1930-2013
ISMAIL Mohamed, who has died at the age of 82, was a professor of maths, a member of the ANC underground, a treason trialist and a long-standing ANC member of parliament.
Mohamed was born on July 27 1930 in Barkly East, Eastern Cape. His parents were divorced before he was five and he was raised by his mother, Rose Fortuin, who worked as a domestic and machinist in a clothing factory.
Although she was a devout member of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, she sent him to St Joseph's Catholic School. The nuns had a profound effect on him and he was baptised in the Roman Catholic Church. It was under their tutelage that his precocious talent for maths emerged.
After moving to Johannesburg with his mother, he scrubbed floors, worked in the gardens of her white supervisors at the clothing factory and taught maths to their children to get money for his school fees.
His exposure to politics started when his mother spoke about her exploitative wages. He went with her to union meetings, where he met members of the Communist Party of South Africa.
After matriculating, he worked as a dish washer on the railways to finance his first year at university before being awarded a bursary.
Through the influence of his mother, who by this time was an active trade unionist, he joined the Non-European Unity Movement and attended seminars on Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, the communist revolution in China and the anti-colonial revolution in Algeria.
He became convinced that only through the participation of workers could there be true liberation in South Africa. He distributed leaflets during the Alexandra bus boycott and politicised workers at his mother's and other factories.
He subscribed to an outlook that was well to the left of the ANC, and continued to view it with suspicion until being won over by the Congress of the People and the Freedom Charter.
Meanwhile, he majored in physics and did an honours degree in maths. While teaching science at William Hills High School in Reiger Park, Benoni, he completed his master's at the University of the Witwatersrand and was awarded a bursary to study in London. He completed a doctorate in maths in group theory at London University and lectured in maths at the University of Wales in Cardiff.
He was offered a lectureship at the University of London, but the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 persuaded him to return to South Africa to join the struggle against apartheid.
He became a lecturer at Wits and continued his political activism with the Non-European Unity Movement. A government policy prohibiting white students from being taught by black lecturers drove him back to London with his wife and three young children. He lectured at London University for a year before moving to Lusaka, where he became a senior lecturer in maths at the University of Zambia.
In 1968, he began lecturing at the University of Lesotho. Many of his students were young South Africans and they whetted his appetite for the struggle in South Africa.
In 1975, he joined the University of the Western Cape as a mathematics lecturer and came into contact with leading anti-apartheid activists in the Western Cape such as Trevor Manuel, Cheryl Carolus and Johnny Issel.
In 1976, they were arrested under the Internal Security Act. He was released after three and a half months without being charged, but the university fired him because of his political activities. His academic achievements - he co-authored the famous Heineken-Mohamed theorems - could not easily be ignored, however, and he returned to Wits as an associate, and later full professor.
In the 1980s, two of his children were detained and a third, his 17-year-old son Andrew, went to join the ANC in exile.
Mohamed, who himself was working in the ANC underground with Ebrahim Ebrahim and Lindiwe Sisulu, helped to start the detainees' parents support committee and became a vice-president of the United Democratic Front.
In February 1985, he and other UDF leaders, including Frank Chikane and Albertina Sisulu, were arrested on treason charges.
During the trial in Pietermaritzburg, it became clear that these were trumped-up charges designed to take the leadership out of circulation. The charges against him were withdrawn in June 1986.
Mohamed became an ANC MP in 1994. He fought for a dedicated Department of Science and Technology and never ceased battling for more national funding.
After three terms in parliament, he retired in 2009.
Mohamed is survived by his wife, Ellen, a former student of his whom he married in 1959, and five children.