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

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.

Healing The Rift

Steadily, slowly, step by careful step, the three greying legal heads made their way to the reunion at Rivonia. Their progress was as deliberate and methodical as the defense they led with razor sharp precision in their finest hour, in court half a century ago.
Joel Joffe, George Bizos and Denis Kuny are the survivors of the legal team that defended accused number one, Nelson Mandela, and his comrades in facing the death penalty over 221 charges of sabotage. They are all in their 80s, two of them are still working; Bizos and Kuny, who both live in Johannesburg, tackle human rights cases. Multi-millionaire Joffe is retired in the English countryside of Wiltshire after a lifetime of legal work in London and the setting up of Hambro Life Insurance.
Joffe, who wanted to get out of apartheid South Africa, was about to emigrate to Australia when he was asked to be the instructing attorney for the defense in the Rivonia Trial at the Palace of Justice in Pretoria. The trial cost £29,000 pounds, in 1964, but the defense team chose not to take the money they had earned.
“He slept on a mattress on the floor with his wife; his furniture had gone to Australia. He was persuaded to stay. They lived on as little as possible so the defense fund could go as far as possible… What Joel showed is that courage takes many different forms, here was a lawyer who wanted out of apartheid and yet stayed to uphold the principles of justice for people who had no hope of surviving, at a time when no other lawyer would take it on. That is courage,” says accused number three Denis Goldberg.
Kuny defended fellow lawyer Jimmy Kantor, accused number 12 in the trial, who had nothing to do with the case but was scarred by it. Ludicrous evidence against Kantor, thrown out by the judge, included that he was seen feeding the chickens at Liliesleaf; therefore he must have known about the sabotage plotted there. Kantor was acquitted but his legal practice was destroyed and he went to an early grave.
The reunion was to launch the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the police raid in Rivonia, which sparked the world-famous trial. It was a winter’s afternoon on July 11, 1963 that a delivery van pulled up outside a thatched cottage at the back of Liliesleaf—a safe house used by underground activists. The van was a Trojan horse. Inside were 14 policemen and a dog. Inside the cottage was almost the entire leadership of the South African underground movement holding a meeting, including Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada and Govan Mbeki. The police jumped out of the van, surrounded the building and rushed the door. Mbeki and Kathrada tried to escape through the window but were hounded down. The police handcuffed the activists in a circle outside the cottage and let the dog snap at them. They couldn’t believe they had caught so many activists in one place.
“We have hit the jackpot!” said an excited officer-in-charge over the police radio.
Joffe, Bizos and Kuny stood at around the same spot where that triumphant statement was made, as they posed for photographs on a warm February evening. They recalled memories of the trial of the century that proved the turning point for South Africa. The trial saw the words of Mandela and his fellow accused fly around the world changing millions of minds. Overnight, the saboteur criminals were seen more as freedom fighters; the Benjamin Franklins of Africa—in the words of Bizos.
Three of these words that winged their way drew smiles on the night. Bizos, the strategist in the legal team, says he made a slight change to the famous speech on behalf of all the accused that went down in history.
“It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die,” Mandela concluded from the dock to a dramatic silence in court, according to eyewitnesses, in which you could hear a pin drop.
“I felt the speech was too strong as it was. It was an invitation to the judge to hang everyone and make them martyrs, so I recommended we put in the words ‘If needs be,’” says Bizos.
Joffe—a former chairman of Oxfam, was made Lord Joffe by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair—remembered Mandela’s reaction to the change.
“I read my speech and there seems to be an error, he said. It is my sentence and I want it back!” chuckled Joffe.
On a more serious note, Joffe recalled the handwritten note by Mandela, now in a museum, in which he wrote out his last words, if he were to hang.
“This handwritten note said: ‘I apologize for nothing, I was fighting for justice and there’s no sacrifice I am not prepared to make in the cause of justice,’ that was Mandela, faced with hanging, no fear,” says Joffe.
The lawyers have 150 years legal experience between them. They say they would do it all again and support the new South Africa, with reservations.
“In South Africa today, sadly the majority of the population is living in poverty and unemployment and one believes there is much more that government could do about that and then these problems with corruption, incompetence and efficiency would disappear,” says Joffe.
“I know that there are people, including me, who are disappointed with some of the failures of the government, some of which were very serious and unnecessary, but I don’t go along with the idea that nothing has changed. Things have changed in relation to education, health and the professions,” says Bizos.
All three are as unassuming as they are sage. You would not blink if you saw them in your corner shop buying a loaf of bread.
When I double checked with Joffe, whether his title was Lord or Baron, he smiled.
“Ag, just call me Joel.”

Tag: Liliesleaf

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Farewell To A Gentle Soul

Healing The Rift

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