Kathrada embodied the ideals that once made SA great

29 March 2017 - 09:53 By The Times Editorial
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Ahmed Kathrada, who died yesterday aged 87, was cut from a cloth that South Africa yearns for today. He was part of a generation that served an ideal with pure principle at its core and that principle did not include the blind pursuit of power and self-enrichment.

His ideal, like that of Nelson Mandela and fellow surviving Rivonia Trialists Andrew Mlangeni and Denis Goldberg, was one that embraced a South Africa of equality and nonracialism.

This is not an ideal to which Mandela and Kathrada and the others paid lip service. They lived it with the very fibre of their beings. It was what once made South Africa great and celebrated globally.

With a political pedigree that few could equal, Kathrada was asked to serve in the post-apartheid cabinet, but he turned it down. Such power and its attendant trappings were not for him. Kathrada was truly a humble leader.

Hopefully his passing and the reflection on his life which it has inspired will reignite an appreciation of the ideals he and others represented, because they are fading fast.

The greatest tragedy of his final days must have been witnessing the desperate self-interest that defines the political leadership who inherited the society he and others fought so hard to achieve.

A year ago, breaking with a lifelong tradition of keeping his criticism of his party and its leaders to within the ANC's ranks, he wrote an open letter to President Jacob Zuma.

The letter came in the wake of the disastrous firing of Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene, an episode, with a tragic sense of timing, that now appears about to be repeated with Pravin Gordhan.

In that letter he exhorted Zuma to "submit to the will of the people and resign".

Kathrada's life embodied much, but that letter and the moral force of its sentiment may be among the most important.

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