Z. K. Matthews Biography
In the 1940s and 1950s, Zachariah Keodirelang Matthews (Z. K. Matthews) was a well-known leader of the African National Congress (ANC). He was also one of the first Africans to work as an educator in South Africa, at a time when there were not many black professors. Christian and Cape liberal traditions that emphasized the value of education in resolving social issues and supporting a society devoid of race had a significant impact on Matthews.
He was on the board of the South African Institute of Race Relations, which put him in touch with white leftists. He thought that Africans should be in charge of their own lives and that their past should be written from an African point of view. The Tswana people and his family stories talked a lot about how invaders stole their land.
Throughout his work, Z. K. Matthews tried to balance being a professor with being a public figure. His first job was as president of the Natal Bantu Teachers’ Association in 1930. His second job was as head of the Federation of African Teachers’ Associations from 1941 to 1942. In 1936 and 1937, he was on the Royal Commission into Higher Education in East Africa. In 1945, he was on the Union Advisory Board on Native Education, and he was also on the Ciskei Missionary Council.
Policies of division and, after 1948, apartheid made it harder for black people to move up in society, which is what drove members of the black elite like Matthews into politics. In 1935, he helped start the All-African Convention. In 1940, he joined the ANC and was elected to its National Executive in 1943. In that role, he helped write African Claims (1943) and the Program of Action (1949), which were important documents in the ANC’s move toward becoming a more mass-based movement.
In 1949, he won the election as president of the Cape ANC, but the same year, Nelson Mandela’s Congress Youth League members nominated him to serve as the ANC’s national president. Back in the 1940s, the ANC had a vague approach to state structures, which could be used to help African goals at times. So, Matthews and other ANC leaders were voted to the Native Representative Council (NRC) in 1942. The NRC was just a body for advice and didn’t really have any power.
In this setting, he fought for African rights, and in 1946, he spoke out against the “wanton shooting” by police of African mineworkers who were on strike on behalf of the NRC’s African members. But he didn’t quit the NRC until 1950, even though extreme ANC members had asked him to do so. He did this to protest apartheid policies.
In the 1950s, Z. K. Matthews was still involved in politics. He helped plan the Defiance Campaign but didn’t take part in it because, from June 1952 to May 1953, he was a visiting professor at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. While there, he pressed the UN, even though Pretoria told him not to. When asked about alternatives to apartheid at the ANC annual meeting in 1953, he suggested that all South Africans write a charter that represented their hopes and dreams.
The first Congress of this kind took place in 1955, and the Freedom Charter that came out of it became the ANC’s main policy statement for the next 40 years. Matthews was also ANC vice president general under Chief Albert Lutuli and gave the presidential speech for Lutuli in 1955.
But the government cracked down harder, and in December 1956, he, his son Joe, and many other important ANC leaders were jailed for the treason trial. Z. K. Matthews wasn’t freed until April 1959, and he was jailed again during the emergency in 1960. Still, he kept working on unity projects, like the 1960 Cottesloe Consultation of the World Council of Churches in Johannesburg, and for a short time, he became head of the Cape ANC again. Z. K. left South Africa in 1961 because he was being persecuted there.
He worked on ecumenical issues while he was in exile. For five years, he was the Africa head of the World Council of Churches in Geneva, but he also spoke out against apartheid. Botswana’s ambassador to the US and permanent representative to the UN were both given to him in 1966. He was born in Washington, D.C., and died there in 1968. He was buried in Botswana.
Z. K. Matthews wrote a lot. He had a lot of scholarly and popular pieces about South African politics and history, as well as works about Tswana history and culture and an autobiography that came out after he died. Matthews was not a radical, and he was wary of them. However, the African nationalist ideologies that became prevalent in the ANC after 1940 also had an impact on him. He fought for black rights all the time, and as a pioneering African educator, he was a major force for unity in the ANC.
He saw that the ANC needed to grow into a strong mass force. Even though he was a liberal, he admitted in the early 1960s that the ANC only turned to armed struggle when all other peaceful options had been exhausted. His influence lives on. Thabo Mbeki told the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997 that Z. K. Matthews was “an outstanding leader of our people.”
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