Revolution and romance: the Eleanor Kasrils story

WHEN a young, petite, white shop assistant of a popular Durban CBD bookshop with a love for the arts was arrested, it shocked her artsy community, who never imagined her association with a liberation movement and what she was up to.

- SANDILE MDADANE

Eleanor Kasrils, née Logan, was born in Scotland and arrived as an infant in Durban in 1936. Like many other schoolchildren, according to her Struggle stalwart husband, Ronnie, she was educated and socialised in a colonial settler environment.

“However, she was a kind, compassionate person and strongly influenced by the writing of the great Scottish revolutionary writer and poet Robert Burns.

“Her distaste for racism and segregation led her to join the liberal party as a young adult around 1958,” said the former minister of State Security Kastrils, who wrote the book, The Unlikely Secret Agent, based on her life.

The book has been adapted to a stage play of the same title. Eleanor and Ronnie met at the time of the Sharpeville Massacre of March 21, 1960, and “she was shocked to the core”.

He thinks she was misunderstood by her black comrades and white members of the SA Communist Party, who didn’t imagine that a slightly built, softly spoken and demure single parent had the strength and willpower they grew to admire.

“The arty and somewhat pretentious whites who her parents socialised with, and those she worked with in a bookshop on West Street (Griggs), would have thought of her as a pleasant, typical socialite who loved the arts.

They never dreamt of the subversive life she was beginning to lead. When she was arrested, they were gobsmacked!” he said.