A close friend of Dr Dadoo told me that when he was a boy there was this park in front of his house, but he was not allowed to enter it. It was for whites only. In his family, there was a continuous pall of nostalgia about India, and incessant talks of the joys of life out there. He thought lndia was like that park.
He was eventually taken to lndia and to his village in Kholvad. It was the height of the monsoon, and he was lifted across the water, and there was sand everywhere, and the India that was the park in his mind's eye, evaporated. He accepted India for what it was, his father's and his mothers land. Later, when he went to Aligher, and he grew into India's problems, he came to see her also as his land part of the great fraternity of lands in need of liberation.
I paid my respects to the memory of Dadoo in London. The massive head of the granite Marx brooded over the little grave, no more than a mound of earth surrounded by a low picket fence. Yusuf Dadoo lay buried as he requested, in a Muslim cemetery, but as in life, so in death he remained integrated in two ideologies. Brian Bunting and Winnie Dadoo attested that he was a Communist to the last. His brother Eboo believes, however, once a Muslim always a Muslim; the roots are too deep, too strong. Yusuf Dadoo was probably both, reconciling the two in their commitment to life as freedom from tyranny.
During the weekend, South Africans of all races were to have met to celebrate the life of Dr Yusuf Dadoo. The Government joined the celebration by banning the meeting, thereby officially recognising that the life and work of this man has an import that goes far beyond his death, and beyond his banning and exiling.
Yusuf Dadoo's significance lies in his 47 years of active service (1936 to 1960 South Africa; 1960 to 1983 Britain) in the cause of democratic rights for all South Africans. Dadoo's childhood was spent in Krugersdorp where his father, a poor peasant, settled towards the end of the last century. When he was about 10 years old, his family faced eviction on grounds of race, but his father took the matter to the Appeal Court and won his contention that his company, Dadoo Ltd. was not a person and had no race.
His father's stance and the ripple effect it had in securing, albeit temporarily, the trading rights of many other similarly pressed Indian traders, left an indelible impression on his young mind.
Two years later, he left for lndia where, in 1930, he matriculated at Aligerh College. He then proceeded to Britain where he graduated as a medical doctor at Edinburgh. He returned to South Africa in 1936. His professional status gave him an immediate entry to leadership in the Indian community as it had to the 25 year old Gandhi, some four decades earlier. It was inevitable that he would react strongly to the mounting racism which characterised South African society on the eve of the Second World War. All three black peoples were facing fresh legislative attacks which threatened further diminution of their status.
Indian land and trading rights were under fresh assault in the Transvaal and, at a time when 80 percent of the population was South African by birth, the Colonisation Commission of 1934 had proposed new areas for their settlement in Guinea, Guyana and Borneo. Attacks of a cruder nature had resulted in the sitting of two more commissions to consider the desirability of a Mixed Marriage Act and an Act to prevent blacks from employing whites.
Dadoo directed his attention to moving India politics from the conciliatory to the confrontational, and to release it from its ethnic bastion. He declared passive resistance against the Transvaal Indian Act in 1939 and was immediately supported by Gandhi and Nehru. The campaign, however, was postponed to 1946 when the Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Act was extended throughout the country, affecting all Indians. Two thousand people were imprisoned and at the United Nations, the question of racism in South Africa became an international issue.
Dadoo's greatest significance, however, lies in the fact that he worked for a broad democratic front. He joined the South African Communist Party as the only organisation active at the time involved in the rights of African workers. As early as 1922, Africans had made up the bulk of the membership of the Communist Party (1 600 of the 1 775 total membership). He was impressed by Moses Kotane and J. B. Marks who were both members of the Communist Party and the ANC. He drew close to Dr A. B. Xuma, the President-General of the ANC. He was moved by the deplorable living conditions of the Africans workers and their families. Above all, he was shattered by the crippling effect of the pass laws.
He joined Dr Xumain a massive campaign against passes and was arrested with him when they jointly attempted to present the authorities with a petition bearing 850 000 signatures. Later he signed a declaration with Xumato work together. That declaration was a precursor to the joint action that the Indian and African National Congress took against the Nationalist Government in 1952 in the Defiance of Unjust Laws campaign. Joint action continued in the Freedom Charter of 1955 and finally led to events of 1960 which forced Dadoo into exile.
Caption taken from Apartheid and The History of The Struggle for Freedom in South Africa, All rights reserved.