Outside South Africa Johnny Issel’s name won’t mean much. But down there, mostly in the Western Cape, he had a reputation as a formidable political organizer and educator in the turbulent 1980s. Issel also helped found the UDF in 1983.  in Mitchell’s Plain, Cape Town. The UDF was the most important political movement inside South Africa during the 1980s before it was disbanded by and then absorbed into the soon to be in power, ANC.  More than that, Issel mentored a whole generation of activists from that region, which gained a reputation as one of the most radical in 1980s South Africa. He was under a banning order at the time. Issel died of kidney failure on 23 January 2011.

Issel’s biography is typical for the left vanguard of late apartheid. Born in 1946 in Worcester, an hour or so drive from Cape Town, he briefly lived outside Johannesburg after his mother moved there, then came to study at the University of the Western Cape (at the time, a university for coloureds in the apartheid government’s segregated university system). At UWC, he was active in Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement (in fact, he was captured tortured for his involvement), before gravitating to the trade unions and then to the ANC-aligned civic and social movements of the late 1970s and early 1980s. He also helped found Grassroots, a popular magazine and newspaper which reported on inequalities in Cape Town’s townships and which served as political education for my generation (I was in primary, i.e. elementary, and then high school for much of the 1980s).

Issel, with his gruff voice, is remembered mostly as a formidable organizer and brave activist as testimonies of contemporaries at his funeral confirmed: Mildred Leisia, Ruth Lewin, Cecyl Esau (also from Worcester and to whom Issel was a mentor), Ryland Fisher, and his daughter Leila. among them. Issel had been shot at by police, harassed (he has been described as “a nightmare for the security police”) as well as imprisoned for his activism. He was known for his aggressive recruitment for the ANC and his insistence to defy the government’s ban on open display of symbols of the organization as well as that of the Communist Party (both which were banned). He was famously behind the unfurling of an ANC flag at the funeral of another legendary ANC activist, Hennie Ferrus, in Worcester in 1980. Displays or possession of banned materials like the ANC flag could result in a five year jail sentence at the time.  Significantly,  Issel also represented a radical political strand of Islam. Muslims were prominent in the struggle from the 1960s through the 1980s, but are now mostly socially conservative and withdrawn from politics.

Issel faded from postapartheid politics as some of his other contemporaries (Cheryl Carolus, Chris Nissen, and Trevor Manuel, among others) became more nationally and globally prominent. When the ANC was unbanned, he briefly became its main organizer in the Western Cape after after 1994 served for a while as a provincial MP (he regularly clashed with the dour National Party speaker of the legislature for wearing Cuban guayabera shirts to parliamentary sessions as opposed to Western suits and ties). In 2007, he was honored by President Thabo Mbeki for his contribution to the struggle against apartheid.

None of this, however, prevented him speaking his mind. In a 2003 interview, his skills as a political educator and organizer come through clearly:

‘… Since the coming of the nineties, things seem to change within [South Africa]. A new culture arrived with the nineties. It brought and legitimated the “market”. And in a very short space of time it took control of practically every aspect of our lives. Though the market had been with us for a long time it remained condemned, the domain of decadent white society. And whereas some of us were quite skeptical about it at the beginning, we eventually succumbed. Today it regulates and controls all of our lives. It determines how we conduct our politics. It writes the scripts of our locally produced soapies. Increasingly our young minds at school are imprinted with the dictates of the market. Drilling them in the art of selling themselves. It influences the way we play sports, the way we speak, the way we dress. Our public appearances are carefully choreographed. These are the requirements of the market. It demands that we present ourselves as salable commodities. As functionaries we are required to possess a certain measure of exchange value, like any other commodity for sale. Such are the dictates of the “market”.

‘And more better if it is “packaged” in an Italian-designed suit and driven in a German-produced automobile. And if so, the exchange value increases and the market rewards a higher premium. But on the market not all goods up for sale are sought. Similarly, some of us discover that we are not appropriately packaged. And we begin to doubt our own worth, our own self-worth. Others seem to find somewhat more expedient ways, albeit criminal ways, to appropriate what the market has to offer. In our market society everyone looks out for himself – and only himself. Nobody is his brother’s keeper. Very different from the tenets held and forged during the camaraderie of the eighties. Very different from the values that inspired the likes of Vuyisile Mini … or Neil Aggett, or Anton [Fransch].* The new values emerging within our nascent democracy are at the opposite pole of those prevalent during the times of the UDF. We can hardly expect the values, which came with the nineties, to give rise to those selfless deeds seen during the time of the UDF.’

* Mini, from Johannesburg, was sentenced to death and hanged (he famously sang liberation songs on the walk to the gallows) in 1964.  Aggett, who was white, was killed while in detention in 1982. Fransch, a member of the ANC’s armed wing and from Cape Town, was murdered by security police in 1989.