Joining the Dots E-Book

Jonathan Ancer

• Herausgeber: Jonathan Ball
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

PRAVIN GORDHAN has been at the centre of many of the political storms that have torn through South Africa's political landscape. He has been investigated by the Hawks, fired as finance minister, accused of running a 'rogue unit' at SARS and come up against the public protector, to name a few. Seasoned journalists Jonathan Ancer and Chris Whitfield take a magnifying glass to someone at the centre of this tumultuous period to try to understand the man behind the public image. They go back to Durban in 1949, when Gordhan was born, tracing the significant events and influences that shaped his life and prompted him to become involved in politics as a pharmacy student. The authors interview former fellow activists to build a picture of the role Gordhan played in the struggle, including his detention and torture. It was during this time that he worked closely with Jacob Zuma, the man who would become president and Gordhan's nemesis and, on the back of a bogus intelligence report, fire him as finance minister. The book examines why President Cyril Ramaphosa's right-hand man has been dragged into major controversies and made enemies such as public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane, Julius Malema and many of those associated with corruption. Joining the Dots is an in-depth, insightful, gripping and satisfying read about a man who found the courage to stand up to the dark forces of state capture.

Leseprobe

Jonathan Ancer & Chris Whitfield

Jonathan Ball Publishers

Johannesburg • Cape Town • London

Table of Contents

Title page

Introduction

Prologue

1. The Making of an Activist

2. The Making of a Philosophy

3. The Politics of Non-Participation

4. Providence

5. Captured by the State

6. Torture

7. The Dawn of Democracy

8. The Higher Purpose

9. The Making of a Minister

10. Fired

11. A Dramatic Week

12. Going Rogue

13. The Cabal

14. Smoke Without Fire

15. Mr Charming

16. The Burden of Competence

17. ‘Do not waste one minute of his life’

18. The Strong Government

19. ‘Optimism is certainly there’

Abbreviations

Sources and references

Photo section

Acknowledgements

About the Book

About the authors

Imprint page

Introduction

Jonathan Ancer

I watched Pravin Gordhan make his way to the podium in parliament to deliver his department’s budget speech. It was 11 July 2019 and members of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) were spoiling for a fight with the public enterprises minister.

A year earlier, the EFF had been among Gordhan’s most effusive praise singers, but now they heckled him and threatened to stop him speaking – even if they had to use force. Moments later twenty EFF members of parliament in red overalls stormed the podium.

Grace Boroto, who was presiding over the sitting, was concerned they would physically attack the minister. But Gordhan, a grim look on his face, didn’t flinch. He stared down the red berets.

I remember being impressed by Gordhan’s steely resolve.

I knew Gordhan had been involved in the struggle for freedom, but I didn’t know the details about the actual contribution he’d made. Gordhan is a household name, but there isn’t a great deal in the public domain about his background.

In July 2020, a year after the EFF’s parliamentary bust-up, I got the opportunity to delve into Gordhan’s history when fellow journalist Chris Whitfield and I set out to write his unauthorised biography. We asked ourselves what we hoped to achieve with the book. For starters, we wanted to trace where he came from and track his political trajectory. We wanted to know how he came to be the face of the resistance against state capture and whether he really is that exceedingly rare beast: a clean politician.

I was also curious to find out more about Gordhan’s steely resolve.

Ultimately, though, we wanted to know what it is that makes Pravin Gordhan tick. We set out to do what Gordhan had told the country to do at the memorial service for struggle icon Ahmed Kathrada in 2017: connect the dots.

To get a grip on the role that Gordhan has played in the country, we interviewed a broad range of people he’s interacted with throughout his life: comrades and compatriots, associates and advisers, cabinet ministers and colleagues, communists and economists, friends and … well, okay, we didn’t speak to his foes (more about them later).

Speaking to 1970s Natal activists, we learned that when he was in his early 20s Gordhan devoted his life to dismantling apartheid. He and his comrades Yunus Mahomed and Roy Padayachie were a triumvirate that pioneered mass mobilisation in the province, a concept that was rolled out throughout the country. ‘The Durban Moment’, as it became known, resulted in the resuscitation of internal resistance, which the state had effectively crushed during the 1960s.

Many of those Natal activists put their lives on the line, took enormous risks and made huge sacrifices for South Africa’s liberation. They’re among the thousands of unsung heroes whose contribution to the anti-apartheid cause has gone largely unacknowledged.

Gordhan worked above ground, was active in the underground, and also operated in the shadowy world between the two. He was involved in civic organisations, the Natal Indian Congress (NIC), the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP).

It was while trawling through evidence before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC, which operated from 1996 to 2003 to help deal with what happened under apartheid) that I caught a glimpse of Gordhan’s resolve of steel. He had endured beatings and been tortured by the security police, but no matter what his torturers meted out, he refused to cooperate or divulge anything of value to them about another activist. He would rather have died than succumbed.

The more we delved into his history, the more I realised that Gordhan’s life is tied to South Africa’s struggle for liberation and that he’s had a hand in a number of watershed moments, taking on different roles and functions as he faced the demands of each new challenge.

He played a significant role behind the scenes in the formation of the United Democratic Front (UDF), which brought together diverse groups to shake apartheid to its core.

He helped to shepherd South Africa through the fragile Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa) and Multiparty Negotiating Forum (MPNF) process that saw the country shed apartheid and embrace democracy.

He participated in the drafting of South Africa’s constitution and spent five years in parliament helping to develop local-government authorities.

As South African Revenue Service (SARS) commissioner, he transformed the revenue service into an efficient and effective tax authority.

His 2009 appointment as the country’s finance minister put him on a collision course with the forces of state capture.

The more we looked into Gordhan’s life, the more questions we had. We wanted to know at precisely what moment he realised that the state had been captured and how he felt about his former comrades who’d betrayed the principles on which the struggle had been built. How did he feel about becoming the poster child for the resistance and having the responsibility to clean up corruption?

And, of course, I wanted to know where he gets his steely resolve.

We realised that to form a comprehensive picture of Gordhan – to properly connect the dots – we would have to connect with the man himself. But that was easier said than done. We asked people close to Gordhan about the possibility of setting up an interview with him so that we could explain our project and what we hoped to achieve.

The answers came back: ‘I’ll try, but don’t hold your breath …’; ‘You know, Pravin is actually very shy …’; ‘The minister is a private person …’; ‘PG doesn’t like talking about himself …’; ‘Minister Gordhan loathes talking about himself …’; ‘PG dislikes talking about himself …’; ‘Pravin hates talking about himself …’

Eventually, after many people had pleaded our case and vouched for us, we managed to achieve where the Guptas had failed: we wore him down. Gordhan agreed to give us an audience.

We logged into the Zoom meeting at the appointed hour and watched as his image came into focus. We explained that we wanted to write about his public life. He nodded. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘What’s your first question?’

‘Er, um, well,’ we spluttered.

We’d been so busy polishing and rehearsing our arguments appealing for his cooperation that we hadn’t prepared any questions.

We arranged a number of interviews over the months. He answered every question we posed. He had facts and figures at his fingertips and recalled extraordinary details from events half a century ago. Gordhan, who’s in his 70s, has incredible stamina. After one two-and-a-half-hour session, in which he’d done all the talking, I could barely keep my eyes open.

‘You look more tired than me,’ he declared.

I was. It was a Sunday evening and, despite having worked the whole day, he still had another meeting to go to.

In our sessions with Gordhan, we never saw him lose his composure or become flustered, but, then again, we never called him arrogant or a racist bully or told him to shut up – as former SARS commissioner Tom Moyane’s advocate Dali Mpofu did when he cross-examined him at the Zondo commission.

We didn’t speak to Gordhan’s foes: the EFF, Jacob Zuma and his ‘radical economic transformation’ (RET) gang, Iqbal Survé and Piet Rampedi, and the like. We tried. We sent messages asking if we could explore their criticisms in greater depth, and we asked them to share with us the evidence of the accusations they’ve levelled against Gordhan. They didn’t respond, which probably says all you need to know about the substance of their allegations.

When his opponents wouldn’t provide us with evidence against Gordhan, we went searching for the dirt ourselves. We couldn’t find any. Yes, people talked about how he doesn’t brook opposition and can be an exacting micromanager who gets grumpy when he doesn’t get his way. Someone even suggested he was a slavedriver, who demanded loyalty, focus and dedication from his staff. (If he’d been our publisher, we may even have met the deadline for this book.)

There were grumbles about his abrasiveness but there wasn’t a single hint of impropriety. ‘Incorruptible’ is how most colleagues described him. They spoke about his integrity and described him as principled, moral and thoroughly scrupulous.

So is Gordhan, in fact, that exceedingly rare creature, a clean politician?

My guess is that he would be the first person to shake his head – not because he doesn’t see himself as clean, but because he doesn’t consider himself a politician. He sees himself as a community worker, an activist.

It’s why he joined the freedom struggle and it’s how he became a major obstacle in the state-capture project. He drew a line in the sand when Jacob Zuma went nuclear on him after Nenegate in 2015, and tried to dislodge him as the finance minister. He stood up to the attacks launched by the former president and his allies.

For Gordhan, it’s always been about ‘the higher purpose’. And that, I realised, is the source of his steely resolve.

Chris Whitfield

When we were commissioned to write this book, I put on my figurative hazmat suit and prepared to head into the toxic world of politics. I’d been out of mainstream media for several years and had mostly adopted the jaundiced view of the current crop of commentators: that we’re governed ineffectually and there’s very little cause for optimism.

My co-author, Jonathan Ancer, and I dipped our toes into the project by interviewing old comrades of Pravin Gordhan from the 1970s and 1980s. We soon realised we were dealing with an extraordinary set of people: brave, thoughtful, decent and wise.

Some of them are in the later years of their lives and a few of their contemporaries have died. This is itself a cause for sadness, but more so because so many of them are unsung heroes. Yes, heroes: their commitment to this country and their selflessness have been heroic. They wouldn’t ask for it, but their courage and valour deserve greater recognition.

We also turned to former work colleagues of Gordhan for their impressions. In this process it became evident that the public sector had lost people of the very highest calibre during the presidency of Jacob Zuma. One example: the contribution that Ivan Pillay could have made to governance if he hadn’t been hounded out of SARS is probably immeasurable. There is, of course, a personal element to this: Pillay’s career was cut short in a brutal fashion and he’s suffered financially as a consequence. But we South Africans have also been robbed of the contribution of a thoughtful person who could have continued helping heal a country still wounded by its past.

Pillay wasn’t alone in being purged, and this led us to another realisation: that the damage inflicted during the Zuma years runs far deeper than its breathtaking financial losses. SARS, for example, has been denied the qualities of the likes of Pillay and others, but also much more: the successful culture of a ‘higher purpose’ that Gordhan and his lieutenants had instilled in the service was diluted and then destroyed. The systems they’d developed to make the tax collector a world-class department were also weakened or broken.

Many other government entities were similarly stripped of talent, culture and systems. We were told of a number of accomplished and important civil servants from various government departments who headed into the private sector when they realised just what was going to be required of them under the Zuma administration. These people were the cream of the crop – the ones who could comfortably find work elsewhere.

The culture of service that earlier presidents and ministers in the post-apartheid era had been trying to build was dashed before it really got going.

But we also met people working in the current administration who had somehow weathered the Zuma storm and have since rolled up their sleeves and got on with the job of rebuilding the country. Many of them are also remarkable – committed and smart.

Good people have also been brought back into service by the Ramaphosa administration.

And then there’s Gordhan himself. There’s a lot of smoke around him and we expected to find some fire, but we didn’t. Instead, we found somebody who’s devoted his entire life to the service of this country and whose primary motivation seems to be simply to make it a better place for all of us.

Of course, he’s flawed – who isn’t? – but whatever his faults may be, they don’t appear to have interfered with that objective, and it’s surely one we should treasure in our public leadership.

The commentariat – the journalists and broadcasters who analyse and comment on current affairs – isn’t much given to praise or optimism these days. Heaven knows why, but journalism is increasingly coming to seem like the social-media space that has done it so much damage.

But this journey and the people I’ve mentioned gave me, at least, hope.

Prologue

The wheels had just touched the tarmac at Heathrow Airport early on that Monday morning in 2017 when Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan – often called ‘PG’ by those close to him – switched on his cellphone. The South African economy was underperforming and he was at the start of a pre-arranged high-profile roadshow to the United Kingdom and the United States to promote the country as an investment destination.

As the aircraft taxied from the runway to the terminal, his phone pinged. There was a message from Cassius Lubisi, the director-general in the presidency, whose job it was to carry communications between the president and the various heads of government departments.

What now? Gordhan thought, as he opened the message.

To:Honourable Minister Pravin Gordhan,        Honourable Deputy Minister Mcebisi Jonas,       Director-General Lungisa Fuzile

From:Cassius Lubisi,             Director-General in the Presidency

Date: 26 March 2017, 22h13

Good evening, Honourable Minister and Honourable Deputy Minister.

By order of His Excellency the President, I have been directed to communicate an urgent message to your good selves, that the permission for you to travel to the UK and the USA from 26 to 31 March 2017 has been rescinded with immediate effect. In that regard, His Excellency has directed that I request that your good selves return to the Republic of South Africa as soon as you receive this message. Further, His Excellency has directed that you instruct [Director-General] Lungisa Fuzile to accompany your good selves back home. His Excellency the President will be dispatching a formal directive to your respective offices tomorrow morning, 27 March 2017.

Gordhan disembarked into a crisp spring London morning, wondering what this sudden recall was all about. Since his reappointment as finance minister fifteen months earlier, he’d been under attack from all quarters. He’d been set upon by the crime-busting unit the Hawks – the country’s Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation, set up by Jacob Zuma’s administration in 2008, which targeted organised and economic crime and corruption – and the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), which had thrown spurious corruption charges at him.

The relentless pressure was taking a toll on his health, but at this stage, almost a decade into the presidency of ‘His Excellency’, Gordhan had no illusions about the sheer depth and width of the corruption that was tearing the country to pieces, and he was determined to fight it. It was no secret that he was engaged in political warfare with President Jacob Zuma, his former struggle comrade with whom he shared a birthday, and the man at the centre of the state-capture project.

Gordhan spotted Lungisa Fuzile and showed him the message. The two men stood in the airport, considering what to do. When the president instructs you to return immediately, you do so, but there was no immediate flight from London. They decided to continue with the meetings for that day, including two with global ratings agencies, and a teleconference call with a third ratings agency.

It was 6am and the delegation had been flying for twelve hours. Gordhan made his way to a hotel, showered, changed, bolted down some breakfast and took a call from his deputy, Mcebisi Jonas, who was to head up the second leg of the investor roadshow, to the United States, and was at that stage still in South Africa. He’d also received the text message and wanted to know what was going on.

‘I don’t know,’ Gordhan told him.

‘Maybe he’s going to fire us now,’ said Jonas.

‘Maybe,’ Gordhan responded. ‘We’ll see.’

By 8.30am Gordhan was in his first meeting.

A little more than 24 hours after Gordhan had touched down in London and read the text message ordering him to return home, the wheels of the plane bringing him back to South Africa raised smoke on the tarmac at Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International Airport, delivering the finance minister into a political firestorm.

1

The Making of an Activist

He’s heavy, thought Abba Omar, when he first met Pravin Gordhan in the late 1970s – a description of the then long-haired, bearded firebrand similar to those of others who knew him at the time. Serious, determined and focused, Gordhan was described as ‘bookish’ and ‘very serious’ by some peers.

Yacoob Abba Omar served the ANC in various capacities prior to South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, and the ANC government in various capacities after those elections, including as the country’s ambassador to Oman and then the United Arab Emirates. But back in the 1970s, he’d just made his way to the University of Durban-Westville and was drifting into student politics. At the time, Gordhan – idealistic, and determined to change the world – had already left university, and was operating in legal political activity, quasi-legal political activity and completely illegal political activity in the underground.

Gordhan’s reputation as a committed activist had spread into Durban’s Indian neighbourhoods, where the memory of the apartheid government’s iron-fist crackdown of the 1960s was still fresh and had produced a cowed community who lived in fear of getting on the wrong side of the security police. Most people steered clear of politics and avoided activists.

But for Gordhan, says Omar, ‘Activism was, like, 99.99 percent of Pravin’s life.’

Pravin Gordhan may now be 72, clean-shaven and bald, but he’s still imbued with the fiery commitment of the activism of his youth. ‘We’ve come some way in the last 26 years, and among the younger generation there’s some level of cohesion taking place, but at the same time the fractures of the past remain with us,’ he says on 16 December – the country’s official Day of Reconciliation. The date is also the anniversary of the launch of the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), and on this day in 2020 Gordhan is reflecting on what it means to him. He says it’s about remembering the sacrifices activists made in the liberation struggle, and it’s about continuing to get good South Africans to contibute towards social cohesion and nationhood. ‘It’s a reminder of the kind of heart but also the vision and the maturity and the farsightedness of the leadership that [Nelson] Mandela, [Walter] Sisulu and others represented,’ he says. ‘That’s what reconciliation is about, notwithstanding our differences.’

Pravin Jamnadas Gordhan was born in Durban on 12 April 1949, a year after the apartheid government came to power. His parents were immigrants trying to carve a new life for themselves. Jamnadas Gordhan and his wife Rumbaben were from the western part of the Indian state of Gujarat, not too far from the Port of Porbandar, where Gandhi was born.

The first Indians had come to South Africa in the 1860s as indentured labourers and worked on the sugar plantations in what was then Natal. Jamnadas, however, had been born into a family of jewellers, known as Sonis, and the Gordhans were part of the so-called passenger Indians: traders with small business skills who were commercially oriented and were seeking opportunities abroad, and who entered the country under the ordinary immigration laws, and at their own expense.

They settled in Durban in the 1920s and lived in a fairly rundown building in Bond Street in the city centre, which was popularly known as the Grey Street area or Durban’s casbah. It was a working-class community of Muslim, Hindu and Christian families, seen as Durban’s equivalent of Johannesburg’s Sophiatown or Cape Town’s District Six. The young Gordhan found the mix of religious backgrounds fascinating and grew up in an environment where a Muslim person referred to a Hindu person as his sister or brother, and whether you were Hindu or Muslim or Christian didn’t matter.

His childhood wasn’t exceptional for a boy in his community in the South Africa of the day: he was born in a country in which he couldn’t sit on benches marked for Europeans only; when he went to parks, he had to watch with his arms folded while other children played on the swings – swings he couldn’t touch because they were reserved for white kids. He learned to play cricket and soccer in the street, not on a sports field, because there wasn’t one in his neighbourhood, not even at the school.

In the mid-1950s Gordhan senior started to import saris, and opened his own store in the Grey Street area. Gordhan junior worked in the shop on weekends and during school holidays but being in business didn’t appeal to him.

Durban’s Indian population was growing and there was a demand for special saris from India for significant events like weddings. In a space of a few years, Jamnadas Gordhan had opened three shops. All was going well until someone let him down financially and he went insolvent. The Gordhan family went through a particularly tough period in the 1960s.

While the young man was aware that there were places he couldn’t go because of the colour of his skin, he figured that was just the way life was. His parents weren’t political (‘I was the black sheep,’ he says with a wry grin). It was only when he went to Sastri College, an Indian boys’ high school, and a couple of teachers drifted away from their subjects and talked to the boys about philosophy, literature and a version of history that wasn’t through the lens of the National Party (NP) that Gordhan’s eyes began to gradually open and he started to realise that racism was an issue.

His advance down the road of full-blooded activism took a great leap forward in 1968 when he registered to study pharmacy at Durban’s University College for Indians (which would in 1972 become the University of Durban-Westville, and finally, post-apartheid, one of the campuses of the University of KwaZulu-Natal). The campus was based at the former navy barracks on Salisbury Island in the Port of Durban, and the students travelled by ferry from the mainland to the island.

The deputy registrar, a white Afrikaans man, met the ferry at the island each morning. He wasn’t there to welcome the students, but to inspect them as they disembarked. He checked the length of their hair and made sure they were wearing a tie. If the students failed his inspection, he put them back on the ferry and sent them home.

Durban’s air was heavy with humidity during the sweltering summers, and on one particularly unpleasant day the students in Gordhan’s stuffy chemistry class took off their ties. It was just too hot. Their lecturer told them to put their ties back on or he wouldn’t teach. The students walked out.

On the surface, their departure may not have seemed political, but it was very much an act of defiance against the university’s authority – an authority strongly aligned with apartheid.

Almost the entire university administration was made up of white Afrikaners, and it was known to be led by Broederbonders, exclusively male, Calvinist members of an Afrikaner ‘brotherhood’ dedicated to the advancement of Afrikaner interests. The influence of the Broederbond, founded in 1918, was strongest during the rise of apartheid, which was largely designed and implemented by members. Many prominent figures of South African political life, including all leaders of the government, were Broederbonders.

At the University College for Indians, some of the administrators were rumoured to have links with the dreaded Security Branch security police, known for the torture, extralegal detention and forced disappearance and assassination of anti-apartheid activists.

Gordhan was searching for a political home during this time, and had a range of experiences that led him further and further along the path of activism. He attended events at the Phoenix settlement, an area about 25 kilometres northwest of Durban, founded by Gandhi in 1904 and established as a township by the apartheid government in 1976, but with roots as a sugarcane estate and a long history of Indian settlement. These events were organised by activists in the NIC, founded by Mahatma Gandhi in 1894 to fight discrimination against Indians in South Africa. Many of the activists were banned and placed under house arrest. Banning, a form of ‘internal exile’, was a repressive measure used by the South African apartheid regime and entailed restrictions on where the banned person could live and who they could have contact with, and forbade them from travelling outside a specific magisterial district. They couldn’t attend meetings of any kind or engage in any political activity, with the penalty for any violations up to five years in prison.

Gordhan went to the Durban City Hall to listen to the Progressive Party, which at the time believed in a qualified franchise. Considered the left wing of the then all-white parliament (represented for many years by a single member, Helen Suzman), the party opposed the ruling NP’s policies of apartheid.

Gordhan read the works of German-American philosopher, sociologist and political theorist Herbert Marcuse, and French philosopher, author and journalist Albert Camus. He pondered the pros and cons of Trotsky’s ‘permanent revolution’, in which a revolutionary class pursues its own interests independently and without compromise or alliance with opposing sections of society. And he took an interest in the emerging grassroots activist Black Consciousness Movement; although he never became an adherent of its philosophy, it raised his awareness.

Gordhan also became involved in campus issues, and was voted onto the 1971/1972 student representative council (SRC). As far as the university’s management was concerned, however, an independent student council was out of the question, and the administration would only allow the SRC to function on its terms. The SRC submitted a constitution to the administration, which was returned with the words ‘with the prior approval of the rector’ after everything they wanted to do, such as publish a newsletter, invite guest speakers and produce press statements.

As an example of the administration’s interference, Gordhan recalls the students wanting to invite a speaker as part of the orientation of the first years in 1972. Curiously enough, the person they had in mind was Mangosuthu Buthelezi, then a member of the ANC Youth League, and chief executive officer of the newly formed Zulu Territorial Authority, a region intended by the apartheid government as a homeland for the Zulu people, but the administration refused, arguing that Buthelezi was too liberal.

The SRC called a mass meeting to protest against the administration. Students gathered in a large lecture theatre but before the meeting could begin, the university’s fearsome six-foot-plus registrar – and one of the university officials believed to have security-police ties – came in and told the students they couldn’t meet in the lecture theatre because it was a fire hazard, and ordered them to vacate.

The students regrouped in the canteen, where they resolved to hold a two-day boycott and suspend the SRC until they could have a student government body that was acceptable to them. This decision became known as the ’72 Resolution. The upshot was that the SRC remained in abeyance for the rest of the decade.

The university administration ran an annual orientation programme for first-year students, to put out a strong propaganda line about how to be a good student and obey the rules. After the SRC was dissolved, Gordhan and his fellow activists launched their own orientation initiatives off campus to conscientise first-year students. They recruited students into adult-education programmes and community projects in working-class areas, and held cultural events in town. In addition, they hosted sessions at Phoenix settlement that they called Farcity, consisting of skits critiquing the university’s administration and highlighting the wrongs of South African society in general.

Students recited their own poems, the political poetry of German Marxist Bertolt Brecht, and verses from a range of African and Russian poets. They also performed the witches’ scene from Macbeth, portraying some of the university’s administration as the witches brewing a plot to keep everybody in subjugation.

They put on a version of Sizwe Banzi is Dead, a hugely popular and highly charged political drama by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona. The students renamed the play Sizwe Banzi is Alive because they wanted it to have a positive message about students taking control of their own lives. Gordhan was involved in the production but no one can remember clearly if he acted in it – not even Gordhan himself. ‘I doubt it,’ he ventures.

Then ANC activist Ivan Pillay was in the audience, and believes Gordhan had a part in the play and thinks he may have even been sporting a ponytail. Yousuf Vawda, today a lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Law, but a student at the time, suspects Gordhan was more behind the scenes because ‘he’s the least skilled in terms of singing or acting and he’ll be the first to admit it’.

That year – 1972 – proved to be a formidable period in student politics. It was driven largely by the Black Consciousness Movement protesting against what was essentially apartheid tertiary education.

The dissent began in May, when Abram Tiro was expelled from Turfloop campus (now the University of Limpopo) for criticising the university’s graduation ceremony, for which white people packed the audience while black parents, whose children were actually graduating, were shut out.

Tiro was a prominent member of the South African Student Organisation (SASO), which had been formed in 1968 after some members of the University of Natal’s Black Campus SRC decided to break away from the National Union of South African Students, a liberal organisation dominated by white students. Students on black campuses across the country, including Durban-Westville, embarked on two-week long lecture boycotts to protest against Tiro’s expulsion.

Yousuf Vawda remembers the police descending on the Westville campus during the protests. ‘Seeing the full might of the law on campus was highly politicising for all of us,’ he says.

Gordhan, who was very much in the core of the campus leadership, was moved by the student solidarity across the country and inspired by the power of protest. He’d been reading about strategy, tactics and principles of struggle, and the boycotts provided an opportunity to put the theory into practice.

Most political books were banned and he consumed any scraps of literature he could get his hands on, like essays from Vietnamese communist politician Lê Duân, who was the general secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party, and anti-apartheid campaigner Mary Benson’s prohibited 1962 book The African Patriots: The Story of the African National Congress of South Africa. Gordhan listened to the ANC’s Radio Freedom, a crime that carried an eight-year jail term. Every year on 8 January, the anniversary of the ANC’s founding, he would tune in to hear Oliver Tambo’s annual message to see where the movement was heading.

When Gordhan had first walked – or sailed – onto the Salisbury Island campus in 1968 he wasn’t an activist, but when he graduated from the Westville campus in 1973 he had a strong affiliation to Congress politics and was a committed activist.

There wasn’t a watershed moment that led Pravin Gordhan to become an activist. His journey to activism was incremental, and encompassed experiences of injustice; dealing with the university’s verkrampte administration, which opposed any changes toward liberal trends in government policy, especially relating to racial questions; being exposed to the Freedom Charter – the 1955 statement of core principles of the South African Congress Alliance, which included the ANC and the South African Indian Congress (SAIC) – and getting to know members of the NIC, and becoming familiar with its history and principles. His university years proved to be a period of pulling all the political pieces together and developing his political consciousness.

The moment he knew he’d become a full-blown activist, however, was when Durban’s University College for Indians moved to Westville, and the university administration invited the vicious apartheid prime minister BJ Vorster to open the shiny new campus. On the morning of Vorster’s address, a group of students blitzed the campus with thousands of bright-yellow stickers bearing the slogan ‘Vorster Go Home’.

The students boycotted the prime minister’s speech and arranged an anti-Vorster rally at a nearby hall. While Gordhan waited for the crowds to take their seats, a burly Security Branch policeman marched up to him and glared at him. This particular security policeman had a reputation for being brutal and provoked fear in all he confronted. Gordhan, however, stood his ground.

Fifty years later, he’s still doing the same thing.

2

The Making of a Philosophy

The Umgeni River slices through the northern parts of Durban, its normally sluggish brown waters spilling into the sea at the Blue Lagoon. But it’s not always placid.

According to Neelan Govender and Viroshen Chetty in their 2014 book Legends of the Tide: Roots of the Durban Fishing Industry, when the Umgeni River is in flood it’s ‘as large as a python and as fast as a viper’ and swallows everything: ‘dogs and chickens, carts and carriages, goat sheds and goats too’. In 1917 torrential rains caused the river to burst its banks and ‘wave after wave, the Umgeni dumped its dinner of shredded trees, corrugated iron sheets and carcasses’.

Tin Town, a shack community on the Springfield Flats near the Blue Lagoon, was submerged in those floods. The community was made up of over 2 500 people who’d turned the riverbanks into lush vegetable gardens, and hawked their produce door to door around Durban. They’d experienced flooding many times over the years but this was the worst. Residents were swept away in the waves, battling the current. Some managed to climb onto the roofs of their collapsing homes, pleading to be saved, but police abandoned their rescue attempts, fearing for their own safety.

Mariemuthoo Padavatan, a seine-netter, and five other fishermen made five trips into the raging river in an oar-driven boat. The Padavatan Six, as they became known, saved 176 people from drowning and their rescue effort is considered one of the country’s most impressive civilian acts of bravery.

More than four hundred people lost their lives in the floods and almost all the farmers lost their livelihoods. The Tin Town residents picked themselves up and rebuilt their shantytown settlement, replanting their vegetables.

In March 1976 the Umgeni misbehaved again and heavy rains flattened Tin Town once more, leaving thousands of residents, who had had very little to start with, with nothing. Former member of an MK cell in the Durban Central area and later Robben Island prisoner Sunny Singh recalls visiting the community after the floods and sinking into mud. ‘The floods swept all those veggie gardens and the homes away. People were absolutely destitute,’ he recalls.

In a strange twist, the deluge was pivotal to the development of the strategy of mass mobilisation and made a significant contribution to dislodging the apartheid government.

By the time of the 1976 Tin Town floods, 27-year-old Pravin Gordhan had graduated from university and was working as a pharmacist at King Edward VIII Hospital in the Durban suburb of Umbilo – but that was mostly just cover. His real job was on the political front, where he was exceedingly busy.

He was on the executive committee of the newly revived NIC, which at the time was functioning mostly as a committee, but its influence could be felt and its affiliation to the Freedom Charter seen. Gordhan, who’d been recruited into the ANC, had been making contact with the first wave of political prisoners who’d served their sentences and were coming off Robben Island – activists like Sunny Singh, Jacob Zuma and Mandla Judson Kuzwayo. He was also part of an informal activist collective, along with microbiologist and research chemist Roy Padayachie, medical physicist Goolam Aboobaker, attorney Yunus Mahomed, and Yousuf Vawda. The five comrades met regularly to develop a finer understanding of politics. They discussed what was happening on campus, and studied Marxist literature and the works of leaders of the African liberation movements.

But, notes Vawda, they realised that they weren’t doing enough. ‘Of course, we wanted to change the world, so we felt that we needed to do a little more, because reading groups were not going to bring about fundamental change.’