Still raging against injustice
When Ronnie Kasrils joined the anti-apartheid struggle, little did he know that decades later he’d find himself at odds with former comrades gone rogue. His latest memoir reveals why he gave up a life of privilege to become SA’s most irrepressible rebel, writes Jonathan Ancer
● He’s the erstwhile Red Pimpernel, the one-time revolutionary and a former cabinet minister, but Ronnie Kasrils is still a Yeoville Boykie (he lives in Greenside, but once a Yeoville Boykie always a Yeoville Boykie). From Ron-a-la to Ronnie Casserole to the Hillbrow bohemian to Public Enemy No 1 to Minister Kasrils to grandfather of Leilani, Kasrils has led many lives and one helluva extraordinary life.
He’s also a bestselling author and his latest book, Catching Tadpoles, has just hit the shelves. I meet Kasrils after his second of three Cape Town launches. Kasrils, who turned 81 on Friday, has a punishing schedule with launches all over the country.
Catching Tadpoles reveals how a nice Jewish boy who liked to capture tadpoles became a revolutionary in permanent danger of being captured.
One moment stands out.
When Kasrils was seven he was with his mother in downtown Johannesburg when they witnessed a black man being beaten up by white thugs with knuckle-dusters. Kasrils recalls asking his mother if the way black people were treated in SA was similar to the suffering of the Jews under the Nazis. It was this incident that would lay the foundation for Kasrils’ lifelong journey of raging against racism.
Kasrils wrote about it in his 1993 memoir, Armed and Dangerous. A critic scoffed at him, challenging his memory. It was partly this comment that prompted Kasrils to collect tadpoles again. But these tadpoles are not the tailed aquatic larvae of an amphibian but a metaphor for his memories, which can be slippery, fleeting and deceptive.
Once he started he couldn’t stop. Memories led to more memories until long-forgotten details began to emerge — the name of a movie in 1946 (Road to Rio), the flash of a bronze knuckle-duster, the sensational Bubbles Schroeder murder trial, a schoolboy chant (In 1944 the Germans went to war, They had no guns so they shot with their bums, in 1944), and Cape Town blitzed with the initials “VJM” (Verwoerd Jou Moer).
Kasrils, an accomplished and cheerful storyteller with an eye for detail and an ear for dialogue, has built these memories into a compelling memoir.
But let me catch some of my tadpoles of Kasrils. On May 2 1994, freedom was in the air when I joined people outside the Carlton Hotel, where Nelson Mandela had just announced at an ANC post-election celebration that the party had won. Outside, people toyi-toyied as the who’s who of the liberation movement spilt out of the hotel. The VIPs waved, dispatched an Amandla or two, and left. Then out came a stocky man with a black, green and gold scarf around his neck and eyebrows so bushy they should be paying him rent. It was Kasrils. He stood among the revellers for hours, a boyish grin spread wide across his face.
The next time I saw Kasrils in the flesh was in November 2014, at Cape Town’s Dalebrook tidal pool. He had been busy in those 20 years, serving three presidents: first as the deputy minister of defence in Mandela’s cabinet, then minister of water affairs and forestry and minister of intelligence in Thabo Mbeki’s government, and then he served as a thorn in the flesh of Jacob Zuma. Kasrils became the first ANC senior leader to break ranks and denounce Zuma.
I had been trying to get hold of Kasrils for a year but — like tadpoles and memories — he had proved elusive and I had a taste of the apartheid security police’s frustration when he successfully dodged them — in the early 1960s and then 30 years later when Kasrils was sought during Operation Vula.
In 1989 Kasrils, who had been in exile, slipped into SA illegally as part of Vula, a campaign to smuggle key activists into the country to develop an underground ANC network.
Vula remained in place after the ANC was unbanned in 1990 as a backup plan to overthrow the government if negotiations failed. When the security police uncovered Vula, they began to round up its leaders, launching a manhunt for the “armed and extremely dangerous” Kasrils.
Kasrils was due to speak to international journalists at Mike’s Kitchen in Johannesburg and astounded the reporters by keeping the appointment, famously ordering a whisky “and don’t drown it in water”. He grins at the recollection of this tadpole. “I thought, why not? The country needs to see this defiance, so let’s pull the tiger by the tail,” he says.
I had wanted to interview him in 2014 about a nasty character with whom he had crossed paths in exile in the 1970s and Kasrils wasn’t eager to speak about him. And then, while my kids splashed in the Dalebrook pool, I spotted a burly figure walk to the water’s edge. It was Kasrils.
I was surprised he was wearing a jersey in summer and that he didn’t take it off before he plunged into the water. An hour later he was still doing laps (now I know he was catching tadpole memories).
Kasrils eventually emerged from the water (he wasn’t wearing a jersey; he’s not only astute he’s also hirsute). I introduced myself as the person who had been stalking him for a year.
He flashed his easy grin. He may be armed and dangerous, but he’s got a disarming smile. He agreed to meet me at a tapas bar a few days later and dredge up unpleasant memories. Schlurping up deep-fried squid, he dug deep into his memory bank and pulled out 40-something-year-old memories.
Memories cannot be trusted. They’re fuzzy, fallible and malleable, but Kasrils’ memories were reliable and I was able to verify the information he gave me.
Catching Tadpoles is the prequel to Armed and Dangerous, which is the derring-do tale of Kasrils’ involvement in the armed struggle. It’s part memoir, part historical record but above all a thrilling yarn of disguises, explosions, skulduggery and subterfuge.
Catching Tadpoles is similarly action-packed as Kasrils describes growing up in the predominantly Jewish working-class suburb of Yeoville in the 1940s and ’50s. The book bursts with Yiddish Runyonesque characters like Six Finger Sam, Shnoz Silver and Jumbo Goldstein, whose grandson, Warren, is the country’s chief rabbi.
Kasrils, the grandson of Jewish immigrants, writes about his father, a travelling salesman for a candy factory, and his mother, who kept her young son’s mind open, which Kasrils considers another turning point in his life. His parents weren’t political but instilled in their son the importance of kindness, respect and being sensitive to injustice.
He went to King Edward VII School (KES), where he was the sports-crazy class clown, which had unfortunate consequences at the business end of the sadistic principal’s cane. But it was also at KES where he met the enlightened history teacher, Teddy
Gordon, whose lessons on the French Revolution were a political rite of passage for the teenager.
All these influences, turning points and watershed moments transformed Ronnie the Rebel into Ronnie the Red, but it was the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, when police gunned down 69 black people protesting against the pass laws, that prompted Kasrils to not just support the struggle but to join it.
Speaking at the Catching Tadpoles launch at Kalk Bay Books on Tuesday, former Constitutional Court justice Albie Sachs recalled Kasrils’ admission into the liberation movement 60 years ago.
“He was not like us,” explained Sachs. “He was irreverent; we were serious. He was rebellious; we were serious. He was ebullient; we were serious … even our laughter was heavy, but Ronnie was fun, rambunctious and exciting.”
Kasrils was part of the first regional command of the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto weSizwe (MK), and on December 16 1961 placed a bomb, concocted with chemicals, a capsule of sulphuric acid and a condom, at a government complex in Natal. It was one of a number of explosions that day signalling that the ANC was going to hit back at apartheid.
“It was thrilling,” says Kasrils. “But it wasn’t just about the adventure. The people who became involved hated this ignoble system and were prepared to stand up to it.”
In 1963, after 18 months of clandestine activity, Kasrils and his wife-to-be Eleanor Logan went into exile. They didn’t expect to be in exile for very long. None of the exiles did.
“There was such an absolute burning belief, an article of faith, that apartheid could not last. Virtually everyone in the movement was of the view that the system would come tumbling down quickly. Joe Slovo said it would take no longer than five years. After five years, I’d say to Joe, ‘Well, what’s your prediction now?’ and he would say, ‘I predict what I predicted five years ago … another five years’.”
Kasrils went to the Soviet Union and trained in guerrilla warfare and became MK’s chief of intelligence. He also set up training camps in various ANC-friendly countries and recruited Brits to go to SA posing as tourists to be couriers and to explode leaflet bombs. He was a member of the SACP central committee, and always looking over his shoulder for apartheid assassins.
Old habits don’t die and Kasrils still has the old weariness of the long-standing spy.
“I’m always aware of my environment. I meet people in places where people know me because if something strange happens I’ll have their support. I sit with my back to the wall.”
Kasrils and Eleanor had two sons, Andy and Chris, and Kasrils says one of his biggest regrets was having to leave for long stretches.
“My sons are lovely and loving boys, but absences have consequences,” he says.
The regret is compounded by the fact that he gave his life to a movement and made sacrifices for comrades who have fallen “very short of the mark” in post-apartheid SA.
“Zuma?” I ask.
“Zuma, yes, and a lot of others. Sometimes you say, ‘I wasn’t able to spend time with my sons when they needed me and now look at these guys accruing wealth in such a criminal and ignoble manner’.”
In 2012, a few months after Kasrils went public with his scathing criticism of Zuma, he learnt that Zuma was going to present medals to MK’s founding members. Kasrils thought of refusing but decided to accept because the medal was in recognition of MK.
“Zuma gave it to me and we shook hands and he laughed in his ‘generous’ way. But that’s Zuma; he can be engaging but can be furious with you and regard you as a traitor.”
Five years later Kasrils’ third memoir, A Simple Man: Kasrils and the Zuma Enigma, came out, outlining Zuma’s misdeeds: the Khwezi rape trial, Nkandlagate, the Marikana massacre and his relationship with the Guptas.
Kasrils has not seen Zuma since that medal ceremony but if he encountered him expects there would be an element of camaraderie but at the same time “he would want to strangle me”.
The former No 1 may not be a fan of the former public enemy No 1 but Kasrils’ hot-blooded commitment to the anti-apartheid cause has made him a popular struggle icon whose action-packed contribution to SA is captured in his memoirs.
Catching Tadpoles is more than just the story of his political awakening, there’s also a great deal of sex, a fair bit of drugs and some kwela kwela. Many anecdotes are filled with humour but many also have a dash of sadness — like the disappearance of his nanny, Poppy Molefe, who named her son Ronny.
“When I wrote about Poppy I cried … I was bawling. She meant so much to me. Shit, I’m going to start crying again,” he says.
Catching Tadpoles is charming and unpretentious — like Kasrils himself.
What’s next for the Yeoville Boykie?
“If I felt I had health for 10 more years I might give up a year to study global warming so I could add to the debate and rally people, but I don’t know if I’ll last that long. I’m fairly healthy but, God, when you get to 81 your friends just go like that,” he says, clicking his fingers. He reckons there’s still time for another book.
“I’ve sketched an outline for a spy novel. What can I say? The tadpoles are biting this old bullfrog.”
I thought, why not? The country needs to see this defiance, so let’s pull the tiger by the tail
I wasn’t able to spend time with my sons … now look at these guys accruing wealth in such a criminal manner