One of the last survivors of the rebels who faced death with Nelson Mandela was a genial soul with a resolve of iron.
Ahmed Kathrada was one of the great worker bees of the struggle against apartheid in the 1950s and early 1960s. In the shadows of Liliesleaf, a smallholding in the middle-class northern Johannesburg suburb of Rivonia, used as a hideout by underground activists, Kathrada, wrote, worked and photocopied pamphlets tirelessly. When the struggle called upon him to pose as a white man – he dyed his hair, put on make-up and a moustache to pretend to be a Portuguese man called Pedro. It was a disguise that fooled people; despite this, he never felt comfortable going into restaurants where people of color were not allowed.
Discomfort in the heat of an armed struggle, against a brutal regime, shows the gentle soul that was Kathrada. He may have been strident when it came to principle, but never fell for bravado; humility was his middle name. He admitted to me once, in an interview for CNBC Africa, that he feared he could have broken if he had been tortured by special branch after his arrest half a century before. His heart was always tender and 26 rough brutal years in prison left few callouses. Once, on national radio, I heard Kathrada break down when a caller reminded him of a comrade who had been tortured to death more than 50 years before.
<div id="attachment_5630" style="width: 211px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5630" class="wp-image-5630 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/funeral-076-201x300.jpg" alt="" width="201" height="300" />Kathrada’s widow Barbara Hogan and nephew Nazir</div>
If the scars were deep, Kathrada’s spirit kept a salving sense of humour. With a laugh, he told me how Govan Mbeki – the father of South Africa’s former president Thabo – used to sell eggs he coaxed from the Liliesleaf chickens to his fellow activists, despite their protestations. He also told me how the underground activists of Liliesleaf used to sell vegetables.
“Our best customer was the Rivonia Police!” he chuckled. It was the police of Rivonia who raided Liliesleaf with dogs, in July 1963, putting Kathrada behind bars on his way to trial for sabotage that carried the death penalty.
Even in the shadow of death Kathrada, in the so-called Rivonia trial in Pretoria, never lost his sense of humour. Prosecutor Percy Yutar quizzed him, on the stand, about a person who went by the initial K, referred to in Nelson Mandela’s diary. Yutar pressed in an attempt to humiliate: did Kathrada know anyone with the initial K?
“Yes,” replied Kathrada, “Mr Khrushchev.”
Even the judge laughed. The court spared Kathrada and his comrades the rope at the end of the trial in 1964.
“We subsequently found out that life was to mean life,” he said with gentle irony through his trademark smile.
When Kathrada emerged from prison, in 1989, apartheid had taken a lot more than his youth; it also took his birthplace. The place he grew up in, Schweizer-Reneke, in South Africa’s North West province, was bulldozed by the authorities in the cause of keeping the races apart.
Incarceration took even more. Computers, hotel room cards instead of keys and the paraphenalia of the modern world were a mystery. He tried driving on motorways that he had never seen, once, but found it too stressful. Even a harmless ATM spelled confusion as Kathrada found out one Sunday morning when he went to draw money with fellow Robben Island prisoner Laloo Chiba.
“He put in his card and it was swallowed, then I put my card in and pressed a few buttons and it was also swallowed. We had to phone the bank and they came to open up the ATM and get our cards out. Now Barbara gets my money for me,” he told me.
Former minister Barbara Hogan was Kathrada’s loving partner and they appeared kindred spirits. Kathrada would have loved to raise a family – a big gap in his life. The prison guards, on Robben Island, used to keep children cruelly out of sight of prisoners; Kathrada told me of the pain of more than two decades without that most natural sound; the carefree laughter of a child. Hogan was his family.
“When I phone home from overseas my first question is: ‘What happened in Isidingo (A TV soap opera), my second question is about whether the country has been overthrown!” says Kathrada drily.
One or two people in the African National Congress would whisper to you that Kathrada could be a bit star struck when it came to big names and would occasionally drop everything to be with them. It was Kathrada who accompanied the then United States senator Barack Obama to Robben Island.
When it came to integrity, there was never a waver, nor whiff, of scandal around Kathrada. I shall remember him for six words he shot back to me in the studio in 2010. I ventured that there was a rising generation of young people who chose not to know, nor care, about the causes and sacrifices of the struggle.
<div id="attachment_5632" style="width: 211px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5632" class="wp-image-5632 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/funeral-041-201x300.jpg" alt="" width="201" height="300" />Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Julius Malema at the funeral in Johannesburg, South Africa</div>
“That is what we fought for.”
The principled and upstanding way of Ahmed Kathrada that South Africa is poorer for losing; sadly, many of those principles he fought for have been abandoned by a generation old enough to know better.

Farewell To A Gentle Soul

Ahmed Kathrada looked frail, but fit and always on the move, as he trod the concrete of his former prison. In the so-called Rivonia Trial, Kathrada was accused number five alongside Nelson Mandela and eight others. They were charged with sabotage and faced death. Instead a young Kathrada and his co-accused were shipped to Robben Island to serve life imprisonment in 1964.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-3703" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Robben_Island_Event_LR_058-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />
“We found out only later that life was to be life,” he says.
Kathrada spent 18 years of hardship and humiliation on Robben Island, followed by spells in other prisons, before he was released in 1990. Now 85, he is one of three survivors of the trial.
As South Africa celebrated 21 years of freedom, in April, Kathrada was back on the island wearing a black baseball cap with the words ‘Long Walk To Freedom’. A sign that this was a trip laden with symbolism. Upon disembarking on the ferry, he rejected a shuttle and walked for about 200 meters to the jail that robbed him of his youth.
As he spoke, standing on concrete patch prisoners used as a tennis court, he held his old cell key in his left hand; to his right was Christo Brand, the jailer who kept his eye on Mandela. Brand was 18 years old when he joined the prison as a warder, he’s now a manager at the island’s museum.
“We have our jailer among us,” smiled Kathrada.
Being a prisoner was no laughing matter. Alongside Kathrada was Vusumzi Mcongo, a former prisoner and now a tour guide on the island.
Mcongo told FORBES AFRICA the guard dogs would attack prisoners when they worked in the quarry. If the prisoners fought back they were punished. Officers thought more of the dogs than the humans they guarded.
“Black prisoners wore shorts because were regarded as boys and the Indians had long trousers,” says Mcongo.
Kathrada was back on Robben Island, now a World Heritage Site, because Google had launched a virtual tour application. It means anyone in the world can tour Robben Island for free.
This is a world away from the years that Kathrada and fellow prisoners spent on the island before they were released in the 1990s; they were still living in the 1960s.
“The technology revolution passed us by. The warden came to us and said ‘we received a fax from Pretoria, you are getting released’, after slight jubilation we asked ‘what is a fax?’” says Kathrada.
When Kathrada came out of prison he had never seen a motorway, nor a computer, not even an ATM.
“Not being able to see or interact with children for 20 years was possibly the most difficult thing to endure during my time on the island. There’s a poetic justice that children in classrooms all over world will now be able to visit Robben Island using this technology,” says Kathrada.
Kathrada, his friends called him Kathy, was a librarian in prison and earned an honours degree in history; he also became a father figure.
“There was a 15-year-old boy here, he was sentenced to 10 years. He did his matric here, his BA here, he started his B Juris here but completed it outside. Today, he’s the Deputy Chief Judge of the Constitutional Court – Justice Dikgang Moseneke – that was the boy,” says Kathrada proudly.
Long before Kathrada and his comrades were arrested, Xhosa Chief, Makana Nxele, was in chains on Robben Island. Nxele led a Xhosa regiment against the British in the Eastern Cape and was captured in 1819. In 1820, in an attempt to escape, Nxele swam from the island; guards caught him when he reached the beach at Blouberg, near Cape Town. The armed guards forced him to swim back. On the way back he drowned. You can google the rest.

Cyberspace Creeps Up  On The Island of Tears

When the music pumped, Andrew Mlangeni jived onto the dance floor – carrying with him the spirit of the men with whom he faced death half a century ago. Fiery and defiant, dancing with the female vocalist of the band. Everyone stood and cheered.
“Mlangeni, wherever your fellow Rivonia peers are, they are proud of you,” says Sipho ‘Hotstix’ Mabuse, one of the men who played music.
For a moment, you could almost imagine a fortune teller putting his hand on Mlangeni’s shoulder, as he faced the death penalty for sabotage on that cold winter’s morning in April 1964, in Pretoria.
“Don’t worry young man, you will live, see your country free, and 50 years later you will dance in celebration with a woman a third of your age.”
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You couldn’t make up a story like that; a story of Mlangeni, Nelson Mandela and the Rivonia Trial. Indeed, Mlangeni was unlucky to be arrested at all, on that gloomy winter night in July 1963, and even luckier to survive. Mlangeni was asleep at his home in Dube, Soweto, where he lives to this day, when police came to arrest him. They had already picked up his late friend Elias Motsoaledi, who was in the back of the police car. Because the detectives had been brought in from outside Johannesburg, to clamp down on dissent, they didn’t know Soweto and drove past Mlangeni’s home several times.
“Motsoaledi told me that he was saying to himself ‘can’t this man wake up and run?’” says Mlangeni nearly half a century later.
Police eventually found Mlangeni’s back door, for which they had a key, and woke him in bed to tell him he was under 90-day arrest. It was 26 years before he set foot in his home again.
In Johannesburg Fort, that night, special branch officers put a cloth bag over Mlangeni’s head and poured water through it. The water seeped into his lungs and soon he was drowning. Close to the moment of death a special branch officer punched Mlangeni in the stomach. The force of it blew the water from his lungs and saved Mlangeni’s life.
This was the spirit Mlangeni brought to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Rivonia Trial at Liliesleaf Farm on April 20. Mlangeni is one of the three survivors of the Rivonia trial &#8211; so called because that is where the arrests were made. Ahmed Kathrada and Denis Goldberg are other survivors of the 10 accused. Kathrada and Goldberg were traveling overseas, so Mlangeni held the fort on the dance floor.
The festivities were to commemorate the famous three-hour speech Mandela read from the dock before sentencing. On behalf of his co-accused, Mandela declared he was prepared to die for freedom.
“Comrade Mandela’s job was to make a political statement, about our struggle, about the suffering of our people, about the regime killing our people, banning our people, sending our leaders to exile. He spoke on our behalf when he said those words ‘If it need be, I am prepared to die’. It was a speech that affected the feelings of everybody in the country and abroad,” says Mlangeni.
“When the Rivonia trialists were arrested, I must have been 12 years old. My father walked into the house angry, I knew something was wrong. And this something that remained in our minds for many years… We celebrated it and, at some stage, I felt that that particular speech should resonate with what we do. We should be guided as musicians by those activities,” says Mabuse.
Mlangeni had the crowd in stitches as he recalled how he and his late friend Motsoaledi, father of the health minister Aaron Motsoaledi, could have been easily hanged. The two were responsible for a number of Umkhonto we Sizwe operations, the armed wing of the African National Congress. They took advice not to give evidence.
“All of the other accused took to the witness box, but in the case of comrade Motsoaledi and I, we were not to go to the witness stand. It was felt that if we went to the witness stand, the prosecutor would slaughter us, he would really cut us to pieces.”
Mlangeni is living proof that you cannot suppress a good man forever.

The Spirited Survivor Jive

On a clear winter’s evening at Liliesleaf in Rivonia, Johannesburg, Denis Goldberg and Bob Hepple walked towards each other.
“Long time,” says Goldberg holding out his hand.
The two men embraced near the spot where they were chained together by police, left to the mercy of a snapping dog nearly half a century before. The two anti-apartheid activists were in Johannesburg with another survivor of the Rivonia Raid, which occurred on July 11, 1963, Ahmed Kathrada. They were there to celebrate the raids 50th anniversary—when police drove hidden in the back of a delivery van to arrest the entire leadership of the South African underground including: Walter Sisulu; Govan Mbeki and Raymond Mhlaba. The decisive raid paralyzed dissent for nearly a decade and saw the trial that sent Nelson Mandela to prison.
In the wake of the trial, Goldberg served 22 years in prison before being deported into exile. Hepple, who suffered under interrogation, was freed by the prosecution in the hope that he would turn state witness. He skipped the country to England, where he became a professor at Cambridge University and a knight.
At the time, Goldberg, now retired in Hout Bay near Cape Town, feared Hepple may give information about his comrades in the dock.
“That’s a long time ago, I am always happy to greet another comrade,” says Goldberg after the brief reunion.
Hepple, who will retire in England, retains his sense of humor about South Africa and his exile from the land of his birth.
“It was very difficult to talk to people about Nelson Mandela in the early days. Margaret Thatcher used to call him a terrorist.  Now, he is very popular and a hero, it is a lot easier,” says Hepple with a chuckle.

Tag: Ahmed Kathrada

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Farewell To A Gentle Soul

Cyberspace Creeps Up On The Island of Tears

The Spirited Survivor Jive

Healing The Rift