South Africa activist’s funeral exposes divide
JOHANNESBURG — The funeral of one of South Africa’s leading anti-apartheid activists on Wednesday exposed the angry divide over the fate of a country he fought decades to see exist. President Jacob Zuma didn’t attend after Ahmed Kathrada’s family asked him to stay away, while funeral-goers rose in a standing ovation for Kathrada’s recent call for the scandal-ridden Zuma to step aside.
Kathrada, who spent years in prison with Nelson Mandela for opposing the former white minority government, died Tuesday at age 87. He stepped into the spotlight last year to urge Zuma to quit after corruption allegations against him shook the faith of many in the ruling African National Congress, the country’s former liberation movement. Kathrada died Tuesday at a Johannesburg hospital after being admitted for surgery linked to blood clotting on the brain. The ANC flag covered Kathrada’s coffin, and a statement from Zuma’s office said South Africa had lost “one of its valuable and most respected freedom fighters.”
But the growing frustration over the country’s leadership burst out among the aging activists. They rose in a standing ovation when Kgalema Motlanthe, a former deputy president under Zuma, quoted from Kathrada’s letter urging Zuma to leave to avoid deepening the “crisis of confidence in the government.”
Kathrada, born in 1929 to a scholarly Muslim family, became involved in political activism at the age of 11. He joined the Communist Party in the early 1940s and, as general-secretary of the Transvaal Indian Congress, was instrumental in linking it to the ANC. He later became a member of the ANC military wing’s high command. He was acquitted in the 1956-61 mass treason trial but was placed under house arrest in 1962. He went underground a few months before being swept up in the arrests of anti-apartheid activists in 1963. Kathrada and Mandela were part of a group sentenced to life imprisonment after the historic Rivonia trial in 1964.
He was released from prison in 1989, just months before Mandela himself walked free. In April, after South Africa’s highest court found that Zuma had violated his oath of office by refusing to abide by an order to pay back millions in public money spent on upgrading his rural home, Kathrada wrote a letter to the president asking him to step down.