Memory is the Weapon (Paperback, Revised)

Don Mattera sets his boyhood experiences against the background of Sophiatown, and offers a compelling account of how a multicultural and cosmopolitan society was transformed and destroyed by apartheid. Sophiatown was at the heart of black South African culture in the 1950s. A "Greenwich Village" of music, politics, and crime.It was run by warring gangs, but it also developed a thriving cultural life, attracting writers and musicians of international fame. When the Nationalist government came to power in 1948, it decided that the mixing of races in Sophiatown contradicted its fundamental tenets, and began a campaign to racial reclassification that segregated the community into racial districts. Seething with resistance to the "removals" and hated by the racial purists of apartheid, Sophiatown was finally bulldozed out of existence in 1962. Growing up in Sophiatown in the 1950s with an Italian grandfather and Tswana mother, Mattera was classified as a "colored" in the lexicon of apartheid. He portrays with anger and sympathy the tragic fate of the community divided by new laws that declared interracial marriages illegal and that sent members of the same family to different residential districts. Mattera's brutal story also traces his rise to political consciousness. In his journey from notorious gangster to activist and poet, Mattera introduces the reader to such major figures as Robert Resha and Nelson Mandela, and to forces of resistance that originated in that period and that have since remained active in the struggle for liberation. Powerful, honest, and full of insight, Sophiatown is an extraordinary testimony to the triumph of the spirit over the devastating effects of apartheid.