Anti-apartheid activist and struggle icon Yusuf Dadoo had an early introduction to social injustice in South Africa. When he was just 10 years old, in the late 1910s, the local municipality tried to evict the Dadoos from their business premises in the “whites-only” area of Krugersdorp.
Mohammed Dadoo — a shopkeeper said to be “the wealthiest man in Krugersdorp — was having none of it. He took the council to court, where he was represented by none other than Mohandas Gandhi.
Gandhi may have been painfully shy, but his legal argument was watertight. “Can a business have a racial classification?” he asked, explaining that the business was not owned by an individual but by a company called Dadoo Ltd. Faced with this logic, the court ruled in the Dadoos’ favour — setting a precedent that would help many other Indian traders keep their businesses in white areas.
With Indians barred from studying to matric level in the Transvaal, Dadoo was in 1921 sent to the prestigious Aligarh College in India to complete his schooling. Despite landing with his bum in the proverbial butter, Dadoo was struck by the inequality of colonial India: oppression, he was realising, was universal.
Upon finishing high school, the young anti-capitalist refused to return to South Africa to help run the family business. After some sea-mail back and forth, he eventually persuaded his father to send him to London to study medicine.
Soon after arriving in London, in 1929, Dadoo was arrested for protesting against British rule in India. Worried that his heavily politicised son would get no studying done in London, his father had him transferred to Edinburgh University.
It was a bad move. Dadoo quickly persuaded a classmate to mark him present at his lectures, and — together with his new friend Monty Naicker — spent his days in Scotland immersed in communist literature and practising his oratorial skills at The Mound, a Scottish version of Speaker’s Corner. His nights were more frivolous. He “ate and drank everything that came his way,” writes author Venitha Soobrayan, and “went to lots of parties where he danced the night away”.
Miraculously, Dadoo passed his final medical exams. In 1936 — the same year that JBM Hertzog and Jan Smuts’s “Fusion” government removed black Africans from the voters roll and passed legislation that laid the groundwork for the Bantustans — Dadoo and Naicker returned to their homes in the Transvaal and Natal. Due to his status as a doctor rather than his political credentials, Dadoo was invited to join the executive of the Transvaal Indian Congress (TIC).
The TIC had been founded by Gandhi in 1903 to champion the rights of all Indians — but Dadoo instead found an organisation that was preoccupied with protecting wealthy Indians and their businesses. This didn’t wash with the spirit of Marxism that now flooded his veins, and he wasted no time in kicking up a fuss.
Over in Durban, Naicker launched a very similar attack on the stuffed shirts of the Natal Indian Congress (NIC).
In 1938 Dadoo was elected Transvaal leader of the Non-European United Front (NEUF), a multiracial organisation founded to counteract the government’s divide-and-rule system. He’d spent years perfecting this kind of rhetoric on The Mound, and whenever the NEUF went into townships, people flocked to hear him speak.
Soon the main square in Orlando was known informally as Dadoo Square.
In June 1939 the government introduced the Transvaal Asiatics Bill. If passed, it would make it even harder for Indians to get trading licences. Dadoo denounced the “obnoxious legislation”, using it to show the wealthy Indians on the TIC executive the folly of accepting crumbs from racists.
A few months later, South Africa was at a crossroads: with Hitler’s invasion of Poland, the country had to decide where it stood in World War 2. A disagreement between Smuts (who was all for joining the war on the Allied side) and Hertzog (who favoured neutrality) led to the collapse of the government and saw Smuts replacing Hertzog as prime minister.
Smuts in short order called for South Africans of all races to join the war effort, causing consternation among politicians of colour. Many felt that black, Indian and coloured men should enlist in the racially segregated armed forces as a way of opposing Hertzog and his fascist sympathies. But Dadoo pointed out the obvious flaws in this logic in an open letter to Smuts: “Sir, you have appealed to the people of South Africa to go all-out to win this all-in war. But how can the Non-European people go all-out when they are chained down under the burden of oppression, low wages, pass laws, poll tax, segregation, inadequate land, no democratic rights?”
Laws in the making of which we have no say and which are bad and unjust and calculated to disturb the peace and harmony can not only not be tacitly approved of but must be fought by every legitimate means at the disposal of the people
— Yusuf Dadoo
The war highlighted an important moral issue, but South Africa’s “non-Europeans” had more pressing concerns: the Indian community continued to oppose the Transvaal Asiatics Bill, while black South Africans were forced to deal with the pass laws.
Dadoo was way ahead of his time in seeing that these issues were interconnected, and in 1943 he chaired an anti-pass conference which brought together 153 organisations from around the country. Two years later the ANC, led by Dr AB Xuma, got in on the act and called an even bigger anti-pass conference, where Dadoo was elected vice-chair.
On March 9 1947 the relationship between the Indian congresses and the ANC was formalised in what became known as the Three Doctors Pact. Medical doctors Dadoo, Naicker and Xuma signed a joint declaration of co-operation, stating that “for the building of a united, greater and free South Africa, full franchise rights must be extended to all sections of the South African people”.
Only, by 1952 it had become clear that stayaways, petitions and entreaties to the UN would get them nowhere. A group of young turks including Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu had overhauled the leadership of the ANC. Together with Dadoo and Naicker’s Indian congresses and the Communist Party, they plotted the Defiance Campaign, which would see thousands of South Africans deliberately contravene apartheid laws and offer themselves up for arrest.
While that process was still in the planning phases, Dadoo was slapped with a personal banning order under the Suppression of Communism Act. But it didn’t stop him from joining in when the Defiance Campaign kicked off on June 26 1952.
Unsurprisingly he was arrested — for the seventh time in his life. Speaking from the dock, Dadoo made a stirring speech, in which he defended the actions of all participants: “We are law-abiding citizens and are prepared to obey all laws made for the peace, order and the good government of the country. But laws in the making of which we have no say, and which are bad and unjust and calculated to disturb the peace and harmony, cannot only not be tacitly approved of but must be fought by every legitimate means at the disposal of the people.”
Dadoo’s seemingly perpetual banning orders meant that he wasn’t able to attend the Congress of the People in Kliptown in 1955, when about 3,000 South Africans declared that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white”. But his influence on both the document in particular and the liberation movement in general meant he was one of three recipients of the ANC’s highest award, Isitwalandwe. The others were Father Trevor Huddlestone and Albert Luthuli.
To scan the whole panorama of [Yusuf Dadoo’s] life’s endeavours would have needed more than a gravestone; it would have needed a mountainside!
— Joe Slovo
In 1953, Dadoo and his comrades re-established the banned Communist Party in secret. He was also a defendant in the seemingly never-ending Treason Trial, which resulted in all 156 accused being found not guilty. Not that Dadoo waited for the verdict: in 1960, after the Sharpeville massacre, the Communist Party decided he should leave the country to continue his work abroad. Dadoo was dead against the idea, but after being outvoted he reluctantly agreed.
He clandestinely crossed the border into Bechuanaland (Botswana), meeting up with Oliver Tambo (who’d been sent into exile by the ANC) and the writer Ronald Segal. “The problem,” writes Andre Odendaal, “was that even if they could avoid being kidnapped by apartheid agents or deported by British officials in Bechuanaland, they still had to cross more than 2,000km of colonial territory to Dar es Salaam, and they had no travel documents or any means of transport.”
Luckily Frene Ginwala was able to wangle three blank Indian passports and a charter plane. Nyasaland (Malawi) police tried to arrest the trio when the plane refuelled in Blantyre, but they got off on a technicality and the plane continued to Dar before the arrest warrants had been reissued.
Dadoo went on to settle in an extremely humble flat in London, from where he continued to fight for the liberation of all oppressed peoples. This struggle would take him all over the world, but he would never return to the land of his birth. He died from prostate cancer in 1983 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery, a few metres away from Karl Marx.
Dadoo’s contribution to humanity was summed up by what his lifelong friend Joe Slovo described as “a rather heated and, to what might seem to some a rather odd debate” about what words to put on the headstone of Dadoo’s grave.
“How do you carve everything Yusuf was into a piece of stone?” Slovo asked. “Could we, indeed, have a gravestone large enough to do justice to the many layers which made up his many-sided contributions? To scan the whole panorama of his life’s endeavours would have needed more than a gravestone; it would have needed a mountainside!”
Eventually Slovo and co agreed on the words: “Fighter for national liberation, socialism and world peace.”
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