FOREWORD
Monty, as we all referred to him affectionately, was a generous, jovial man with sufficient political foresight to realise that the problems of South Africa's disenfranchised cut across ethnicity and had to be fought on a broad united front.
He gave the formidable Natal Indian Congress, founded by Mahatma Gandhi in 1894, a new lease of life when he assumed its presidency in 1945 and galvanised the Indian people into militant passive resistance against General Smuts's racist laws.
He struggled relentlessly for the rights of all South Africans to the end of his life and remains entrenched in our history as an eminent contributor to our freedom struggle.
Nelson Mandela
September 1961
