Rissik Haribhai "Barney" Desai was born into an Indian family on 10 April 1932 in Durban, Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal), South Africa. According to South Africa’s Apartheid race classification laws, he was “reclassified” as a Coloured person in 1957.
His father, an accountant born in India, and his mother were classified as Malay. As a teenager, he visited India with his father. Mosie Moolla and Barney later became joint secretaries of the Transvaal Indian Youth Congress (TIYC). In 1952, Desai founded and briefly edited Spark, a youth publication. The following year he received his first banning order, forcing him to resign from 24 organisations.
In the late 1950s, Desai moved to Cape Town, changed his name to Shabaan Desai and became legally reclassified as coloured. He succeeded James La Guma as president of the South African Coloured People's Congress (CPC—originally known as the South African Coloured Peoples Organisation - SACPO) in 1961 and participated in planning for the Malmesbury Convention. Elected in 1962 to replace George Peake as a City Councillor for District Six, Cape Town, he was prevented from taking up the position because he was a banned person. Desai was a member of the underground South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Western Cape regional structure of uMkhonto weSizwe (MK). He was the Vice President of the South African Coloured People's Congress before leaving South Africa in the early 1960s. He settled in Britain with his family, where he qualified as a barrister in 1970, specialising in defending Black people in criminal cases.
In 1986, Desai moved to Zimbabwe and began developing links with the internal Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). He had joined the PAC in 1965. On 10 February 1990, Desai became one of the first prominent exiles to return to South Africa. The Mayor of Cape Town officially received him.
He served as the PAC's publicity secretary and senior negotiator during South Africa’s constitutional talks in the early 1990s. He never formally retired from politics; because of ill health, he never took up his seat in Parliament following the elections.
Desai was co-author of The Killing of the Imam (1978), about Imam Abdullah Haron who was killed in police detention, and is the subject of a biographical film, Born Into Struggle (2004) by his son, Rehad Desai.
Rissik Haribhai "Barney" Desai passed away in 1997.
