Arthur Magerman: Lawyer turned personal Alexandra spy for Madiba
1933-2017
ARTHUR Magerman, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 83, carried out a top-secret mission on the instructions of Nelson Mandela to ensure that the hugely popular cleric and community leader the Rev Sam Buti never got too close to the apartheid government.
In the early ’80s Mandela, who knew Magerman from when they were in the ANC Youth League together, issued a personal directive from Pollsmoor prison for Magerman to join the town council in Alexandra and get close to Buti, who was the mayor.
Buti was enormously popular in Alexandra at the time.
He was hailed as its saviour after persuading the National Party minister of co-operation and development, Piet Koornhof, to abandon government plans to demolish the township and remove its inhabitants as it had done in Sophiatown and District Six.
But the ANC was deeply concerned about Buti’s close personal relationship with Koornhof, which it feared Koornhof and the government might exploit to the ANC’s detriment. It regarded him as a potential collaborator and saw his massive popularity in the township as a threat to its dominance in the area. Mandela felt that Buti’s popularity might be used by the government to turn the people against the ANC.
Magerman was instructed to befriend Buti, keep a close eye on what he was up to and put pressure on him to distance himself from the government and align more closely with the “progressive movement” comprising the ANC and United Democratic Front.
So he joined the Alexandra township council and became town clerk.
This placed him in an extremely dangerous position.
He was targeted by the youths of the progressive movement who of course were not aware that he was acting on instructions from the ANC, let alone from Mandela himself.
He was labelled a sellout, stooge and traitor, his home was petrolbombed and he received death threats.
But his mission was regarded as accomplished when Buti announced in 1986 that he was quitting as mayor. He said he had been harassed and attacked, his home had been destroyed and his family threatened.
Magerman announced his own resignation as town clerk.
When Buti died in 2010 the ANC hailed him as a hero of the liberation movement.
Magerman was born on May 17 1933 in Alexandra. He attended the Alexandra Catholic School and was one of its first matriculants.
While studying law at the University of the Witwatersrand, he participated in the Alex Bus Boycott which began in January 1957 and lasted three months, joining the daily 15 000 people from Alex trudging to the city along Louis Botha Avenue. After a month he’d had enough and made use of taxis and lifts from fellow students.
Residents from Soweto and other townships joined the Alex protest and after three months the government scrapped its attempt to increase the four-penny bus fare by one penny.
After qualifying as a lawyer, he defended members of the notorious Msomi and Spoiler gangs.
He stopped practising because he didn’t want to be part of what he considered a racially biased legal system.
Magerman was head of logistics and finances for the ANC underground in the Transvaal.
As a member of the Transvaal High Command, he was responsible for supplying guns, limpet mines and other weaponry to underground Umkhonto weSizwe units in the Transvaal. These were brought in from Zambia, Botswana and Swaziland and hidden in caches just across the border.
After being alerted that the weapons had arrived and told where they were hidden, he would send couriers, frequently his eldest son, Errol — now an ANC member of the Gauteng legislature — to collect them and deliver them to designated cadres around the province and in Bophuthatswana.
Magerman had to ensure that the routes used were safe. Various wellplaced agents would inform him of police roadblocks or other threats.
He was also responsible for ensuring the safe passage of new MK recruits from the Transvaal across the border into Botswana where they’d be received and taken through Zimbabwe to Zambia.
While working for the Alexandra town council, Magerman started a waste-removal company in 1984 which provided a useful income until he closed it in 2003.
He is survived by his wife, Dorothy, and four sons. — Chris Barron