By Emma Olivier
In preparation for Die Matie’s 85th anniversary edition set to come out on 12 August, I paid several visits to the compact storage section of the library. In that quiet underground room where time only passed when I looked at my watch, I was confronted with decades of stories captured between those sliding shelves, and I marveled at the privilege and the burden one has in preserving such a massive fraction of history.
85 years ago today, Die Matie published its first-ever edition. Looking through the archives showed me the importance of local media in keeping trustworthy journalism alive. It reflects the thoughts of our milieu, directly from the minds of our neighbours, in a world where this becomes fleeting as the pace and sheer amount of content exceeds memory and imagination.
As I reflect on this mass of information now – a drop in the bucket, if you consider every story and every struggle – I think of a letter the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote around 65 AD. Almost two millennia later, this letter perhaps says something that we who live in abundance (floods) of information may still take to heart. To paraphrase the letter, a restless traveler has no home, a plant constantly replanted cannot take root. So, Seneca warns against a frantic consumption of information, lest you take in nothing.
For 85 years Die Matie has nourished an informational home in Stellenbosch for its readers to take root in. Building Die Matie back up after the COVID-19 pandemic seemed a slow and complicated mission, and perhaps it was a long time coming, since the transition from print to website was everything but smooth. Just a few years ago, on multiple occasions, had I mentioned Die Matie, people would not know what I meant.
Today, Die Matie’s presence has increased significantly, and we don’t plan on stopping. The people behind the paper are some of the most hard-working, passionate and admirable that I have ever met. The way a team works together certainly reveals itself in the results they release. I believe sharing in this labour of love, and knowing that’s what it is – love for the truth, freedom of speech, our fellow students, and the way all this can benefit them – is what helps Die Matie report well.
Paging through hundreds of old Die Matie pages, and walking past the photos of previous editorial teams in the office entrance really made me feel the weight of writing for this paper. And although heavy sometimes, it’s a comforting weight.
Having dinner on the office floor, falling asleep at the desk on late layout nights, writing down the ridiculous things said and heard on the quote wall during news meetings: these experiences are not new, and that’s an overwhelming, beautiful feeling.
The legacy of 85 years of campus news is both a lovely burden and a heavy privilege to carry, and our team does it joyfully, unabashedly. It feels like Die Matie has finally found its footing again after a restless period of learning and adapting, but it remains a home for the stories and the students that make this town’s history.
