Humble hero of the struggle
Kathrada was not afraid to be unpopular in his own party
AHMED Kathrada, one of the quiet men of the struggle, was probably the one South African who did more than any other to nurture the challenging legacy of his long-time prison companion, Nelson Mandela.
His death in Johannesburg, aged 87, followed a short illness, and a life generously devoted to humane objectives.
Unalterable in conviction, modest to a fault, Kathrada was scrupulous in using his undoubted status and renown as a former Robben Island prisoner and Rivonia Tria;list solely to advance and deepen the ideas for which he and his fellow famed triallists were condemned to nearly a lifetime behind bars.
As a prisoner, he was studious and thoughtful; as a free man, tireless – right to the end – in sharing all he had learnt, and placing it at the service of South Africans in their continuing, difficult quest for the good society, for equity and equality, non-racialism and justice.
If he was devoted to Mandela and Mandela’s cause, Kathrada will be remembered as the friend who penned perhaps the truest portrait of Madiba as a complex, contradictory, sometimes difficult figure of history who was so easily obscured by the near saintly luminosity projected on him by those who often hankered only for a share of its reflected glory.
And, like Mandela, he was willing to “break ranks” – and, as he himself wrote only a few months ago, “stare down dominant views, and face being unpopular among ‘one’s own’”. He did no less in March last year when he wrote to President Jacob Zuma: “I am now driven to ask: ‘Dear Comrade President, don’t you think your continued stay as president will only serve to deepen the crisis of confidence in the government of the country? … I know that if I were in the president’s shoes, I would step down with immediate effect. I believe that is what would help the country to find its way out of a path that it never imagined it would be on, but one that it must move out of soon’.”
Ahmed Mohamed Kathrada (or “Kathy”, as he was popularly known) was born on August 21, 1929, in Schweizer-Reneke, a small town just over 300km south-west of Joburg. His parents – his father was a shopkeeper – had come to South Africa from Lachpur in Gujarat, India. Growing up in rural South Africa gave Kathrada an early and lasting insight into the mean force of race; at the age of 8, he was compelled to leave the family home to go to school in Johannesburg because neither of the two schools in Schweizer-Reneke – one black, the other white – were allowed to enrol him, because he was classified an Indian.
“My entire world came tumbling down,” he recalled decades later. “Friendships that I had formed across racial lines were of no significance to the rulers of the time.”
The year was 1937, more than a decade before the National Party’s electoral victory of 1948 and the inauguration of the policy of apartheid. (Notably, Kathrada found the ANC’s own racial restriction on membership, lifted only in 1969 at its Morogoro conference, “both contradictory and humiliating”.)
However, Joburg would give him an early political education he would not have received in the rural backwater of his hometown.
He was introduced to politics at an early age after joining a non-racial youth club run by the Young Communist League at the age of 12.
Only five years later, having come under the influence of activist Yusuf Dadoo, Kathrada participated in the Passive Resistance Campaign of the South African Indian Congress against the Asiatic Land Tenure and Trading Act, which further restricted the trading rights of Indians. He was among the 2000 people arrested and imprisoned at the time.
It was in the 1940s that he first met Congress leaders Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela, Ismael Meer and JN Singh. Theirs would be a lifelong bond.
In 1952, Kathrada was in a group of 20, which included Mandela and Sisulu, sentenced to nine months in prison with hard labour, suspended for two years, for organising the Defiance Campaign against six apartheid laws.
In 1954, Kathrada was placed under restrictions by the security police and was arrested several times for breaking his “banning orders”. In 1956, he was among the 156 Congress activists and leaders charged with high treason – a trial that dragged on for four years before all the accused were acquitted.
In 1962, Kathrada was placed under “house arrest”. The next year he broke his banning orders, and went “underground”.
In July 1963 when police swooped on Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, Kathrada and other key leaders – Mandela, Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Denis Goldberg, Elias Motsoaledi and Andrew Mlangeni – were arrested, and, in the Rivonia Trial, sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour.
Kathrada’s 26 years and 3 months in prison – after 18 years on Robben Island, he, Mandela, Sisulu, Mhlaba and Mlangeni were transferred to Pollsmoor Prison in 1982 – sealed his convictions. The words he once chose to express the true commemorative virtue of Robben Island, could well be his own epitaph: “(A) triumph of the human spirit against the forces of evil; a triumph of wisdom and largeness of spirit against small minds and pettiness; a triumph of courage and determination over human frailty and weakness; a triumph of the new South Africa over the old.”
Kathrada is survived by his longtime partner, Barbara Hogan.