political phases to the world he had come from. The Programme of Action that the Youth League pushed through the ANC's 1949 annual conference — the document that committed the ANC to strikes, boycotts, stay-at-home protests, and defiance of unjust laws — was the political expression of the generation's militancy, and Matthews was among those who had worked to make it happen.
The Defiance Campaign of 1952, which put the Programme of Action into practice, was one of the high points of the early ANC's mass action politics — a campaign in which thousands of volunteers deliberately broke the apartheid laws in acts of nonviolent defiance, accepting arrest and prosecution as the price of their resistance. The campaign built the ANC's membership from under ten thousand to more than one hundred thousand in a single year, transforming the organisation from a relatively small educated elite into a genuine mass movement. Joe Matthews was part of the political generation that made this transformation possible.
The Ideological Fracture: ANC and PAC
The founding of the Pan Africanist Congress in 1959 represented the most significant organisational split in the history of the South African liberation movement — a split that reflected a genuine ideological division about the nature of African nationalism and its relationship to non-African communities in South Africa. The Africanists who formed the PAC — led by Robert Sobukwe, with the support of figures like Potlako Leballo and others — argued that the ANC's Congress Alliance, with its formal partnerships with the South African Indian Congress, the Congress of Democrats, and the Coloured People's Congress, compromised the authenticity of the African nationalist project. The argument was that South Africa was an African country, that its liberation would be achieved by Africans, and that the inclusion of non-African organisations in the Congress Alliance — however well-intentioned those organisations might be — diluted the African character of the liberation movement and gave disproportionate influence to communities whose relationship to African liberation was necessarily different from that of the African majority.
Joe Matthews's move from the ANC to the PAC was a move from the non-racialist current to the Africanist current within African nationalism — a real ideological choice that reflected genuine convictions about the nature of the liberation struggle. The non-racialism of the ANC, grounded in the Freedom Charter's declaration that "South Africa belongs to all who live in it," was one answer to the question of what South Africa should become. The Africanism of the PAC, grounded in the argument that a country colonised by European settlers was in the first instance an African country that needed to be reclaimed by its indigenous people, was another answer to the same question.
The PAC was less organisationally effective than the ANC in the long term — its Sharpeville campaign of March 1960, though it triggered the massacre that became one of the defining events of the anti-apartheid struggle, was followed by the banning of the PAC and the organisation's subsequent difficulty in building an effective underground or exile presence comparable to the ANC's. But the Africanist argument was not simply wrong because the Africanist organisation was less successful than the non-racialist one; it was a serious political position with a genuine philosophical grounding in the traditions of African nationalist thought.
Exile, Intellect, and the Long Complications of Political Life
Joe Matthews spent years in exile — working for the PAC in various parts of Africa and beyond, contributing his legal skills and his intellectual capacity to an organisation that was significantly smaller and less resourced than the ANC but that represented a genuine alternative tradition within South African nationalism. His years in exile were years of engagement with the broader Pan-Africanist movement, with the intellectual debates about the nature of African identity and African liberation that were conducted across the continent in the decades of independence.
He was a man who thought seriously about politics — who engaged with the theoretical dimensions of the questions he was living through rather than simply acting on instinct or loyalty. His legal training and his intellectual formation at Fort Hare gave him the tools to analyse the South African situation with a rigour that made him one of the more intellectually distinguished figures of the liberation generation, regardless of the political positions he arrived at through that analysis. People who disagreed with his conclusions — and many did, especially in his later phases — generally conceded the quality of his mind.
Inkatha and the Most Contested Chapter
The most difficult and most contested period of Joe Matthews's long political life was his association with the Inkatha Freedom Party — the organisation led by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi that during the transition period became involved in violent conflict with ANC-aligned communities and that was subsequently revealed, through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and other investigations, to have received covert support from the apartheid government's security apparatus, including funding for the training of hit squads responsible for the killing of ANC activists.
Matthews's alignment with Inkatha placed him on the opposite side of this conflict from the movement he had started his political life in. The violence in KwaZulu-Natal and on the Reef between IFP and ANC supporters in the late 1980s and early 1990s killed thousands of people and constituted one of the most tragic dimensions of the transition period — a conflict in which the apartheid state's covert support for Inkatha was a deliberate strategy to weaken the ANC by setting Zulu-speaking communities against each other and against ANC-aligned communities. The political figure who had been a Youth League comrade of Nelson Mandela in the 1940s was now, in the most charitable interpretation, associated with an organisation that the security apparatus of the apartheid state was using as an instrument of violence against the ANC.
How to assess this phase of Matthews's career — how to weigh it against the earlier phases, how to understand what brought him to it, how to evaluate the sincerity of the political convictions that he articulated within the Inkatha context — is genuinely difficult. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's findings about the apartheid state's covert support for Inkatha did not resolve the question of individual political responsibility for those who were associated with the organisation without knowledge of or participation in the covert operations. But the association remained, and it shaped how his career was remembered.
Legacy: The Full Complexity of a Political Life
Joe Matthews died in 2010, at the age of eighty-one. He had lived through the founding of the ANC Youth League, the Defiance Campaign, the Freedom Charter, the founding of the PAC, the years of exile, the transition to democracy, and the first sixteen years of the post-apartheid era. His was a long life in politics, and it was a life that did not resolve into a simple narrative.
What is unambiguous is his intellectual distinction — the quality of the mind he brought to the analysis of South African politics across the many phases of his career. What is unambiguous is his significance in the Youth League years — his contribution to the generation that transformed the ANC into a mass movement and that built the political foundations on which the liberation struggle rested. And what is unambiguous is the complexity of the subsequent journey — the moves from organisation to organisation, from ideological position to ideological position, that make his career one of the most instructive and most troubling in the history of the South African nationalist tradition.
Understanding the liberation movement requires understanding its contradictions as well as its achievements, and Joe Matthews — son of ZK Matthews, comrade of Mandela, Africanist, Inkatha figure — embodies those contradictions with a thoroughness that no simpler life could match. The full range of the South African nationalist tradition, from its most hopeful beginnings to its most painful divisions, is visible in the arc of his political life. That is not a minor thing for a historian to work with, even if it is a difficult thing for a movement to acknowledge.