/ 22 February 2008

‘It is vital that we speak out’

”These boxes will go with us. Those books over there still need to be packed. These documents will probably all be thrown away.”

This is how Rushni Salie, Kader Asmal’s personal assistant, navigates us through her office. They are moving from the Good Hope building in the parliamentary precinct in Cape Town’s city centre to the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in Bellville.

Asmal is leaving Parliament to take up an extraordinary professorship at the university where he lectured on his return from exile in 1994. ”It is extraordinary because they don’t pay me,” he says, laughing.

In the boxes is a history of the role he played to midwife a country crippled and made bankrupt by apartheid. The history reaches beyond the most prominent roles: his positions in government as minister of water and forestry (1994-1999) and minister of education (1999-2004).

It charts the life of an internationally renowned academic. Asmal taught at illustrious international institutions, such as Trinity College in Dublin, Christ’s College in Cambridge and the London School of Economics (LSE). He was involved in civil society.

Now, at the age of 73, he is retiring from formal politics to put his experiences as a teacher, lawyer, politician and human rights activist to other uses.

After he left South Africa in the late 1950s to study at the LSE, Asmal became a founder member of the British and Irish anti-apartheid movements and was admitted as a barrister in London and Dublin. On his return from exile he was part of the African National Congress (ANC) team responsible for drafting the Constitution and was appointed by Nelson Mandela to the first Cabinet of a free South Africa.

After President Thabo Mbeki dropped Asmal from his Cabinet in 2004 the former lawyer became one of the government’s most earnest critics, speaking out on the Achilles heel of the Mbeki administration: the continued failure to pull Zimbabwe back from the brink of destruction.

In an interview with the Mail & Guardian this week, the self-confessed controversialist goes even further. ”I want my government to do more. If the parties there do not carry out the agreements in good faith [that were signed as part of the mediation process chaired by Mbeki], they should be subjected to wide-scale international condemnation and we should join that. Then it is vital that we speak out.”

Even now, while organising his political and professional life into an array of boxes, he still has a lot of fight in him. ”I am going back to grassroots politics.”

He wants to help South Africans engage with and know their Constitution better so that it can be distilled into all parts of life.

He also wants to become involved in helping refugees and immigrants to find a home here. ”These people are invisible, they are strangers in our midst. I want to be actively involved in helping them.”

He believes the media have not come out strongly enough against the recent raid on the Central Methodist church in Johannesburg, during which refugees were abused by police. ”I want an inquiry into the behaviour of the police; it is as important as the electricity crisis.”

He worries about the fact that so little is reported about foreigners suffering at the hands of xenophobic South Africans and institutions such as the police. This is why he wants to write a regular column in a national newspaper to ensure that readers are not ”let down” by media owners, who decide what news sells and what does not.

Although he feels it is ”much too early to talk about my legacy”, he sees the National Water Act, which ensures an amount of free water to every household, as his greatest achievement.

He will, however, probably be better remembered for the changes he brought into the realm of higher education in South Africa. The controversial merger of tertiary institutions was initially met with scepticism in some quarters, but for Asmal the intended outcomes were achieved.

”I did my part for the transformation of our country. I would like to think I occasionally gave a lead that others followed. I was part of a government that restructured apartheid institutions.”

The fact that former ”bush colleges” are now fully fledged institutions running a variety of courses to provide the nation with skills fuels his conviction that the mergers were successful.

But tensions about the mergers persist. ”Of course there will be tensions. How do you work together after 300 years of oppression? But the fact that an institution in Port Shepstone and one in the North West can now work together is one of the remarkable things in South Africa.”

The failure of the government, he believes, is that the post-1994 mood and goodwill were not exploited enough. ”We did not do enough with the peace dividend that came after 1994. We did not exploit the generosity of Africans enough. We failed as government to make people understand where they come from.”

His role in the ANC has been greatly reduced since the elective conference in Polokwane last year, where he lost his position on the national executive committee. He also no longer serves on the party’s internal disciplinary committee.

He believes, however, that discipline in the party is on the slide. ”Before Polokwane lots of the ground rules were not respected. If you disrupt meetings, illegally evict members, that is not the tradition of the ANC. You must respect the office that people hold, even if you don’t respect them.”

Any views on the new leadership?

He replies soberly. ”I hope they will continue to respect and see the importance of the freedom of speech.”

The making of the politician

Kader Asmal was born on October 8 1934 to a shopkeeper father and housewife mother. Though not political, his parents encouraged debate in their home.

He grew up in Stanger, KwaZulu-Natal, in the 1940s and 1950s and learned a few lessons about race and the government of the day. As a teenager he was chased away from a white-owned shop when he went to buy a newspaper.

He recalls that after seeing footage of Nazi concentration camp victims he decided he wanted to become a lawyer. As a politicised matric pupil, he witnessed Defiance Campaign leaders marching in prison uniforms through Stanger and subsequently led the school stay-at-home.

In 1953, he went to Durban to study for a teacher’s diploma and strengthened his links with his mentor, ANC president Albert Luthuli, who was banned and restricted to Groutville, near Stanger.

In 1959, he went overseas to study law. He qualified as a barrister, LLM (LSE) and MA (Dublin) at both the London and Dublin Bars. Since he could not return to South Africa because of his political activities, he accepted a teaching post at Trinity College and spent the next 25 years in Dublin, lecturing in law. He became Dean of the Faculty of Arts.

He was a founder member of the British and Irish anti-apartheid movements. He was involved in civil rights campaigns in Palestine and Northern Ireland and served on international legal commissions.

He found time to publish widely and to speak on South Africa at conferences all over the world. For his energy, he earned the nickname ”The Bee”.

In 1983, Asmal received the Prix Unesco award for his work on the advancement of human rights.

In 1990, he returned to South Africa to become a professor of human rights at the University of the Western Cape. He served on the ANC’s national executive committee and was chairperson of the then University of the North’s Council in 1992.

In 1993, he served as a member of the ANC’s negotiating team at the Multiparty Negotiating Forum.

The April 1994 general election saw Asmal standing as number 22 on the ANC’s national list for the National Assembly. He became a member of Parliament and was appointed minister of water affairs and forestry in May 1994.

He was appointed minister of education after the June 1999 elections.

In September 2004, Asmal was elected chairperson of the First Intergovernmental Meeting of Experts on the Draft Convention on the Protection of the Diversity of Cultural Contents and Artistic Expressions at Unesco’s headquarters in Paris. — www.anc.org.za