Enuga Sreenivasalu Reddy, Order of the Companions of Oliver Tambo, turned 96 this week. The Indian national ranks among the most intrepid documentalists and archivists of the South African freedom Struggle.
Known simply by his initials, “ES” landed in New York after World WarII, in early 1946. The young student had travelled from south India hoping to study engineering. A delayed boat meant that he missed the start of the term. That led him into another passion, politics. Reddy was immediately swept into the campaign to free South Africa from racism.
Speaking at a 1979 conference in London on the twentieth anniversary of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, he said: “I recall my own participation in a demonstration in front of the South African Consulate in New York in 1946 - under the leadership of Paul Robeson and Dr WEB Du Bois - to protest the bloody suppression of the African mine labour strike and the Pegging Act against the Indian community. It took place during the 1946 visit of a delegation from the ANC led by its president, Dr AB Xuma, to the UN.”
At the time, his own country was on the final stretch of a 200-year-long struggle against the brutal British colonial invasion.
The nationalist movement, with Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, among others, at the helm had a deep concern about fighting for the liberation of other oppressed peoples.
Reflecting on the mission led by Mrs Vijayluxmi Pandit, Reddy wrote: “So when the Indian delegation came to the UN for the first time, they said the main issues in the world for us are colonialism and racism. They were not interested in the Cold War and other things.”
The solidarity with South Africa had a much earlier history. The Indian National Congress and the ANC were part of the Congress of the Oppressed People against Imperialism convened in Brussels in February 1927.
On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the ANC on January 8, 1987, Reddy said: “Indeed, the contacts established by leaders of colonial peoples at that congress were to lay the foundations for the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the Non-Aligned Movement.”
Writing in the monthly ANC journal Sechaba in 1989, Reddy pointed out that Nehru “saw to it that India did its utmost to promote African freedom and play a leading role on behalf of Africa in the UN and other fora”.
Soon after completing his studies in New York, Reddy joined the UN as an intern, and then as a full-time official. Uppermost on his agenda were the campaigns of the freedom movements of South Africa and Namibia. An earlier sitting of the UN thwarted attempts by General Jan Smuts to incorporate Namibia into South Africa.
It was there, too, in 1946 that Pandit had embarrassed Smuts and declared that India would be the first country to break diplomatic relations with the racist regime in Pretoria and impose sanctions.
The UN was clearly a powerful global platform to campaign against oppression. Speaking before the Swedish People’s Parliament against Apartheid in 1986, Reddy said: “I believe that my own principal contribution in the UN, as the official in charge of action against apartheid from 1963 to 1984, was in encouraging, promoting and assisting, in appropriate ways, the actions of anti-apartheid movements and other non-governmental organisations, as well as individuals, in campaigns and actions against apartheid and in support of the Struggle.”
When he was invited to speak at a conference on international anti-apartheid movements convened by the Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre in Durban in 2004, Reddy recalled that the Special Committee Against Apartheid brushed aside doubts about its competence to grant hearings to South Africans.
Between May and July 1963, the committee heard an ANC delegation comprising Duma Nokwe, Robert Resha and Tennyson Makiwane.
It was also addressed by Patrick Duncan, of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania; PAC activist Mary Benson; George Houser of the American Committee on Africa; Professor Leslie Rubin of the South African Liberal Party; and most memorably, the African nightingale, Miriam Makeba.
Makeba’s address before the UN led to her being stripped of her passport by the apartheid authorities and denied entry into the country of her birth - and remained in force until the unbanning of the ANC, PAC and SACP in 1990.
It was fitting that when the South African government conferred its highest award to a foreign national, the Order of the Companions of OR Tambo, the citation in Reddy’s honour read: “His active support of the South African freedom movement for more than half a century. As head of the UN Centre Against Apartheid for over two decades, he played a key role in promoting international sanctions against South Africa and organising the world campaign to free Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners.”
A fortnight ago in a live-streamed tribute, his namesake and chairperson of the History Society, Dr Jairam Reddy, observed that ES Reddy’s relentless activism was effectively two lifetimes rolled into one.
* Selvan Naidoo is the curator of the 1860 Heritage Centre and Kiru Naidoo serves on the Advisory Board of the Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre at UKZN