Conversations with a Gentle Soul

Preface

Ahmed Kathrada does not clearly remember the day he walked out of prison after twenty-six years behind bars. For him, Sunday 15 October 1989 went by in a whirl and some memories only resurface when he watches video footage from that day.

‘We came out into a different planet,’ he declares. ‘With computers and ATMs. I still don’t know how to use an ATM but I have friends who help me.’

Uppermost in his mind, when he thinks back to his day of freedom, are the children who gathered around him, pulling his hair and prodding him. They had been told by excited adults that a beloved prisoner was to be freed but they didn’t know what a prisoner was. They needed to find out if he was real.

I cannot remember precisely when I first met Ahmed Kathrada. During the heady late 1980s, I was living in Cape Town and working as a journalist for the international news agency, The Associated Press.

Kathrada, Nelson Mandela and the rest of the Rivonia Trialists featured strongly in our coverage of the latter part of the anti-apartheid struggle. Calls for their release and that of all political prisoners had grown steadily until they became a deafening cry.

A bunch of us, local journalists working for the foreign media, would hang out together in knots of like-minded souls. Our main knot was weaved from strands of friendship and comradeship formed from similar-needs journalism but mostly strongly from our opposition to apartheid. I joined the sub-knot of Aziz Tassiem and Jimi Matthews. We drove around together virtually every day and connected on and off the story with Zubeida Vallie, Rashid Lombard, Eric Miller, Ayesha Ismail, Adil Bradlow, Mary Pfaff and Mike Hutchings. In and out of each other’s cars, homes and lives. We ducked and dived and ran and cried and laughed with others such as Fanie Jason, Louise Gubb, Peter Magubane and Anna Zieminski. Ducking for cover. Running with lungs retching out tear gas. The ubiquitous Autopage beepers latched onto our belts – no cellphones in those days – sounding warnings of where police Security Branch members had been spotted trawling in their Toyota Cressidas or sharing inside information about where a protest was about to happen. We were arrested together; hid unexposed film and video footage from police and swelled with triumph when we sent out to the world evidence of action the regime denied had happened. We were feeding the hungry international news beast and hoping it would assist the campaign for democracy and equal rights.

It was an intoxicating time for journalists and activists alike. Dangerous. Traumatic. We reeled from one crisis to the next. For the activists there were beatings, arrests, detentions without trial. Court cases, convictions, sentencing, executions. Torture. Hunger strikes. Deaths. We raged and cried. Funerals led to more attacks by the security forces and more deaths. It went on and on. Grief and trauma mingled with small joys.

One of our collective traumas was 6 September 1989 when police lashed out at protestors demonstrating against another whites-only election. We hid in the houses of sympathetic souls in the township of Lavender Hill as police prowled the streets shooting at protesters. My friend Walter Dhladhla captured on film the touching moment of a mother rushing away from the danger with her small child hurrying to keep up. Their fingertips touched, the tender scene framed in the shadow of a lumbering armoured vehicle. Twenty-three people died that day. Our pain turned to joy when in their outrage, and led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Reverend Alan Boesak, thousands of people crammed the streets of Cape Town in a peace march. Allowed at the last minute to go ahead without threat of police interference, it represented what peace could look like. It felt like the end of the war. It was not.

Intertwined with it all loomed the vision of our jailed leaders. Reality replaced rumour daily. Who is visiting them? What do they say? When will they be freed? Until finally, on 10 October 1989, President FW de Klerk announced that Ahmed Kathrada, Walter Sisulu, Raymond Mhlaba, Elias Motsoaledi, and Andrew Mlangeni would walk out into the world, free from their prison cells. Other Rivonia Trialists, Denis Goldberg and Govan Mbeki, had already been released. Nelson Mandela was still in jail. De Klerk added to the list other African National Congress prisoners, Wilton Mkwayi and Oscar Mpetha, as well as Pan Africanist Congress prisoner Jafta ‘Jeff’ Masemola.

Joining a throng of journalists, I travelled to Soweto on 15 October for their first press conference and my first sight of these heroic men. It was as if we were living a dream.

After Kathy and I met, we became friendly. I was not alone; he befriended many people after his release – my colleague Alexandra Zavis, now at the LA Times, was someone he grew to hold in high esteem. Slowly, over time, Kathy and I became buddies. It was an organic process, which saw, as a highlight, he and his wife, Barbara Hogan, attending Claude Colart and my surprise elopement announcement in 2002. Kathy still says he attended our wedding.

It was an honour to be added onto the long strand of Kathy’s colourful band of friends. We jangled along through his post-prison years; sparkling as we reflected his light and forming some close and lasting friendships with each other on the way. Friends through him, because of him.

One of scores of people who have developed a friendship with this icon of the anti-apartheid struggle, I treasure this relationship and the time we have spent together.

Kathy and I worked together on some projects over the years. And through my work at the Nelson Mandela Foundation I often called on him to check this or that fact. Sitting down to discuss the past resulted at times in me recording the conversation, often at his urging for ‘a historical record’. We went for lunch: fish and chips, curries, ice cream. We held ‘gossip’ sessions disguised as visits; and because he didn’t drive I got to attend fascinating events as his ‘driver’. And bodyguard, we joked. He had long spurned all efforts to get him a proper chauffeur and a security detail.

Kathy has friends in every corner of the world and at least two ‘adopted’ daughters who decided they would make up for his own lack of children. When I complained of not being an adopted anything, he suggested I could be his ‘adopted sister’. This made his niece, Zohra Kathrada-Areington, my niece. I am the ‘aunt’ of a woman of my age, we joke. We call each other by the Gujarati terms, ‘Banji’ and ‘Foi’. The niece of my brother. The sister of her uncle.

Kathy does not like taking long-distance trips alone and looks for a friend or relative to accompany him whenever he accepts such an invitation.

My turn first came in November 2009 when he had to represent Nelson Mandela at the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates in Berlin, Germany, and our most recent journey together was to India in 2016 when Kathy accepted an invitation to the World Cultural Festival in New Delhi.

In 2010 we travelled to London for the international launch of Madiba’s book Conversations with Myself. The trip involved various interviews and a grand launch event at South Africa House hosted by High Commissioner Zola Skweyiya. Exhausted but stimulated by the occasion, we found one of the highlights to be a post-launch late-night ice-cream feast with the publishers, Geoff Blackwell and Ruth Hobday of PQ Blackwell.

Geoff and Ruth proposed the idea of this book – a sitting down together, in conversation to distil his essence, his insights and wisdom for those who love him and for those who are yet to love him. It has been a tender journey and I hope Conversations with a Gentle Soul will shine a special light on this treasured friend and inimitable South African.

Sahm Venter

November 2016

Introduction

‘As I have often found to my cost he is a person of strong opinion and sharp insight. But he also has great humour and humanity.’

NELSON MANDELA ON AHMED KATHRADA

‘I f you never existed I would have to invent you’ is a saying that might have been written to describe Ahmed Kathrada and the importance of people like him to those who strive for a better, kinder world.

Kathrada shot into the hearts of millions on Sunday 15 December 2013 when, with an unsteady voice, he delivered the heartbreaking eulogy to his departed ‘Elder Brother’, Nelson Mandela. Glued to television sets, cellphones, radios, computer screens, whatever was on hand and wherever they could, people tuned in to the broadcast of the funeral service in Mandela’s childhood village of Qunu. Ordinary people everywhere wept as Kathrada expressed his love for the man he had struggled alongside, was jailed with, laughed with and had argued with.

Most who viewed the live transmission of South Africa laying to rest its most beloved son had not even been born when he and his comrades were sentenced to life in prison. They had little, if any, knowledge of the accused, beyond Nelson Mandela, in the famous Rivonia Trial.

Who was this gentle soul on the stage in front of the coffin whose words had moved them so?

Without much fanfare Ahmed Kathrada had worked with Mandela, Walter Sisulu and other giants in the struggle to end racial discrimination in South Africa. A political activist while still at school, he later joined the armed struggle and became the second person in the country, after Helen Joseph, to be placed under house arrest by the apartheid regime. He was forced to remain at home for thirteen hours a day and was severely restricted in terms of who he could meet, how many people he could meet with and where. The restrictions drove him underground to continue his political work in secret. He faced several court cases related to his activism until, finally, a trial for sabotage saw him sentenced to life imprisonment with Mandela and six others.

Also known as Kathy, Mr K, Nana, Comrade Kathy, Uncle Kathy and Pedro Perreira – from the underground alias for his mustachioed pseudo Portuguese persona – Kathrada is the embodiment of a humanity forged through many decades in a deeply inhumane country. Of his various stints in prison and police detention, his longest period in jail was twenty-six years – one less than Nelson Mandela. Jailed for his efforts to change his country from a racist state into a democratic and non-racial nation, he and his comrades lived in the belly of the beast and survived. They survived by clinging to the lifeline of their dignity and integrity. And their belief in the justness of their cause.

Throughout his life, like Mandela, Kathrada refused to hang on to ‘negative emotions’ such as hatred and bitterness. Instead, he radiates contentment and the openness of a man at peace with himself and he lives a life true to his principles. His is a bliss born out of the knowledge that he did his best in his time. And continues to do so.

His wisdom is packaged within layers of optimism, mischievousness and humour. Reaching it means navigating seams of modesty he calls ‘fact’. It is worth the journey.

At the age of eighty-six, and after much persuasion, he found that he could accept the worth in sharing his views on life, love, prison and freedom for generations to come. The argument that finally swayed him was that his own life lessons held potential value for the youth.

Picking up the threads of many exchanges over more than twenty years, we formally began a series of conversations on 16 October 2015 – the day after he celebrated the twenty-sixth anniversary of his release from jail. He had lived as a free man for as long as he had been a prisoner – twenty-six years in and then twenty-six years out.

Drawing life lessons from a self-effacing man is not easy but the examples from his almost ninety years of life are a study in lessons learned. Out of pain and sacrifice, his adventures and misadventures, come a handful of precious insights that will benefit young and old for generations to come.

As he says: ‘I suppose it’s useful for when young people today don’t have the example in front of them to learn from, for them to have other examples given to them. Maybe they’ve never met the person, but through reading, through hearing stories from other people, they can then aspire to that.’

Eulogy to Nelson Mandela

‘I don’t consider him to be my friend, he was my elder brother.’

AHMED KATHRADA

Ahmed Kathrada says that his eulogy to Nelson Mandela was the most difficult speech he ever had to deliver. His words at the burial, ten years before, of his beloved comrade, Walter Sisulu, were written for him. In some way this protected his emotions at the funeral of the man he considered to be his second father. Then it was the speech speaking rather than Kathy himself. Madiba’s was different, he says, ‘I wrote it myself.’

On Sunday 15 December 2013, the time had come to say goodbye. Kathy walked slowly onto the stage in a giant marquee on Nelson Mandela’s farm in Qunu. There he stood before a huge portrait of a smiling Mandela, ninety-five candles representing the span of Madiba’s life, and his coffin draped in the South African flag. In front of him the four and a half thousand mourners. Mandela’s widow, Graça Machel, his former wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Row upon row of politicians, clergy, celebrities. President Jacob Zuma, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Oprah Winfrey, Idris Elba and Richard Branson among them.

With emotion grabbing his throat, Kathy soldiered through the eulogy to Madala, the ‘old man’ as they called each other in later years. It was Kathy’s words that captured the hearts of millions in mourning.

The last time I saw Madiba alive is when I visited him in hospital. I was filled with an overwhelming mixture of sadness, emotion and pride. He tightly held my hand – it was profoundly heart-breaking – and it brought all emotions in me. And my mind automatically flashed back to the picture of the man under whom I grew up. How I wished I’d never had to confront what I saw.

I first met him 67 years ago and I recalled the tall, healthy, strong man, the boxer, the prisoner who easily wielded the pick and shovel when we couldn’t do so, the prisoner who vigorously exercised every morning before we were unlocked. What I saw in hospital was a man, helpless and reduced to a shadow of himself.

And now the inevitable has happened. He has left us to join the ‘A-Team’ of the ANC – the ANC in which he cut his political teeth; and the ANC for whose non-racial, non-sexist policy he sacrificed his whole life and for which he was prepared to die.

He has joined the ‘A-Team’ of:

Chief Luthuli

Walter Sisulu

Oliver Tambo

Govan Mbeki

Raymond Mhlaba

Yusuf Dadoo

Jack Simons

Moses Kotane

Bram Fischer

Monty Naicker

JB Marks

Helen Joseph

Ruth First

Professor Matthews

Beyers Naudé

Joe Slovo

Lilian Ngoyi

Ma’Sisulu

Michael Harmel

In addition to the ANC’s ‘A-Team’, Madiba also joins leaders and members of other organisations outside the ANC. Helen Suzman, Steve Biko, Alan Paton, Robert Sobukwe, Cissie Gool, Bennie Kies, Neville Alexander, Zeph Mothopeng and many others.

We are a country that has