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Minister of Intelligence
Former Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry
Former Deputy Minister of Defence
Member
Childhood in a lower middle class Jewish home in Yeoville should have prepared Ronnie Kasrils, born on November 15 1938, for a professional life and material comfort. But his mother always fostered religious and social tolerance in her children, and Kasrils became haunted by the racist inhumanity in the Johannesburg suburbs around him.
Then in Form Four a teacher explained the French Revolution to the class, drawing vivid pictures of peasant suffering and aristocratic cruelty. For Kasrils the parallels with apartheid South Africa were clear. He glimpsed the historical pattern that would envelop his own life.
At school he was always a vigorous sportsperson, excelling particularly in athletics and football. After school he briefly studied law, but dropped out to write for a film company. His bohemian lifestyle, thanks to which he made his first friends across the colour bar, was interrupted by the Sharpeville massacre of 1960. Within Kasrils had contacted the ANC underground and was carrying out secret tasks. He has never looked back.
From 1960 until 1963 Kasrils was active in ANC campaigns against the declaration of a racist republic and against Vorster's sabotage bill. He became a member of MK on its creation and was on the Natal regional command. He personally carried out acts of sabotage and organised a major operation to provide MK with dynamite.
Kasrils was arrested and tried for contraveniong the Pondoland emergency regulations during the Pondo rebellion in 1962, he was acquitted of the charges but fired from his job in advertising nevertheless.
In 1962 he received a five-year banning order and narrowly escaped arrest by the security police when the ninety day detention clause became law.
Kasrils remained on the run from the security police until October 1963 when he and his wife Eleanor left the country at the request of the ANC leadership who sent him abroad for military training.
After several years in the ANC office in Dar es Salaam Kasrils and his wife Eleanor moved to London. Here he worked with Dr Yusuf Dadoo, Joe Slovo and Jack Hodgson, establishing underground MK units in South Africa. He also found time to study sociology, to write poetry under the name ANC Khumalo and to co-write several books about the philosopher and socialist Bertrand Russell.
In 1977 Kasrils moved to Angola to become political instructor in the MK camps and later political commissar for Angola. He was next based in Maputo, where he worked in a regional committee of the ANC's Revolutionary Council, once again developing the underground in South Africa. He was based in Lusaka between 1985 and 1989. He was chief of military intelligence from 1983-1988; a member of the PMC that replaced the RC in 1983; and was a co-opted member of the NEC from 1987.
When he returned illegally to the country at the end of 1989, Kasrils was struck by the appalling conditions of squatter camps lying almost alongside the prosperous developments of white suburbia. Hunted by the security forces for his role in Operation Vula, he repeatedly escaped arrest before being indemnified in June 1991. He was subsequently elected to the NEC and the NWC.
In the 1994 general elections he stood as candidate number eight on the ANC list for the national assembly and became a member of parliament. In June 1994 he was appointed Deputy Minister of Defence.
Kasrils' autobiography "Armed and Dangerous; My Undercover Struggle Against Apartheid" was published in 1993 by Heinemann, London.