Anti-apartheid activist sentenced alongside Nelson Mandela

Born: 21 August 1929;

Died: 28 March 2017

AHMED Mohamed Kathrada, who has died aged 87, was the most prominent Asian South African in the movement to end racial apartheid in South Africa. He stood alongside Mandela and six others facing 221 charges of sabotage and conspiracy to ferment violent revolution in the so-called Rivonia Trial in 1963.

The trial riveted the South African nation and the international community, largely because of a three-hour courtroom speech by Mandela in which he called for “a democratic and free society in which all people will live together in harmony .?.?. an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

Indeed, Mandela, Kathrada and the other co-accused prepared themselves to go to the gallows when the state prosecutor, Percy Yutar, demanded the death penalty. It was matter of considerable relief, Kathrada recalled, when Judge Quartus de Wet instead sentenced him, Mandela and the others to life imprisonment on Robben Island in the cold, shark-infested waters of the South Atlantic off Cape Town.

Kathrada, possessor of a wry sense of humour, said the prison was, despite harsh conditions, a place of relative safety. Unlike developments on the mainland, he said, “no policeman could come to Robben Island and start shooting at us … In the Soweto Uprising of 1976, we were told, 600 kids were killed. Others, people we knew closely, were tortured to death, shot, assassinated. We were safe.”

Mandela, Kathrada and the late Walter Sisulu together formed in prison a triumvirate of comradeship and friendship which was at the core of the ANC’s leadership by the time the three men were released in 1989-90 after serving more than 26 years of their life sentences. When Mandela became state president in 1994 he appointed Kathrada as his personal advisor, saying of his friend: “Our stories have become so interwoven, that the telling of one without the voice of the other being heard somewhere would have led to an incomplete narrative.” Kathrada said he regarded Mandela as his brother. Sisulu became deputy president of the ANC.

Kathrada’s death came at a particularly sad and poignant moment, with South Africa’s politics in turmoil as the ANC, nurtured by him, Mandela and Sisulu, is being torn apart by greed and corruption under current state president Jacob Zuma. Kathrada, renowned as a gentle, humble and notably uncorrupt individual, became so worried that he wrote to the president late last year, saying, “Please submit to the will of the people and resign.”

His plea was not heeded. Instead, as Mandela’s comrade took his last breath, suffering from a blood clot on his brain, the country was on a knife-edge as Zuma contemplated actions, including the sacking of respected finance minister Pravin Gordhan, that could plunge South Africa into deep chaos.

Ahmed Mohamed Kathrada was the son of Indian migrants, Mohamed and Hawa Kathrada, who arrived from Gujarat in India in 1919 and opened a shop in the white Afrikaner-dominated small rural town of Schweizer-Reneke, 200 miles west of Johannesburg.

Under pre-apartheid British-style segregation, Kathrada was not allowed to go to either local Afrikaner schools or those for black people. He was sent to live with an aunt in Johannesburg’s Indian ghetto of Fordsburg, where he attended the local Indians-only school. At 12, he joined a non-racial youth group run by the Youth Communist League and he soon volunteered to hand out leaflets condemning racial segregation.

In 1946, aged 17, he left school and pursued his politics through the Transvaal Indian Congress which then operated separately from the ANC, which admitted only black Africans. When Kathrada became acquainted with Mandela, the two fought about this racial separation between two organisations both struggling for liberation. Mandela in those days was a particularly rough operator and he incensed Kathrada when he threw an Indian speaker from the platform at an ANC rally. Kathrada challenged Mandela to a public debate, boasting that he could beat the charismatic young ANC leader.

Mandela was incensed, accusing Kathrada of “hot-headed” disrespect. But by the mid-1950s, with ever-harsher apartheid laws being introduced by the new Afrikaner National Party government (elected in 1948), the two men were cooperating closely within a more open-minded ANC. Kathrada is widely credited with having persuaded Mandela that the ANC needed to open membership to South Africans of all races.

After several banning orders, house arrests and periods of detention, the two men together founded Umkhonto we Sizwe (The Spear of the Nation), the military wing of the ANC. Until then Kathrada had held pacifist beliefs. Within 17 months, both were arrested and the Rivonia Trial began.

On Robben Island apartheid rules applied. The authorities gave Mandela and other black prisoners shorts to wear and no socks. Kathrada, as an Indian, was given socks and long trousers. He also had better food which he shared with Mandela and the others.

Before his Rivonia trial arrest, Kathrada began dating a white girl, Sylvia Neame, another anti-apartheid activist. The relationship was illegal under apartheid laws. When he was jailed on Robben Island, Neame told Kathrada that she would wait for him, but in 1965 she was jailed for two years for her political activities. She fled South Africa to Britain and then East Germany soon after her release and married someone else, to Kathrada’s great pain although he had released her from any commitment to him.

Soon after his release from life imprisonment, at the age of 60, he met another white woman, Barbara Hogan, also an ANC activist, who became his life partner. Hogan, who survives Kathrada, had served ten years in jail for high treason. The couple never had children.

FRED BRIDGLAND