Background

Sathyandranath Ragunanan Maharaj was born on April 22, 1935, in Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

Education

Mac Maharaj matriculated from St Oswald's High School in Newcastle in 1952. He enrolled for a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Natal (the University of Natal no longer exists as a distinct legal entity, as it was incorporated into the University of KwaZulu-Natal), Durban, as a part-time student. Whilst at university, Maharaj served on the Students' Representative Council, campaigned against the segregation of students, and supported the boycott of the separate graduation ceremonies held at the time. In addition, he edited the student newspaper, Student Call, from 1955-1956. Maharaj completed his Bachelor of Arts in 1955. In 1956, the "Non-European" section of the university opened a Faculty of Law where he completed his first year. However, the faculty closed down in 1957. He decided to leave for the United Kingdom in August 1957, as he was unable to obtain a permit to study law in the Cape or Transvaal.

From August 1959, he studied law for two years at the London School of Economics before leaving to undergo military training in the then German Democratic Republic in 1961. After being sentenced to imprisonment on Robben Island, Maharaj resumed his studies, completing a Bachelor of Administration (majoring in Economics, Public Administration and Political Science) and a further two years towards a Bachelor of Science from the University of South Africa before his release in 1976.

Career

Mac Maharaj worked for a firm of attorneys in Johannesburg whilst spending a great deal of his time on political matters. In July 1964, he was arrested in Johannesburg, charged and convicted with four others on charges of sabotage in what became known as the Little Rivonia trial. Maharaj was sentenced to 12 years' imprisonment, which he served on Robben Island. He was released in 1976, and with him, he took the essays that he encouraged other activists to write. Twenty-five years later, Maharaj was able to publish the writings. Reflections in Prison "reflected the determination of Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Herman Toivo ya Toivo, John Pokela, Eddie Daniels and Billy Niar to provide a political context for themselves and those who would follow in their footsteps," according to Mandla Langa of the Sunday Times. Langa commented on the eerie knowledge those men must have had in knowing "that tragedy was stalking the children," when they had little idea of what was going on outside of the hallowed halls of their prison. Langa continued, "The defiant act of writing was a determination of an authority that was increasingly slipping away from the jailer...the essays are an analysis of power gone mad." Business Day critic Cara Bouwer described the book as "a revealing glimpse into the psyches and strengths of many of the men who personify the struggle against apartheid...secretly written, under the fear of reprisal, each word is a defiance against apartheid and a reaffirmation of the beliefs and freedom these men strove to achieve."

On his release, Mac Maharaj served with a five-year banning order prohibiting him from leaving his Merebank, Durban, home at night. His wife had left the country in 1974 on an exit permit and was living in London. Maharaj was refused permission to take up employment in central Durban and could therefore not earn a living. Following instructions from the African National Congress (ANC), he left South Africa in July 1977 and was deployed by the organization in Lusaka. A senior official in the political department of the ANC, Maharaj was elected to its national executive committee at the 1985 Kabwe Conference. From 1987 to 1990, Maharaj worked underground within South Africa, as a part of Operation Vula. Following the unbanning of the ANC and the South African Communist Party, he had to leave the country and re-enter legally under an indemnity from prosecution, agreed to between the ANC and the government. On his return, he assisted in the organization and restructuring of the South African Communist Party (SACP). He appeared at a press conference with then-SACP general secretary Joe Slovo when it was announced that the party would be relaunching as a legal body in July 1990. At this launch, held on 29 July 1990, it was announced that Maharaj was a member of the SACP's central committee, and he was also named as a member of the party's 22-person interim leadership group.

On 26 July 1990, just three days before the launch of the Party, security police detained Maharaj in Johannesburg under section 29 of the Internal Security Act, following police allegations of an ANC/SACP/ Umkhonto we Sizwe plan (codenamed Operation Vula) to seize power in the event of the failure of the ANC negotiations with the government. Initially charged under the Arms and Ammunition Act, additional charges were later added. In October 1990, Maharaj and eight others were charged with terrorism and, alternatively, illegal possession of arms, ammunition, and explosives. It was alleged that they had conspired to create a national underground network to recruit, train, arm, and lead a "people's army" or "revolutionary army" to seize power from the government by means of an armed insurrection. The accused were released in November 1990 on bail, and all charges dropped on 25 March 1991 after the accused received partial indemnity with respect to Operation Vula. In 1990, Maharaj announced his retirement from the central committee of the ANC. At the ANC's national congress held in Durban during July 1991, Maharaj became a member of the secretariat of the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa), which brought together most South African political organizations to negotiate a new constitutional dispensation.

Before joining the Government of National Unity in 1994, Mac Maharaj played a key role in the negotiation process that led the way to South Africa's first democratic elections and its new Constitution. He was a joint secretary in 1994 of the Transitional Executive Council (TEC), whose task was to ensure that in the run-up to the April elections was fair to all parties. Before that, he served as a joint negotiation secretary to the multi-party talks at Kempton Park from 1991 to 1993 which brokered the agreements that took South Africa to its first democratic election in 1994.

Mac Maharaj became democratic South Africa's first Minister of Transport on 11 May 1994. In June 1999, he retired from politics and joined the board of directors of FirstRand Bank. During his years in office, he has undertaken a process of fundamentally changing the role of the national Department of Transport (DoT) through the formulation of the new policy and the restructuring of his department. One of his first tasks was a major consultative policy review that culminated in the White Paper on National Transport Policy, which was accepted as government policy in 1995. This was taken further in the "Moving South Africa" project which has developed specific goals and strategies for South Africa's transport system for the next 20 years. This ambitious R20-million project developed a set of practical, high-impact, implementable strategic scenarios intended to literally get South Africa moving. Maharaj was a part of a team of Mozambican, Swazi and South African ministers involved in the Lubombo SDI - which would link northern KwaZulu Natal, Swaziland, and Mozambique in a program designed to boost tourism and agriculture in the area - and was also involved in the Wild Coast SDI and the port of Coega development initiative in Port Elizabeth. As part of his portfolio as the Minister of Transport, Maharaj was the shareholding minister of the Airports Company South Africa (ACSA), the South African Rail Commuter Corporation (SARCC), and the Air Traffic and Navigation Services Company (ATNS). Mac Maharaj served on three Cabinet Committees: Economic Affairs, the Committee for Office Bearers, and the Inter-ministerial Cabinet Committee (IMCC) which oversaw the restructuring of state assets. He was a co-chairperson of the transport sector of the National Framework Agreement (NFA) between government and organized labor.

During his many years of political activism, Maharaj did a variety of jobs. He was a truck driver, a petrol attendant, a clerk in a legal firm, a journalist and newspaper manager, an editor of the New Age, and a worker in a quarry, where he first learned about dynamite. It was an occupation he resumed on Robben Island, where he once again picked up a pick and shovel to work in the infamous limestone quarry. In London, he worked as a teacher, a garbage collector, and a canning factory and building site worker. In 2005, he joined the faculty of Bennington College in Vermont, United States.

Achievements

• During his time in the Robben Island prison with Nelson Mandela, Mac Maharaj helped to secretly transcribe the future South African president's life history and smuggled the text out upon his release. The text ultimately became Mandela's autobiography, A Long Walk to Freedom.
  
  The achievements during Maharaj's term as a Minister include the development of new civil aviation regulations and a White Paper on Airports and Airspace Management; negotiation of interim bus contracts to transform the old system of 'bus subsidies for life' to a tendered, competitive system; the development of South Africa as a maritime nation through work on establishing a Ships' Register; the gradual stabilization of the minibus taxi industry through an exhaustive consultation process led by the National Taxi Task Team (its recommendations, accepted by the industry itself and formally endorsed by Government in 1995, paved the way for the implementation of a structured program of unification and formalization based on regulation, legalization, training, and economic development); the establishment of MetroRail as an independent arm of Spoornet and the move away from deficit financing of commuter rail services. Maharaj's department initiated the internationally recognized Maputo Development Corridor Project with the Mozambican Government. This innovative exercise in regional cooperation has charted the way for private sector financing of major transport infrastructure across national boundaries, while firmly locating road, rail, and harbor construction, and rehabilitation within the context of multi-disciplinary spatial development initiatives. In September 1997, Mac Maharaj was selected by the New York journal Infrastructure Finance as one of eight government officials from around the world seen as having been "the most innovative and forward-thinking in their approach to privatization and infrastructure development."

Works

More photos

• book

  • Reflections in Prison: Voices From the South African Liberation Struggle

    (In 1976, while imprisoned on Robben Island, Nelson Mandel...)

    2001

Politics

Mac Maharaj's political life uniquely brings together all the strands of the struggle for democracy in South Africa. He was a potent force in the Communist Party and the African National Congress for nearly four decades. He was active in the fight against South African apartheid and was imprisoned by the government for his activism.

Views

"You don't negotiate amongst friends, you negotiate amongst enemies," Maharaj said, remembering Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State George Schultz who, in the face of worldwide anti-apartheid sentiment, urged the South African government to "start negotiations so the violence can cease." Rebels, he said, are always told to lay down their arms before negotiations can begin, but that gets the equation exactly wrong. For that reason, he added, he never criticizes the right of any oppressed people to choose their means of struggle. But the end of hostilities is a necessary goal. Labels are unlikely to yield change. "Find a way to breakthrough," he said. "Get around the labels to get to the solution."

Quotations: "You don't have to carry a gun to be a freedom fighter."

"Revenge should not be our motivation."

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• A writer for the African National Congress stated: "Mac Maharaj's political life uniquely brings together all the strands of the struggle for democracy in South Africa."

Connections

Mac Maharaj's first wife was Ompragash Maharaj. His second wife is Zarina Maharaj, a political and author. They have two children: Amilcar and Sekai, who attended school in Johannesburg.

Wife:

Zarina Maharaj

In August of 1977, Mac Maharaj came to London. Mac and Zarina's meeting was quite interesting in that Mac had long been familiar with Zarina through letters that she used to write to her ex-husband's brother, who was an inmate with Mac Maharaj. Mac and Zarina officially met at a Woman's Day event in London, on 9 August 1977. Zarina then moved to Mozambique in the same year. She lectured in Mathematics at the University of Maputo. Mac also arrived in Mozambique in 1978. After her contract expired in 1979, Zarina decided to join Mac, who had moved to Zambia, and the two got married in 1981.

In 1982, in Zambia Zarina had to manage the birth of a child, her own job, and being seen as an appendage of Mac, while he was working actively with the ANC (African National Congress). Once she had settled in Zambia, Zarina started working at the University of Zambia for the British High Commission as the British Technical Co-Operation Officer. In the same year, she also delivered her and Mac's first child, Amilcar, who was named after the Cape Verde leader Amilcar Cabral. Amilcar, also nicknamed Milou, was born in July of 1982. For the nine months of her pregnancy, Mac was only present for three months. For the rest of the six months, Mac was in Swaziland. Zarina had to fly to London to deliver her son, as she required a special medical facility because of her age. Even during the time of her delivery, Mac was not around as he was out working for one of the ANC's underground mission called Vula which was one of the ANC's most impactful operations. Mac Maharaj in his interviews, with Padraig O'Malley, author of Shades of Difference, admits to having been absent during these years of Zarina's life. Two years later, in 1984, Zarina gave birth to her second child, Sekai, which means smile. Mac and Zarina also call her Joey. This time though, Mac was around to take care of both Zarina and their children.

Son:

Amilcar Maharaj

Daughter:

Sekai Maharaj

ex-wife:

Ompragash Maharaj

Friend:

Nelson Mandela

Mac Maharaj was a member of Nelson Mandela's inner circle during the days of resistance in South Africa. He was a prison mate of Mandela, who smuggled the first draft of Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, out of Robben Island.

During the 1960s, Maharaj was imprisoned by the government for his activism. He endured his worst period of torture, at this time, contemplating suicide - one time deciding to hurtle himself on the sword held to his throat before his torturer presciently flicked it away moments before the planned impalement. Then, however, his thoughts pulled him out of his own situation. More important, however, Maharaj began speaking with Mandela, who had a surprising tactic in facing his enemies: empathy. Mandela, Maharaj said, advised that one has to "get in their shoes to move them." Specifically, Mandela realized that he could find common ground with his oppressors: just as the white Afrikaners were oppressing blacks in the South African policy of apartheid, the Afrikaners, themselves, had resisted oppression by the British Empire, fighting the Boer War on their way to the founding of the Union of South Africa. What's more, Mandela "insisted I learn the language of the oppressor," not just conversational Afrikaans, but the whites' poetry and literature "to really get inside their heads." Mandela, he added, learned to control his temper, as "uncontrolled reactions play right into their hands," while respectful treatment of an enemy can result in a return of respect, even in the midst of the struggle.

References

• Shades of Difference: Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa
  2007