Ahmed Kathrada

Ahmed Kathrada was born in the Transvaal to Indian immigrant parents and was barred from the nearest school because it was reserved for white children. He joined the Non-European United Front at twelve and was organising boycotts of Indian-owned shops that supported apartheid by his teens, later travelling to study in India and the Soviet bloc before returning to underground work for the Communist Party and the African National Congress.

In 1963 police raided the ANC's secret headquarters at Liliesleaf Farm and arrested Kathrada with several other leaders. At the Rivonia Trial he was convicted of sabotage alongside Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu and sentenced to life imprisonment, most of it served on Robben Island, where Black and Indian prisoners were held to worse conditions than their white guards and where Kathrada helped run clandestine study groups.

Released in 1989 as apartheid began to unravel, he sat on the ANC's negotiating team and later became a member of parliament and an adviser to President Mandela. He was known within the movement for a rare bluntness, publicly criticising the ANC's own leaders, including Jacob Zuma, when he thought they had betrayed the values the struggle was fought for.

He died in 2017, having spent his final years running a foundation promoting non-racialism and warning against corruption in the cause he had given his life to.