He hated racism in any form
When the eight-yearold Kathrada came face to face with the appalling cruelty of racism, he was determined to fight it, writes Kevin Ritchie
AHMED Kathrada was born in Schweizer-Reneke in North West, not knowing race. “With the innocence of children, we were oblivious of any differences between Ahmed and Seretse, and Hendrik. And without questioning why, I simply accepted the fact that Mr David Mtshali (the principal of the African school) was coming to our house in the afternoons to teach me ABC and 1, 2, 3…” Kathrada remembered when he received the Freedom of Johannesburg in 2012.
That all changed when he turned eight years old, forced to leave his family and travel to Johannesburg to go to an Indian school. There he came face to face with the appalling and mindless cruelty of racism: the signs of petty apartheid, separate entrances, “and worst, and most humiliating and insulting, ‘Non-Europeans, tradesmen and dogs not allowed’. In less than 10 words, all of us who were not white had been reduced to the level of lesser humans – the level of dogs,” he said.
The experience would spark a lifelong abhorrence of racism in any form, and he would devote his entire life to fighting it.
Kathrada – or Kathy, as he would be known throughout his adult life – was the fourth of six children born to an immigrant Indian Muslim couple on August 21, 1929.
Four years after arriving in Johannesburg, he joined the Young Communist League of South Africa at the age of 12 and became involved in many of the campaigns run by the YCL and the Transvaal Indian Congress, where he met and was influenced by leaders such as Dr Yusuf Dadoo, IC Meer and Yusuf Cachalia. He matriculated at the Johannesburg Indian High School and then went to work fulltime for the Transvaal Passive Resistant Council, mobilising support against the so-called “Ghetto Act”, which was intended to limit where Indians lived, traded and owned land. He spent a month in a Durban jail for this.
He first met Nelson Mandela, who was a university student, while he was still at school. Mandela was 11 years older than him and Kathrada was in awe of him.
While Kathrada was a student at the University of the Witwatersrand, he was sent as a delegate of the Transvaal Indian Youth Congress to the 3rd World Festival of Youth and Students in Berlin in 1951. He stayed in Europe for a further nine months, working at the headquarters of the World Federation of Democratic Youth in Budapest. It was another seminal moment. As he remembered: “I had to travel thousands of miles away from my country, for the first time at the age of 22, to see the inside of a library, a hotel, a restaurant, theatre, an opera, trams and trains that did not bar me because of my colour. I wallowed in the taste of non-racialism. I began to understand why friends of mine who had gone abroad to study found it difficult to return. A few never came back.”
A trip to Auschwitz left an indelible impression of man’s inhumanity to man.
“We saw the remains of the gas chambers and incinerators, lampshades made of human skin, a glass container filled with gold that was extracted from teeth of inmates. This was racialism at its very worst. Unimaginable. I can never, ever forget the horror of what I had seen. Naturally, my mind turned to South Africa, to the three years that the racist, and proHitler, Nationalist Party had come to power – the party whose election campaign in 1948 had as one of its slogans: ‘ Die Kaffers en Boesmans op hul plek, en die Koelies uit die land.’
“At Auschwitz there were fragments of human bones strewn on the street adjoining the incinerator. In retrospect, it was an error of judgment, but I picked up a few bones which I brought back home, to show the extremities of racism. During one of the police raids on my flat they asked what was in the bottle. Their response to my explanation was: ‘ Dit was seker net Jode. (It was probably just Jews)’.”
Kathrada returned home and immediately became involved in the Defiance Campaign, forging what would become lifelong friendships with Mandela and Walter Sisulu. He was charged and convicted under the Suppression of Communism Act and given a suspended nine-month jail sentence. Between 1956 and 1961 he was one of the 156 accused in the marathon Treason Trial, which ended in mass acquittals.
By 1962, though, he was under draconian house arrest, prohibited from participating in the activities of 39 separate organisations – some of which he had neither belonged to nor ever supported – banned from gatherings of more than two people, restricted to the magisterial district of Johannesburg, banned from speaking to other banned persons and sentenced to be inside his flat every day between 6pm and 7am, with daily reports to the police station every afternoon.
On July 11, 1963, Kathrada was arrested at Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, north of Johannesburg. The farm was the secret headquarters of the ANC’s underground army, Umkhonto weSizwe. He was charged with sabotage and trying to overthrow the state through violence – even though he wasn’t an MK member. The following year, he would be jailed for life along with Mandela, Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Andrew Mlangeni, Billy Nair, Elias Motsoaledi, Raymond Mhlaba and Denis Goldberg. Today only two are still alive: Goldberg and Mlangeni.
Kathrada completed four degrees on Robben Island, two bachelors’ degrees and two honours degrees. He had wanted to study further but was denied by the apartheid authorities. He was moved to the mainland, to Pollsmoor Prison, in 1982 and then released from Johannesburg Prison on October 15, 1989 along with Jeff Masemola, Raymond Mhlaba, Nair, Wilton Mkwayi, Mlangeni, Motsoaledi, Oscar Mpetha and Sisulu.
He was elected to the national executive committee of the ANC in 1991 and appointed head of the movement’s public relations department that same year. He became a member of Parliament after the first democratic elections on April 27, 1994, and became Mandela’s political adviser. He declined renominaiton to the ANC NEC in 1997 and left Parliament at the end of Mandela’s term, devoting himself as chairperson of the Robben Island Council to becoming perhaps its best-known tour guide.
Serving from 1995 until his term expired in 2006, the island for him was far more than just a place of incarceration.
“While we will not forget the brutalities of apartheid, we do not want Robben Island to be a monument of our hardships and suffering. We want it to be a triumph of the human spirit against the forces of evil, a triumph of the wisdom and largeness of spirit against the 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.”
Two years after stepping down as chair, he established the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation in Lenasia, Johannesburg, to collect, record, display and promote non-racialism, highlighting the memories of the heroes in the Struggle against apartheid with Cyril Ramaphosa, today the deputy president of South Africa, as the foundation’s first chairperson.
“The idea was to preserve documents and other memorabilia relevant to my involvement in the liberation Struggle. I did not warm to the idea (initially) because I thought it would be presumptuous on my part as an individual to encourage such a project,” he said.
“For some time I had been giving considerable thought to the history of the liberation Struggle in South Africa, and to the role of the minorities. My mind went back to our Robben Island days where ANC prisoners were obliged to go through political classes based on a syllabus. How I wish that our present political and social structures would emulate the Robben Island experience and systematically undertake efforts to combat the widespread ignorance of our history,” he said.
Sisulu had written a comprehensive lecture on the history of the ANC, and Kathrada had been asked to do the same on the history of the South African Indian Congress. The commitment of the Con- gress Alliance to the Freedom Charter and to its preamble – “That South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white” – struck a particular chord.
“And I gradually began to realise that this fundamental cornerstone of our struggle, of the Freedom Charter and of our constitution, is now slowly receding onto the back-burner. And of equal concern to me is the realisation that the broadly inclusive definition of ‘black’, which united all oppressed people, is being narrowed down, and in danger of becoming exclusive.”
On October 27, 2013 he returned to Robben Island where he launched the International Campaign to Free Marwan Barghouthi and All Palestinian Prisoners.
Kathrada wrote several books and received numerous civic awards, including honorary doctorates from universities at home and abroad, and the freedom of several South African cities. His foundation would provide leadership courses for young South Africans and host an annual countrywide anti-racism week.
On March 4, he was admitted to hospital for surgery related to blood clotting on the brain. He died yesterday at the age of 87. He was to be buried today according to Muslim rites in Joburg’s West Park cemetery. He is survived by his life partner, fellow Struggle activist and former cabinet minister Barbara Hogan.
We saw the remains of the gas chambers and incinerators