Ike+Horvitch,+Obituary,+The+Guardian,+London




 * Obituary**

=**Ike Horvitch**=


 * Unassuming architect and campaigner against apartheid**

Thursday January 26, 2006 The Guardian, London**
 * Denis Herbstein

Ike Horvitch, chairman of the South African Communist party at the time it was outlawed under apartheid in 1950, has died in London, aged 85, of prostate cancer. He once topped the list of 7,000 mostly communist and African nationalists on the files of the white regime's security legislation directorate.

Horvitch had joined the party while at the South African College school in Cape Town - fired by the threat of fascism in Europe and, unlike most whites, with a growing awareness of the black poverty around him. At the time the party was dominated by Russian émigrés prone to take instructions from Moscow. When the headquarters moved from Johannesburg to Cape Town, it became more independent, under the leadership of the British trade unionist Bill Andrews; officers were elected openly by the members, among them black trade unionists and the Indian intelligentsia.

Ike's years at Cape Town University were divided between his architectural studies and work for the party, which, uniquely for South Africa, was non-racial. He spoke at meetings, exposed appalling housing conditions in the townships, distributed the party newspaper and enjoyed the occasional mixed-race get-together. With the ANC yet to be radicalised by Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, the Communist party was in the vanguard of resistance to apartheid. "We regarded ourselves as Marxists," he wrote later, "though very few had actually read Marx in the original . . . he was rather heavy going." In 1946, all eight members of the central executive committee were charged with sedition, following a miners' strike led by the communist JB Marks. Ike, recently married to Mitzi, an opera singer, and running his own architec- tural practice, was forced to spend two years in Johannesburg before the case was thrown out.

By the time the first apartheid prime minister, Daniel Malan, banned the party under the Suppression of Comm-unism Act, Ike had taken over as chairman following Andrews' death. The Cape group, led by the theoretician Jack Simons, refused to go underground, arguing that its members were too well known and would easily be infiltrated. Johannesburg decided otherwise; the clandestine party would play a crucial role in the freedom struggle.

But Ike was not forgotten. In December 1956, he was among 156 people arrested and charged with high treason, though once again he was acquitted. His drawings of his co-defendants, done for the party paper, New Age, at the behest of Ruth First, are now in the Johannesburg apartheid museum. A newspaper headline of the time unconsciously highlighted the real aims of the accused, "Plan for all S Africans to have vote alleged".

After the Sharpeville shootings in 1960, a state of emergency was declared. Ike and his family had been forced to move to Johannesburg. He had had enough of politics and the disruption it wrought. "Everyone who was anyone, including my sister Sheila, was being arrested," he recalled. After once avoiding arrest by hiding in the servant's room while his wife told the police her husband had left the night before, he drove his Mini the 200 miles to British Bech-uanaland. He was eventually flown to Ghana and Britain, helped by Canon John Collins, of the International Def- ence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa.

Ike's father, a postmaster in Cape Town, was British, and his son soon obtained a British passport. His mother was the sister of the war poet and painter Isaac Rosenberg. Ike did much to revive the reputation of his forgotten uncle, writing about him and sculpting his image. In London, he quickly landed a commission to oversee the construction of the Park Lane Hilton, briefly the tallest building in the West End. As a result, he joined Ted Levy's practice, leaving his mark on shopping centres, flats and homes across England. He also spent three years in Lusaka working on the construction of the University of Zambia.

Ike did not become part of the tightly knit South African Communist party cell system operating in London. Though he remained an outspoken opponent of apartheid, he had fallen out of love with the Soviet system. He retired in 1992. A friend, Professor Gerry Shaper, called him "a quiet unassuming man, one of the few people in my life with no malice or cynicism". He is survived by Mitzi and their children, Andrew, Kay and Nina.


 * Isaac 'Ike' Osler Horvitch, architect and anti-apartheid activist, born October 9 1920; died December 28 2005


 * From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,,1695103,00.html**