A GIANT FALLS
Kathrada disliked Mandela’s brand of African nationalism and persuaded him to change it His involvement in the passive resistance campaign saw him thrown into jail for the first time at 17
1929-2017
AHMED “Kathy” Kathrada, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 87, was sentenced to life imprisonment when he was 34 and spent 26 years behind bars.
The evidence against him in the 1964 Rivonia Trial was so weak that his lawyers told him he had a reasonable prospect of being acquitted on appeal or at least having his sentence substantially reduced.
But he refused to appeal out of solidarity with his seven coaccused, who had agreed before sentencing that they would not appeal.
He said he did not want to do anything that would separate him from his fellow accused, especially Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu.
He felt a visceral bond with Sisulu, whom he regarded as a father. His biological father died when Kathrada was 14. When Sisulu died, Kathrada said he had “lost a father”. His attitude to him was one of veneration.
His attitude to Mandela was more qualified; they had acrimonious disagreements over strategy and tactics. Kathrada disliked Mandela’s extreme brand of African nationalism, which he thought racist, and persuaded Mandela to change it.
Leaving them to face life in jail while he walked free was unthinkable to Kathrada.
The Rivonia defence team made no attempt to change his mind. But they left him in no doubt that, in Kathrada’s words, “this is what can happen if you decide to appeal”.
Ismail Mahomed — who later became chief justice — was privately advising Kathrada, and dissuaded him from appealing.
He told Kathrada that people would say: “Look at this Indian. He made speeches for the ANC but when the time came he deserted the party.”
In effect, Kathrada went to jail for 26 years because he believed it was the right thing to do. He said he never regretted his decision for a moment and would have made the same decision if they had been sentenced to death.
What he regretted, and was angry about, was the manner of their arrest at the ANC underground headquarters at Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia on July 11 1963.
He rejected speculation that the police raid on Liliesleaf resulted from a tip-off by the CIA and/or other foreign intelligence agencies.
The ANC and the SACP had only themselves to blame, he said.
“There was a complete flouting of security at Liliesleaf, as if the revolution was around the corner. People just stopped believing in security.”
What nearly got him and his comrades hanged was the issue of armed struggle.
Kathrada supported the escalation of the struggle from passive to armed resistance but said he was “frightened” when talk turned to Operation Mayibuye, the blueprint for the armed struggle.
He did most of the administrative work for the movement and typed out the Operation Mayibuye document. What he saw “terrified” him. He thought the authors, Joe Slovo and Govan Mbeki, were “living on another planet”.
He and the others were only saved from the gallows because the defence persuaded the court that Operation Mayibuye had not yet been officially approved by the leadership. The raid intervened. Kathrada believed that if it had come any later they would “quite likely” have got the death penalty.
They took it for granted that they would get death, particularly after Mandela’s provocative speech from the dock on April 20 1964 in which he seemed almost to challenge Judge Quartus de Wet to hang them.
An experienced advocate consulted by the leader of their defence team, Bram Fischer, warned that it would be their death warrant.
But Kathrada and the others approved it. He said they agreed with Mandela’s approach that “you proclaim your political beliefs, you don’t apologise, you don’t ask for mercy”.
They were not there to save their lives, said Kathrada, but to state their beliefs.
Until the last day of the trial their expectation was death, which they had agreed not to appeal as it would be “a sign of weakness”.
Kathrada was born on August 21 1929 in the small Afrikaans-speaking (Kathrada spoke the language fluently) town of Schweizer-Reneke in what was then the Western Transvaal. His parents were from Gujarat in India. They opened a general dealership in the town in 1919.
There was no school for Indians in Schweizer-Reneke and although this was before the advent of official apartheid Kathrada was not allowed to attend a non-Indian school. At the age of eight he was packed off to stay with an aunt in Fordsburg, Johannesburg, 320km away, so that he could go to the Indian school there.
It was a hugely traumatic and seminal event in his life. He began questioning why he could not go to school with his black and white playmates. His uneasiness was reinforced by signs he started noticing in Johannesburg saying “Non-Europeans not allowed”, or even “Non-Europeans and dogs not allowed”.
All these things playing on an acutely inquiring young mind led to an early political awakening.
His activism began at the age of 11 when he joined a nonracial youth group run by the Young Communist League and handed out anti-war leaflets for them.
When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 the communists became supporters of the war.
But young Kathrada hated British and US imperialism and rejoiced every time they suffered a defeat.
In 1946 he joined the passive resistance campaign against the “ghetto act” that restricted where Indians could live, trade and own land.
The campaign was organised by the South African Indian Congress in which Dr Yusuf Dadoo was a leading figure. He had an important influence on Kathrada, who, under his tutelage, met and befriended the emerging ANC leaders Mandela, Sisulu and Oliver Tambo.
At the age of 17 Kathrada left school before completing matric to work full time in the offices of the Transvaal Passive Resistance Council. Although he flirted briefly with academia at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1951, it was only much later that he picked up his academic studies again.
He was the first prisoner on Robben Island to get a degree, a BA in history and criminology. He completed three more degrees while on the island.
His involvement in the passive resistance campaign saw him thrown into jail for the first time at 17. He was arrested another 18 times before going to Robben Island.
As chairman of the Transvaal Indian Youth Congress he attended the World Youth Festival in East Berlin in 1951 and a meeting of the International Union of Students in Warsaw, Poland.
He visited Auschwitz concentration camp, which had a profound effect on him and reinforced his determination to fight oppression and racism back home in South Africa.
As an icon of the struggle Kathrada was quiet, reticent, thoughtful and self-effacing, a dignified figure in the background happy to let other former activists take centre stage.
But in the cauldron of the resistance in the 1950s he was fiery and opinionated and well able to hold his own against a headstrong and sometimes aggressive Mandela, who was a leader in the ANC Youth League while Kathrada was prominent in the Young Communist League.
In 1950 the Transvaal Indian Congress, SACP and Transvaal ANC resolved to organise a May Day freedom strike.
The ANC Youth League led by Mandela violently opposed it because they feared it would steal their thunder.
During one extremely acrimonious confrontation, Kathrada, all of 21 at the time, challenged Mandela to a public one-on-one debate and told him: “I’ll beat you.”
Mandela complained to the leaders of the Indian Congress about Kathrada’s “disrespect”. Ismail Meer told him not to take this “hot-headed youngster” seriously.
In spite of their spirited disagreements Mandela was a regular visitor to No 13 Kholvad House in central Johannesburg, the flat Kathrada inherited from Meer in 1949 when he went to Durban.
It became a favourite meeting place for Congress leaders in the ’50s and a place of refuge for their children, whom “Uncle Kathy” would look after when they were in jail or on the run.
Others who stayed there regularly included Chief Albert Luthuli, Dadoo and the Anglican activist priest Michael Scott.
Mandela used it as his law office in the early ’60s after Tambo went into exile. Sometimes it was so full of his clients that there was no room for Kathrada.
On weekends it was given over to partying and pulsated with music and jiving activists of all colours.
It is where Kathrada was entertaining his white girlfriend, fellow anti-apartheid activist Sylvia Neame, over a holiday weekend in 1962 when the police banged on the door. She hid in a bedroom while Kathrada, in a display of entirely false bravado, gave them a piece of his mind outside.
Fortunately it worked and they backed off or Kathrada, who was under house arrest, would have been in serious trouble for breaking his banning orders and the Immorality Act.
The experience encouraged him to go underground soon afterwards.
When he was sent to Robben Island Neame said she would wait for him. But in 1965 she was jailed for two years for her political activities, and fled South Africa after her release. In the early ’70s they agreed to end their love affair.
A prison warden confiscated
Kathrada’s only photograph of her. When he asked for it back the warden burnt it in front of him, saying Kathrada had no right to keep a photograph of a white woman.
Neame got married and went to live in Germany, where Kathrada visited her after his release.
Kathrada and Mandela had several serious disagreements in and after prison.
In 1977 he forcefully opposed Mandela’s decision to see his nephew, the Transkei homeland leader Kaizer Matanzima, who had asked to visit him on Robben Island.
He also strongly disagreed with Mandela’s decision after their release to meet the Rivonia Trial chief prosecutor, Percy Yutar.
Kathrada and Yutar had a famous exchange during the Rivonia Trial which annoyed the preening state prosecutor while delighting everyone else, including the judge.
Yutar was trying to tie Kathrada to Mandela, who while underground mentioned in his diary a delicious curry prepared for him by “K”.
“Are you sometimes referred to as ‘K’?” Yutar demanded.
Kathrada: “I am not referred to as ‘K’. I don’t know anybody who refers to me as ‘K’.”
“Do you know anybody else who goes under the initial of ‘K’?” screeched Yutar in frustration.
Kathrada considered this for a while before replying with a poker face. “Yes. Mr Khrushchev.”
In 1952, at the height of the Defiance Campaign, Kathrada was among 20 people arrested and tried under the Suppression of Communism Act. He was sentenced to nine months’ hard labour, suspended for two years.
In 1954, he was placed under restrictions by the security police and arrested several times for breaking his banning orders.
He helped organise the multiracial Congress of the People which adopted the Freedom Charter at Kliptown in 1955, but had to watch proceedings from a distance because of his banning.
In 1956, he was among 156 congress activists charged with high treason. After a trial lasting four years they were acquitted.
When Mandela went underground in 1960 after the banning of the ANC, Kathrada was part of a small committee that looked after him, organised his meetings and planned his trips outside the country.
In 1982 after 18 years on Robben Island Kathrada was moved to Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town with Mandela, Sisulu, Raymond Mhlaba and Andrew Mlangeni.
He was released on October 15 1989 after 26 years and three months in prison. A few months later he said he missed it.
“There, they open the gates for you and close the gates. They provide food. There was a lot of time to think and discuss,” he said. “That time is gone.”
After the unbanning of the ANC in February 1990 he was elected to its national executive committee. He served on its interim leadership committee and its equivalent in the SACP.
He was an MP from 1994 to 1999, which he did not enjoy at all. He also worked in Mandela’s office as his adviser during this period.
He was chairman of the Robben Island Museum until 2006 and spent a lot of his time showing VIPs around the island. By 2014 he had been back there 267 times, he said.
None of the kings, queens, presidents and Hollywood stars he showed around meant as much to him as a white Afrikaans girl from Secunda, Michelle Brits, who was terminally ill with leukaemia. She had two dying wishes: to go to Robben Island and to meet Mandela, then the president.
In 1998 Mandela and Kathrada visited her in Secunda, and Kathrada kept a framed photograph of her on his desk.
Last year Kathrada, who had consistently refused to criticise the ANC leadership publicly, wrote an open letter to President Jacob Zuma urging him to “submit to the will of the people and resign”. His was the first name on a petition signed by 101 ANC stalwarts telling Zuma to leave Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan alone.
Kathrada is survived by his wife, Barbara Hogan. Hogan was the first woman in South Africa to be found guilty of high treason, and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. They met in an SABC TV studio soon after she was released in 1990. — Chris Barron
Kathrada wrote an open letter to President Jacob Zuma urging him to ‘submit to the will of the people and resign’