Firoz Cachalia seemed almost surprised when shown the cover of The Weekly Mail from August 16 1985.”Solar plexus. I still remember that,” he said, pointing at the quirt his younger self is hunched over in the photo. “It wasn’t so bad. I emerged from it in one piece.”
In 1985, Cachalia was a student leader at Wits University. A state of emergency had been declared and there was growing resistance in communities, on campuses and on the factory floor. That day he had addressed student activists at a rally and the group was marching to Jorissen Street in the Johannesburg CBD.”We knew the police were there already but resistance included active confrontation with the police,” he said.
The students were confronted by uniformed police, armed with guns, quirts and teargas and backed by armoured vehicles. In the scuffle, Cachalia didn’t notice the plain-clothes policeman who came up behind him. He was beaten, dragged off and incarcerated at “Sun City” prison. It wasn’t the first time he had been arrested. He had been banned in 1981 at the age of 22 and by the end of apartheid had been arrested five or six times and detained at Vereeniging, Leeukop, Benoni and John Vorster Square.
As the apartheid era drew to a close, Cachalia moved to the United States to study at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbour. It was an opportunity he had not previously been able to take advantage of. At 35, he was hoping to make up for lost time and to build a career in law. He was considering practicing or teaching constitutional law when he was elected to government. “I wasn’t even asked. Someone here put me on a list and when I came back I was on the Gauteng provincial list,” he said.
After spending some time as a back-bencher, Cachalia was appointed to chair the petitions committee. It was in this role that he did some of the work he is most proud of. The committee developed a mechanism that enables civil society to compel the legislature to consider a policy proposal, which Cachalia sees as direct participatory democracy in action. It was adopted by six of the provincial legislatures and the Johannesburg municipality. He was later named leader of the house in the Gauteng legislature, then speaker of the house.
In 2004 he took on the role of Gauteng MEC for community safety. Cachalia maintains that there was no sense of irony in his role as police overseer — the purpose of fighting apartheid was to establish a democratic government and part of that process is to create the space for those who were on the other side.
“It’s important to reflect on our past with a sense of complexity and nuance. It’s not a morality tale. We’re not all heroes and the people on the other side were not all card-board characters, hateful creatures,” he said. But there was one curious incident, when past and present seemed to collide for the onetime student activist.
In 2004 Cachalia returned to John Vorster Square (now Johannesburg Central) to attend a briefing on the kidnap and murder of university student Leigh Matthews. While there, he asked to be taken to the infamous 11th floor. “That gave me quite a strange feeling, which is difficult to articulate,” said Cachalia.
He rubs his eyes with one hand as he thinks back on that day. “I walked past the room where I’d been tortured. I could hear the voices, the sounds of people being tortured, knowing who they were. Frank Chikane was one of them and Samson Ndou was another. I had strong visual recollections of Neil Aggett because Neil Aggett died while we were in detention — It was a strange experience,” he said.
After 15 years of service Cachalia, now MEC for economic development, said he never saw politics as a career option. “It wasn’t something I chose. It was something that chose me and the generation I was a part of. After the transition we came into government because we had a responsibility to see through what we’d striven for, to help build a democratic state.
Many members of the legislature, Bheki Nkosi, Kgaogelo Lekgoro, the premier [Nomvula Mokonyane] herself, have a similar history. Politics chose us,” he said. “In some ways we led very full, intensive lives but in some ways [they were] ones that were circumscribed. But no regrets.”