[image: Sunday Times] * Johnny Issel, Founding member of the UDF*
*Chris Barron, Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 30 January 2011* Johnny Issel, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 64, was a key figure in the struggle against apartheid and played a crucial role in starting the United Democratic Front. He was not a charismatic, fire-breathing crowd puller like his more flamboyant and younger contemporaries Trevor Manuel and Allan Boesak, and has received far less attention. But without his strategic talents and organisational genius, the UDF may not have been the hugely unifying, successful, unstoppable force for liberation it became in the '80s. Issel was born into an Afrikaans-speaking family in the Western Cape farming town of Worcester on August 17, 1946. His parents never married and he never met his father. He was raised by his mother, supported by aunts and uncles. He completed most of his schooling in his home town but matriculated in Boksburg on the East Rand, where his mother had gone for work. Afterwards he returned and signed on for a BA in education at the University of the Western Cape. A cerebral man with intellectual tastes, a voracious appetite for books and a great talent for engaging with people in small groups, he would have made a good, if strict, teacher (he had a strong autocratic streak). But the urgent political demands of the day, plus his natural bent for organising, mobilising and recruiting, took precedence. When Steve Biko and Barney Pityana led black students out of the predominantly white National Union of Students in 1969, Issel joined a delegation of coloured students from UWC to meet them in Durban. He was part of the brains trust that formed the Black Consciousness-aligned SA Students' Organisation and helped build it into a national force. The security police quickly recognised the growing threat it constituted. In 1973 Issel, along with Biko, Pityana and other Saso leaders, was issued with his first five-year banning order. Two more were to follow. In October 1974 he was detained under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act after Saso had marked the independence of Mozambique by launching countrywide pro-Frelimo rallies. Section 6 allowed the police to hold detainees indefinitely without charging them, and gave them a licence to use torture with impunity. They sent Issel and the other detained Saso leaders to Pretoria and showed them no mercy. After six months in Pretoria Central he was released but the torture he endured, including electric shocks, scarred him emotionally for life. Before his detention he had married his 17-year-old first cousin Shaheeda, and life had been hard. They lived in a one-room corrugated iron shack in a back yard in Elsies River on the Cape Flats, with a primus stove and a bucket for a toilet. Biko, Pityana and Issel would hold meetings in the shack while Shaheeda breast-fed their new baby on the other side of a curtain which they'd erected across the middle of the room. As a banned person Issel was largely confined to this tiny shack. He would spend the morning at a local library devouring books on Marxism and philosophy and then come back and write notes and make plans. The situation became even more intolerable after his release from detention. He was uncommunicative and moody. The security police added to the misery by frequently raiding their shack at 3am and keeping them awake until 8am. The marriage ended in divorce and he married journalist and activist Zubeida Jaffer, herself a frequent detainee, who divorced him after 10 years. For the best part of 20 years Issel was on the run from the police, under banning orders and in detention. On one occasion they raided a house on the beach front in Muizenberg after being informed he was there. He slipped out a back window and hid in some bushes on the dunes. The police scoured the dunes and when they couldn't find him they began firing shots into the bushes. He heard them discussing whether they should set the bushes alight. Late at night after they'd gone he crawled 10km through the bushes to Mitchells Plain. In 1994 Issel became a member of the Cape provincial legislature, but became disillusioned with politics and the naked self-interest he felt was tearing his beloved ANC apart. The values of the new South Africa were poles apart from those of the UDF era, he wrote. "Now it's every man for himself." After a brief unsuccessful foray into the fishing industry he went to live abroad, but returned after suffering a double stroke. Two years ago he requested a meeting with one of his chief torturers, Frans Mostert. He asked Mostert why he had done those atrocious things to him. Mostert said he was only doing his job. Issel found Mostert such an old and broken man he almost felt sorry for him. They shook hands and Issel thanked him for making the time. Issel is survived by six children. *From: http://www.timeslive.co.za/sundaytimes/article881422.ece/Obituary---Johnny-Issel--Founding-member-of-the-UDF * * * * * -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] .
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