Dumisani Kumalo Dead at 71; Helped Turn Tide Against Apartheid

Early in his career, Kumalo was a reporter for various South African publications, and in the 1970s he became increasingly involved with anti-apartheid causes. He left the country to live in the United States after “the police wrecked my home and threatened me” in 1977, he told The Weekly Mail in 1985.

He was soon working for the American Committee on Africa and the Africa Fund, promoting divestment. He traveled the United States urging pension funds, universities, cities, states and the federal government itself to shed investments in companies doing business with South Africa.

“I spoke to more than 1,000 campuses all over the country in all 50 states,” Kumalo recalled in a 2005 interview for the book "No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists Over a Half-Century, 1950-2000.”

A particular triumph of his and others’ efforts came in 1986, when Congress, overriding a veto by President Ronald Reagan, passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. The keys to such successes, Kumalo often said, were the grassroots support he worked to generate and an ability to get disparate groups to agree on the wrongs of apartheid.

“In Missouri,” he said, “we had a coalition that had Arabs, Jews and Catholics and right-wingers. These guys, if they discussed anything else, they would be at each other’s throat. But when it was South Africa, they were together.”

Dumisani Shadrack Kumalo was born Sept. 16, 1947, in KwaMbunda, in eastern South Africa. His father, Andries, was a carpenter and preacher, and his mother, Kheline (Mbatha) Kumalo, was a counselor and midwife.

In 1947, the family moved to Evaton, south of Johannesburg, where Kumalo grew up and attended Wilberforce College. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of South Africa and a master’s degree at Indiana University, where he participated in a foreign journalists’ program in 1973 and 1974.

In his anti-apartheid lobbying in the 1970s and ‘80s, Kumalo was not shy about taking on powerful forces, including politicians who accepted campaign money from a law firm, Baskin & Sears, that represented South Africa. One was Edward Koch, mayor of New York at the time.

“He cannot represent a city of black and white citizens and still be taking money from a racist group,” Kumalo said in 1984, calling on Koch to return a $2,000 contribution his campaign had received from the firm in 1981. (Koch defended his acceptance of the money.)

Kumalo returned to South Africa to witness the historic 1994 election that marked the end of apartheid and brought Nelson Mandela to the presidency. He served in the government after that, and in 1999, Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, appointed him to the United Nations post.

In that job, too, he often opposed the powerful, including the United States. He objected to American eagerness to go to war in Iraq in 2003. Later in that decade, when he was sitting on the U.N. Security Council, he drew considerable criticism for opposing sanctions intended to counter President Robert Mugabe’s human rights abuses in Zimbabwe.

“We didn’t want human rights to be used as a tool: ‘If I don’t like you, I trot out human rights violations that you may have,'” he told Voice of America in 2009, explaining this and other controversial stands, “but when it is Guantánamo Bay, they keep quiet, and you know when it is Gaza, they keep quiet.”

“We didn’t do things the way the British and the Americans wanted us to do them,” he added, “and if you don’t do it like the big ones, the French and the Americans and the British, the way they want to do them, then you are a cheeky African. Well, I am happy being a cheeky African.”

Kumalo’s survivors include his wife, Ntombikayise Kumalo; a brother, Henry; two sons; and several grandchildren.

Rachael Kagan, who worked with Kumalo on the American Committee on Africa, recalled a phrase he coined that became a favorite among staff members. In meetings, when they were considering places to press the divestment argument, Kumalo, who had already been to all the possible targets, knew which locations would be unproductive. “Let’s jump quietly over” that one, he’d say.

“It was funny, and wise, a lyrical shorthand,” Kagan said by email. “It helped us not to get bogged down in defeat, and kept us moving forward to build the national coalition that could be built. While we laughed and kept the ‘jump quietly’ saying going in a million ways, it was also a brilliant lesson in tactics.”

And it worked. In a 1999 interview with The New York Times at the Manhattan office he had just settled into as South Africa’s newly named representative to the United Nations, Kumalo recalled a time in the 1980s when, living in the United States, he was denied permission to return to South Africa for his father’s funeral.

“They wrote me back from this office and said, ‘You are not wanted in South Africa — forget it,'” he recalled. “And guess what? I’m now the one sitting in this office.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.