Ahmed Kathrada and Nelson Mandela (Photo by Benny Gool)

“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”—Shakespeare, 12^{th Night}

On the 21st of August 1929, in the rural North-Western town of Schweizer-Reneke, a South African legend was born. Ahmed Mohamed Kathrada, a chubby, gentle-faced son of Indian immigrants, was to become one of the leaders of South Africa’s fight for freedom, and a role model for generations to come.

After leaving the quiet, dusty town of his birth to pursue his school education at a young age, Kathrada became politicized by witnessing the blatant racial and social inequalities in the big city, Johannesburg. At the tender age of 17 Kathrada had joined the Transvaal Passive Resistance Council, and now having left school, found himself immersed in political work.

Kathrada was already beginning to experience a volatile love-affair with the authorities, and his flirtations with the apartheid vicegerents earned him a month in a Durban jail for Civil Disobedience. Upon enrolling at The University of The Witwatersrand, Kathrada took on a new role as secretary-general of the Transvaal Indian Youth Congress, a close ally of The African National Congress (ANC). Kathrada established friendships with Moulvi and Yusuf Cachalia, and now with access to Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, a freedom fighter was well and truly in the process of being molded.

In 1956, the young Kathrada, affectionately nicknamed “Kathy” by his compatriots, was one of 156 accused in the State’s five year, painfully long "Treason Trial". All the accused were acquitted of the charges.

By 1959, when almost 20,000 people were arrested for their protests against apartheid, with the nucleus of the ANC leadership amongst them, South Africa was in a formal state of emergency. The government was vehement in its ruthlessness to crush any resistance whatsoever. It was now that the ANC strategically abandoned passive resistance, and took up the armed struggle.

Kathrada explained, “Since there were individual and organization bans, it was virtually impossible for us to be politically active. The increasing repression was a motivating factor for armed struggle, and though we had no illusion of military victory, we wanted to put added pressure on the government to bring them to the negotiating table.”
In 1963, the now infamous Rivonia Trial included Kathrada, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki (the father of Democratic South Africa’s 2nd President.) The accused were charged with sabotage and attempting to overthrow the government by violent means. The sentence was life imprisonment.

“Kathy” was about to embark upon the most momentous journey of his life, 26 years of incarceration. “While we were suffering, our comrades were having it worse outside, being assassinated, tortured, hanged,” he says. “At least we were protected.”

The bulk of Kathrada’s prison sentence, not too dissimilar to Mandela’s, was to be spent at the notorious Robben Island, a dingy, hellish nightmare only a ferry’s trip off the coast of idyllic Cape Town. These men were to become the symbols of the struggle against the Apartheid monster, and would become the beacons of the country’s crawl towards freedom as the years journeyed on.

Kathrada elaborates, “We were sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor. And the intention of the authorities, which they made clear in so many words, was to crush our spirits, to isolate us completely from the outside world. A senior officer said, ‘In five years time, nobody will know the name Nelson Mandela.’ The laws at the time, the prison conditions—we were not allowed news of any sort, our letters were heavily censored, our visits were censored. We were allowed to write and receive one letter every six months. So they tried to isolate us from the world community.”

The men’s spirit was never broken. Kathrada pointed out that the government’s plans weren’t always accomplished. “When we arrived on Robben Island, we were mixed with criminals, or common-law prisoners, as we called them. They placed the criminals there for the purpose of spying on us, making our lives difficult. But what happened, in fact, was that we politicized them.” Kathrada was the first prisoner at Robben Island to obtain a Bachelor’s Degree while incarcerated, in all, he got four degrees during his tenure behind bars.

Nelson Mandela affirms, “Kathy’s contribution to our liberation struggle and to our movement is well known. His courage and his commitment to his comrades are legendary.”

Kathrada was released from prison in 1989, in a period historians would call the interregnum. When the new era in South African history was ushered in, these heroic figures were to reap their deserved fruits of a monumental human achievement.

In the first all-inclusive democratic South African elections in 1994, Kathrada was elected as a member of parliament for the ANC and later appointed as the political advisor to President Mandela. Kathrada began to soften his political workload in 1999 and stepped down from parliamentary politics.

Although having received a strict Muslim upbringing, Kathrada is fairly diplomatic when describing his religious affiliations. He writes in his Memoirs, “While I have a deep respect for religious beliefs, I am not a religious person. However, I was born and grew up as a Muslim, and I remain a Muslim. I have read the Koran, I have read the Bible, and in prison I attended as many religious services as possible. I support the freedom of people to worship as they see fit, but believe in a secular state.”

Kathrada’s Hajj journey in 1992, left him “deeply moved by the multitudes from around the world, speaking different languages, wearing different garments, displaying different mannerisms, but united in their singular worship of Allah.”

Ahmed Kathrada currently serves as the chairperson of the Robben Island Museum Council.

Sources:

• Kathrada, Ahmed. Memoirs. Zebra Press, 2004.

• Mandela, Nelson Rohihlahla. Long Walk to Freedom. Abacus, 1994.

• Ahmed Kathrada. Wikipedia.

• Rao, Vidya. From terrorist to freedom fighter: Ahmed Kathrada. The Boston- Bay State Banner Online.

• Alongside Nelson Mandela: Reminiscences of a Former Political Prisoner Under Apartheid. Conversations With History. Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley.