Ahmed Kathrada, unflinching opponent of South Africa apartheid, dies, 87

Ahmed Kathrada, an antiapartheid activist who spent 26 years in prison with Nelson Mandela and later served as a leader and a voice of conscience of the African National Congress, died March 28 at a hospital in Johannesburg. He was 87.

His nonprofit organization, the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, announced his death. He had recently undergone surgery to remove a blood clot in his brain.

The son of Indian immigrants, Kathrada dropped out of school as a teenager in the 1940s to devote himself to the liberation struggle – first for South Africa's marginalized Indian population, and then, joining forces with Mandela, for the country as a whole.

The two met in the mid-1940s, shortly before the white-supremacist National Party began formalizing rules that dictated where black Africans, mixed-race "coloreds," whites and "Asians" such as Kathrada could live or work.

"When Mandela was starting out, he wasn't very interested in allying with people of other races because he felt it was an African struggle," said Stephen Clingman, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, said in an interview. Mandela's views changed, he said, in part by seeing people such as Kathrada risk jail time, or worse, for acts of civil disobedience.

Beginning with his arrest for protesting the "Ghetto Act" of 1946, which restricted the rights of Indians to own land, Kathrada was at or near the center of seemingly every major anti-apartheid action of the era, including the 1952 Defiance Campaign that he helped organize with Mandela and other leaders of the ANC and its Indian counterpart, the South African Indian Congress.

After 69 black protesters were shot by police officers in the northern city of Sharpeville in 1960, the ANC, outlawed and branded a terrorist organization, responded by launching a wave of bombings directed at government property.

On July 11, 1963, Kathrada and about a dozen other ANC leaders were swept up in a police raid on the organization's secret headquarters, a farmhouse in the Johannesburg suburb of Rivonia, and charged with 221 acts of sabotage for conspiring to "ferment violent revolution."