Pravin Gordhan was the political architect who tried to shun
the spotlight
Thursday.
I was a trainee journalist at The Leader with less than six months in the game when I attended a press conference called to demand the release of Pravin Gordhan and other United Democratic Front (UDF) and Natal Indian Congress (NIC) activists from detention.
They had been picked up by the Security Branch on the eve of the tricameral elections, introduced by the Nats in 1984 to co-opt Indians and coloureds into the system, for running the Don’t Vote campaign in Durban and elsewhere in KwaZulu-Natal.
The addition of chambers for Indian and coloured MPs was part of the apartheid state’s “reform” measures, but was rejected by most of the people as another attempt to use minorities in the government’s defence and to isolate them from the black majority.
Gordhan was among those in the Indian community who were at the forefront of mobilising around bread and butter issues as a means of undermining the state, although his role was to work in the background, avoiding public exposure which would inevitably lead to arrest — or worse.
Gordhan had been banned in 1982 for his political activities and the order had hardly expired by the time he was arrested again for the anti-election campaign, the first of a series of detentions that would lead to him going underground from 1986 until the 1990s.
A pharmacist by profession and revolutionary by inclination, Gordhan had been involved in the relaunch of the NIC in the early 1970s, rebuilding the organisation and re-establishing its political links with resistance to apartheid.
Gordhan had also been drawn into the ANC’s underground networks, balancing clandestine operations and a public mobilisation with a day job as a pharmacist at the King Edward hospital.
By 1984 Gordhan was already the architect of a formidable network of civic, youth, cultural and sporting organisations across Durban’s townships that operated under the umbrella of the UDF — and a key cog in the ANC’s underground machinery.
The UDF affiliates had been mobilised against the elections and Gordhan and his comrades had been detained in terms of security legislation, allowing them to be held without charge for periods of up to six months.
I didn’t have a clue who Gordhan was — in the photos of him and his comrades on the walls in the briefing room he looked a bit like actor John Belushi — but it was immediately clear even to my ignorant self that this man was a legitimate enemy of the apartheid state.
Just how serious a threat he was was to become apparent over the years that followed.
During the late 1980s Gordhan was among South Africa’s most wanted, on the run but constantly present, a political architect whose fingerprints were all over the organised above ground resistance to apartheid in Durban and other parts of KwaZulu-Natal in the years that followed.
These were the same organisations that formed the mass democratic movement that ran the defiance campaign of the late 1980s, forcing the integration of public facilities and cranking up the pressure on the state from every possible angle.
Gordhan’s influence was felt underground too, where his involvement in the ANC’s military structures gave him a direct line to the liberation movement’s headquarters in Lusaka and a key role in operations in the province in the mid-1980s.
It was this role that was to result in Gordhan’s final arrest in 1990 for his involvement in Operation Vula, an ill-fated attempt to flood the country with guerillas and weaponry which ended in arrest and the death of a number of those involved in the operation.
It is ironic that great sound and fury have accompanied the death of Gordhan, a man who shunned the limelight and sought to remain invisible for more than half of his 50 year political career.
PG, as he was known to his friends and enemies — he had plenty of both, as we are witnessing now — lived two and a half decades of his life underground, on the run or in the police cells.
Gordhan spent the rest of his career building the state, rather than trying to overthrow it, but his focus was on the exercise of power, rather than chasing its trappings, and the desire to avoid the spotlight never left him.History dictated otherwise — getting fired twice for taking on the sitting president of the ANC and the Republic over his role in the capture of the state will do just that — and the spotlight is once again firmly on Pravin Gordhan as he takes the last steps of the journey he started back in 1949.