Anti-apartheid activist jailed alongside Mandela
After Ahmed Kathrada had been arrested in 1963, and before he went on trial with Nelson Mandela and other members of the African National Congress accused of terrorist offences, he and his fellow prisoners were ordered to take cold showers.
When Kathrada had finished his, he was ordered back under the freezing water.
The policemen and prison guards stood by watching, eager to witness his humiliation. Kathrada had an epiphany - he would survive incarceration with his pride and indignity intact.
‘‘I will afford no-one the pleasure of my discomfort,’’ he wrote. ‘‘I walk slowly back under that stream of icy water and stand, gazing up at the cold, clear, indifferent blue sky, determined to stay there for as long as it takes to deprive them of their victory. It is my first triumph.’’
Along with Mandela, Walter Sisulu and six others, Kathrada was sentenced to life imprisonment at the conclusion of the Rivonia trial and he was taken in shackles to the jail on Robben Island in Table Bay.
However, he had maintained his resistance - and retained his sense of humour - during the proceedings. At one point he was being cross-examined about an entry in Mandela’s diary in which he had recorded enjoying a ‘‘delicious curry’’ prepared for him by ‘‘K’’. He denied being the ‘‘K’’ in question.
‘‘Who else could it be?’’ the prosecutor bellowed. Kathrada paused. ‘‘Khrushchev?’’ he suggested. The line of questioning was dropped. Two moments of the trial stood out for Kathrada, a quietly spoken but determined man. First, he recalled, Mandela’s celebrated speech in which he declared that a democratic and free society was an ideal for which he was prepared to die. ‘‘The second moment,’’ Kathrada said, ‘‘was when we all expected death and the judge said, ‘life’ ‘‘.
Kathrada - known as ‘‘Kathy’’ had been fighting racial discrimination in South Africa since childhood. He was born the fourth of six children in 1929 into a Muslim family in Schweizer-Reneke, Western Transvaal; his parents, Mohamed and Hawa, had opened a shop there after emigrating from India.
Barred from local schools, Ahmed was educated in Johannesburg. He joined the Young Communist League when he was 12, then left school at 17 to work for the Transvaal Passive Resistance Council and met Mandela. ‘‘He had this ability to relate to me, a high school kid, almost as an equal, wanting to know what my interests were, what I wanted to do,’’ Kathrada recalled.
Mandela was his senior by 11 years, and Kathrada called him ‘‘Mdala’’, ‘‘the Old One’’, out of respect. Kathrada first went to jail for his part in the passive resistance campaign against the 1946 ‘‘Ghetto Act’’ that limited Indians’ political activity and restricted their movement.
On one occasion, with friends, he got into a lift and was told by an angry white woman to read the ‘‘Europeans only’’ sign. ‘‘We responded by saying, ‘We don’t mind sharing a lift with Europeans,’ and that she was welcome to join us,’’ he wrote.
‘‘She chose not to take the lift. But we asserted our dignity.’’
In 1952 he helped organise the Defiance Campaign, the first largescale protest against apartheid, and was given a suspended prison sentence and banned from political activity. From then on he was in and out of jail - 18 times in all.
Under threat from the authorities he went underground, spending part of his time at Liliesleaf Farm in the Johannesburg suburb of Rivonia, used by the ANC for secret meetings. On July 11, 1963, he and several others were arrested and put on trial with Mandela.
In the jail on Robben Island Kathrada led the communications committee, finding ways to smuggle messages between prisoners inside and outside the isolation section: matchboxes with false bottoms would be left at points on the path to the lime quarry where they undertook hard labour, while notes were hidden in layers of onion skins.
Kathrada became the first inmate of Robben Island to receive a degree - in history and criminology - and three more followed.
Along with many of his comrades he was transferred to Pollsmoor Prison in 1982, and was released on October 15, 1989, a few months before Mandela.
A new relationship then blossomed with another activist, Barbara Hogan, who had been the first white woman in South Africa to be convicted of treason.
They were inseparable while accompanying Mandela on his first trip to London after being released, and remained together thereafter. Kathrada became an MP and an adviser to Mandela. He continued to speak out about racism, but was critical of progress in South Africa.
He urged President Zuma to resign last year for spending public funds on his private home. Indeed, Kathrada’s family made it clear that Zuma was not welcome at his funeral.