John Daniel: Nusas leader who hosted Robert Kennedy in SA
1944-2014
JOHN Daniel, who has died in Durban at the age of 70, was a student leader who hosted Senator Robert Kennedy on his famous visit to South Africa in 1966 before becoming a member of the ANC underground in Swaziland.
Daniel had to look after Kennedy when the president of the National Union of South African Students (Nusas), Ian Robertson, who had invited him, was promptly banned under the Suppression of Communism Act. The government hoped that Kennedy would not accept an invitation from a communist.
When Kennedy came anyway the government accused Nusas of defiance and the SABC called its invitation to Kennedy “proud and provocative”.
After Kennedy’s speech to a packed Jameson Hall at the University of Cape Town, Daniel, acting president of Nusas after Robertson’s banning, proposed a rousing, and under the circumstances very courageous, vote of thanks.
“Though the government might be embarrassed by your visit, we are not,” he said. “If it is defiant to invite leading democrats to South Africa whose opinions differ from official state policies, and provoca- tive to present a differing point of view to the South African public, then we are proud to be called defiant and provocative.”
He urged students to embark on “a massive crusade for human rights and justice”.
Daniel said that the government’s “blind worship of race theories” was “a pathetic and tragic defiance of the realities of the 20th century”.
Cadres he worked with were abducted and assassinated by South African security forces with increasing frequency
He was born on March 3 1944 in Pietermaritzburg and matriculated at Kearsney College where he disliked his peers, because they were so much richer, and resented the fact that he was not made a prefect, which he ascribed to being a bursary student. His early involvement in student politics was driven by what he called “a form of class rage” and an urge to prove himself.
He went to the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg in 1962 and became president of the students’ representative council. He became vice president of Nusas in 1966 and subsequently president.
He was awarded a scholarship to study in the US and decided to take it up in 1968 after being tipped off that he was about to be banned. The government refused him a passport, offering him an exit permit instead, meaning he could not return.
He refused to take it but obtained a British passport through his parents. His mother had come to South Africa from Malaya where her family had made a fortune from rubber. His father came from a family of lawyers in England.
Daniel studied in the US for the next six years, getting a masters and PhD in political science from the State University of New York at Buffalo, which was being rocked by antiVietnam war protests at the time.
One of his professors was JM Coetzee, who was teaching a course on Marxist interpretations of South African history. This had a huge impact on Daniel. Coetzee’s contract was terminated by the university because of his involvement in campus protests. The future winner of the Nobel prize for literature told Daniel he was going to stay with his brother in the Karoo and try his hand at writing.
Daniel went to Swaziland in 1974 to meet his parents and while there accepted a lectureship at the local campus of the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland.
He also became a middleman for the International University Exchange Fund run from Geneva to provide money for student refugees from South Africa. He was told to open an account from which he was to pay money from the fund’s Nordic donors to someone whom Geneva would send to collect it.
This someone turned out to be former Nusas leader Craig Williamson, subsequently exposed as an apartheid spy but even then under suspicion. When Daniel saw him he made his excuses and left without handing over the money. He told Geneva there were rumours that Williamson could not be trusted. He was told that Geneva was 100% sure about Williamson and he must give him the money, which he did.
When the next handover was due Williamson said he would not be able to make it but was sending a trusted friend. This turned out to be Karl Edwards, later exposed as a security policeman.
Daniel became chairman of a scholarship fund for students streaming in to Swaziland after the 1976 Soweto uprising. The money, from international donors, was also used to support ANC cadres. One of his couriers was Jacob Zuma.
For most of his 12 years in Swaziland Daniel worked closely with the ANC, an experience that was as exhilarating for him as it was dangerous. Cadres he worked with were abducted and assassinated by South African security forces with increasing frequency. Others were being deported by the Swazi government on orders from South Africa.
In 1985 the Swazi government banned the ANC and Daniel himself was deported. After a short time in Harare he was offered a post at the Free University in Amsterdam. He found there was not much for him to do and moved to London where he worked as Africa editor for Zed Books, which published radical leftwing literature for the Third World.
He returned to South Africa in 1991 and worked as a senior lecturer in international relations at Rhodes University in Grahamstown and as chair of political science at the University of Durban-Westville.
In 1996 he joined the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as senior researcher into crimes committed outside South Africa during the apartheid years. He was more interested in truth than reconciliation, and was primarily motivated by a desire to find out who had murdered his comrades in Swaziland.
Subsequently he worked for the Human Sciences Research Council and the School of International Training in Durban where he was the academic director until 2011.
Daniel, who died of lung cancer, is survived by his wife Cathy and three children. — Chris Barron