Ahmed Kathrada - Political Activist

Political Activist

At the age of 17 he left school to work full-time for the Transvaal Passive Resistance Council in order to work against the "Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Act", commonly referred to as the "Ghetto Act", which sought to give Indians limited political representation and defined the areas where Indians could live, trade and own land.

Kathrada was one of the two thousand volunteers imprisoned as a result of the campaign – he spent a month in a Durban jail. This was his first jail sentence for civil disobedience. Reportedly, he gave an incorrect age to the police so that he would not be treated as a juvenile, but sent to an adult prison instead. Later, he was elected as secretary-general of the Transvaal Indian Youth Congress.

While Kathrada was a student at the University of the Witwatersrand, he was sent as a delegate of the Transvaal Indian Youth Congress to the World Youth Festival of 1951 in Berlin. He was elected as the leader of the large multi-racial South African delegation. He remained in Europe in order to attend a congress of the International Union of Students in Warsaw, Poland and finally travelled to Budapest and worked at the headquarters of the World Federation of Democratic Youth for nine months.

As result of the growing co-operation between the African and Indian Congresses in the 1950s, Kathrada came into close contact with African National Congress leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu; he was one of 156 accused in the four year Treason Trial, which lasted from 1956 to 1961. Eventually, all of the accused were found not guilty.

After the ANC and various other anti-apartheid organisations were banned in 1960, Kathrada continued his political activities despite repeated detentions and increasingly severe house arrest measures against him. In order to be free to continue his activities, Kathrada went underground in early 1963.