Kadar Asmal Obituary

SA PEN leant with sadness of the passing of member Kader Asmal last week on the 22nd June. Our thoughts and sympathies go out to his family and friends.

Hope and History Rhymed for Asmal
By Gerald Shaw

Kader Asmal first met Albert Luthuli when he was growing up in Stanger, which was close to Luthuli’s home village in Groutville, KwaZulu Natal. The effect on him was electrifying.

Asmal was 14, one of a family of ten children. He recalled many years later that Luthuli gave him a vision of how all this country’s peoples could live together in peace as South Africans, free of religious intolerance and fear. “He enabled me to see the possibilities we could achieve in a country freed from racialism.” Asmal told this story in his preface to a new edition of Chief Luthuli’s biography, Let My People Go, published in 2006.

Luthuli was knocking on doors in Stanger seeking support when he first came to the Asmal family’s house. The Chief’s non-racialism and his commitment to freedom and democracy made an indelible impression on the young Asmal and he continued to meet him in the 1940s and 1950s. Luthuli was a key influence leading Asmal into liberation politics and he became Asmal’s mentor.

The rise of Hitler and the SS and the later horrifying revelations of the Nazis’ extermination camps stiffened Asmal’s determination to fight against racial nationalisms, such as the narrow ethnic nationalism of Malan and his successors.

It was these early influences which helped shape Asmal’s life-long commitment to human rights. At his death there is a growing appreciation of his role as an outspoken advocate of the ANC’s broad South African nationalism at a time when the organisation seems to be losing its way, amid a welter of corruption and self-seeking materialism, and being infected by a dangerous brand of anti-white black nationalist populism.

For Asmal the traditional ANC values of freedom of expression and respect for human dignity, irrespective of race, colour or creed, were non-negotiable. Having served in Nelson Mandela’s cabinet in the first ANC government and then as a minister in Thabo Mbeki’s cabinet, Asmal withdrew as a member of the Mbeki government because he could not agree to the disbanding of the Scorpions, the highly-successful crime and corruption fighting agency which had begun investigating the infamous Arms Deal.

Asmal had returned to South Africa in 1990 after 27 years in exile. He had studied law and embarked on a career as a lecturer in labour law, international law and human rights at Trinity College, Dublin, and in time became Dean of the Faculty of Arts (Humanities). With his wife Louise, Asmal had established the English Anti-Apartheid movement and subsequently the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement, which had considerable influence in stirring international public opinion against South Africa’s racial policies.

Joining the University of the Western Cape as professor of human rights, he settled with Louise in a modest home in Rosebank near the Rondebosch Common where he loved to take his dearly-loved grandson Oisin for walks. He became a patron of the Friends of Rondebosch Common.

A yearly event in the Asmal’s social calendar was Christmas morning drinks at home in Rosebank where Albie Sachs, Benny Rabinowitz, Allan Taylor and other friends were invariably present, as well as an ambassador or two.

I met Kader Asmal for the first time in Paris in November 1989 towards the end of his long years in exile. He was hungry for news from home. We talked long into the night about the more hopeful atmosphere in South Africa following FW de Klerk’s ousting of PW Botha and his succeeding him as leader of the National Party and President.

In Paris Kader Asmal was one of a delegation of ANC leaders in exile who met members of the internal resistance, journalists, academics and businessmen from South Africa. It was an emotional occasion for many of those present. And it soon became apparent against all evidence to the contrary that the exiles would be coming home early in 1990. Major changes were afoot.

In our talks in Paris Asmal and I found a found a common interest in the history and literature of Ireland. Kader had in many ways become more Irish than the Irish. Irrepressible and voluble, he loved quoting WB Yeats and Seamus Heaney, whose prophetic lines inspired him:

History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

In office under Mbeki Asmal found himself increasingly at odds with trends within the ANC and later when free of restraints of Cabinet protocol he spoke out courageously and forcefully against what he saw was happening to the organisation he had served with pride all his life.

In 2007 he cut directly across Mbeki’s policy of “quiet diplomacy” towards Zimbabwe in launching Judith Todd’s harrowing book Through the Darkness when he denounced the tyrant Robert Mugabe for his despoliation of Zimbabwe. Asmal, then still an MP and senior member of the National Executive Council of the ANC, caused a stir in ANC ranks by speaking out in this fashion against the leadership.

In 2009 he reacted angrily to the announcement by Fikile Mbalula, deputy minister of police, that the police force was to be militarized. Asmal recalled the drafting of the new democratic constitution, and said they had spent days and days in 1991 to get away from the idea of a militarised police force. “This is a kind of craziness.”

Mbalula, former head of the ANC Youth League, who is being put forward by the Youth League to replace the present Secretary General of the ANC, Gwede Mantashe, replied with a torrent of abuse.

Asmal was particularly outspoken against ANC proposals to curb the Press. In October 2007, speaking on the anniversary of the NP government’s closing down of the World, Weekend World and several other publications, he noted that draft bills were in Parliament limiting the availability of information to the public. He denounced proposals which would give almost any government official the right to classify information as secret in the “national interest”. Also completely unacceptable was the plan for a media tribunal to punish newspapers and journalists for “incorrect reporting.” It could not be allowed that core values for which the ANC fought could be degraded in this fashion, said Asmal.

And just a week before his death Asmal urged South Africans to reject the protection of information bill and warned the ANC that rushing it through Parliament would destroy trust in the democratic process.

Asmal said he had hoped the weight of public opposition to the so-called “secrecy bill” would by now have persuaded the relevant ministers and MPs “to take this appalling measure back to the drawing board”.

“Since this has not happened, my conscience will not let my silence be misunderstood. I ask all South Africans to join me in rejecting this measure in its entirety,” he said in a letter sent to the Right 2 Know Campaign, a coalition heading opposition to the legislation.

“The bill is so deeply flawed that tinkering with its preamble by accepting a minor change here or there will not alter its fundamental nature – that it does not pay sufficient attention to the nature of freedom of expression.

Kader Asmal’s career, we conclude, was notable for integrity and courage, qualities not always in evidence in the rough-and-tumble of South African politics. But will his contribution have any lasting effect?

Does his battle to preserve the values of the ANC have any chance of success, bringing the organisation back to the standards of unselfish service of the struggle days?

Much depends on what happens in the next 18 months leading up to the ANC”s 53rd national conference in December 2012. The ANC Youth league as led by Julius Malema has thrown to the winds almost all the core values of the ANC. Will their campaign succeed in capturing the key ANC leadership post, the office of secretary general, replacing Gwede Mantashe with their own nominee, the fire-eating deputy minister of Police, Fikile Mbalula.

While ANC elders pooh-pooh the Youth League’s chances of influencing the conference significantly nobody can be sure how much weight Julius Malema and his youth league will carry at the conference. Their blood-curdling demands for seizure of agricultural land Mugabe-style, and their insistence on nationalization of the mines and banks will not impress the organized left as well as the ANC centre.

Nobody is quite sure whether the Youth League will continue to back Zuma, as at Polokwane, or will opt instead for a candidate of their own as president of the ANC, Malema is a cunning strategist and has yet to show his hand.

If Asmal’s influence has helped strengthen the ANC centre and the influence of Kgalema Motlanthe, a man of solid values and gravitas, and Motlanthe, currently Deputy President, is chosen to succeed President Zuma, the short-term outlook will be much improved.

In the longer term, we may hope, the humane ANC values so bravely kept alive by Asmal will prevail.

First published in the Cape Times, 24th June 2011