Unflinching opponent of apartheid in S. Africa
Ahmed Kathrada, an antiapartheid activist who spent 26 years in prison with Nelson Mandela and later served as a leader and a voice of conscience of the African National Congress, died March 28 at a hospital in Johannesburg. He was 87.
His nonprofit organization, the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, announced his death. He had recently undergone surgery to remove a blood clot in his brain.
The son of Indian immigrants, Mr. Kathrada dropped out of school as a teenager in the 1940s to devote himself to the liberation struggle — first for South Africa’s marginalized Indian population, and then, joining forces with Mandela, for the country as a whole.
The two met in the mid1940s, shortly before the white-supremacist National Party began formalizing rules that dictated where black Africans, mixed-race “coloreds,” whites and “Asians” such as Mr. Kathrada could live or work.
“When Mandela was starting out, he wasn’t very CHAPPEL interested in allying with EARLINE M. (DOUCET) people of other races because he felt it was an African struggle,” said Stephen Clingman, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Mandela’s views changed, he said, in part by seeing people such as Mr. Kathrada risk jail time, or worse, for acts of civil disobedience.
After 69 black protesters were shot by police officers in the northern city of Sharpeville in 1960, the ANC, outlawed and branded a terrorist organization, responded by launching a wave of bombings directed at government property.
On July 11, 1963, Mr. Kathrada and about a dozen other ANC leaders were swept up in a police raid on the organization’s secret headquarters in the Johannesburg suburb of Rivonia, and charged with 221 acts of sabotage for conspiring to “ferment violent revolution.” The trial riveted the nation.
Instead of death sentences, Mandela, Mr. Kathrada, and seven others were sentenced to life in prison.
Mr. Kathrada was released in 1989 after negotiations that resulted in the official recognition of the ANC and the country’s first open elections. He was elected to South Africa’s Parliament in 1994 and served five years as parliamentary counselor to Mandela, who was elected president.