Ahmed Kathrada

Ahmed Mohamed Kathrada was born in Schweizer-Reneke, in the western Transvaal of the Union of South Africa, on the twenty-first of August 1929, the son of Indian-immigrant Gujarati-Muslim shopkeepers. He entered the South African Communist Party Youth League at twelve, the Young Communist League at fourteen, and the Transvaal Indian Congress at fifteen — the youngest political organizer of his generation.

He led the 1946 Passive Resistance Campaign of the South African Indian community at seventeen and served thirty days in Durban prison for that work. He served as one of the principal political organizers connecting the South African Indian and African communities through the 1950s and 1960s — a constituency the apartheid state attempted to keep politically separate. He was a defendant at the four-year Treason Trial of 1956-1961 (acquitted with the other accused) and a defendant at the Rivonia Trial of 1963-1964.

He was sentenced to life imprisonment with Mandela, Sisulu, Mbeki, and the other Rivonia defendants on the twelfth of June 1964. He served eighteen years on Robben Island and a further eight years at Pollsmoor Prison — twenty-six years total in apartheid custody. He was released in October 1989.

He served in the first post-apartheid Parliament (1994-1999) as a member of the ANC delegation. He was Mandela's parliamentary counselor through the transition period, served as Chairman of the Robben Island Council (which converted the former prison into a museum and World Heritage site), and founded the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation in 2008 to support post-apartheid civic education.

He delivered the eulogy at Mandela's official memorial service on the fifteenth of December 2013.

He died in Johannesburg on the twenty-eighth of March 2017, age eighty-seven.

He is honored here as the South African Indian organizer who served twenty-six apartheid years.