Max Coleman: a businessman who took on apartheid jailers

My last memories of Max Coleman are of him, at more than 90, pulling out records of the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee (DPSC) from his meticulously-maintained filing cabinets. I was seeing for myself the rigour that many describe in Max – part of what enabled him to contribute so much to the fight for human rights in South Africa.

He was an extraordinary man, as I was to hear over and over again as I interviewed people about the DPSC. His courage, his determination, his integrity, his formidable capacity to marshal information and to drive action all shone through. But so, too, did his kindness and generosity.

Max was catapulted into the world of detention without trial when his son, Keith, was taken into detention at John Vorster Square by Captain Andries Struwig, a man notorious for his cruelty as an interrogator.

Keith remembers how Max found a way to instil courage in his son. “My father said to Struwig, ‘If anything happens to my son, I will hold you personally accountable.’ And I believed him, absolutely. But I also saw that Struwig believed him. This big monstrosity of a human being looked at my father and in that moment, he was scared.”

Max’s actions that day foreshadowed the many confrontations he would have with the security police and the South African government over the conditions in which detainees like Keith were held. But Max, and his wife Audrey, didn’t stop at securing concessions for their son. Rather, Max stepped away from his role as a prosperous businessman to help found, with Audrey, an organisation that was often the only source of support for tens of thousands of South Africans held in South Africa’s jails without any recourse – the DPSC.

Daphne Mashile-Nkosi describes the immediate impact of the DPSC’s assistance. “Max bought takkies for people to use in their minutes of exercise. Suddenly there were food parcels for people in prison. Max would ask, ‘How many detainees?’ and they would buy packs. You are struggling to buy things at home, let alone when you are in prison. Your parents don’t have that extra cash. This was a huge intervention.”

She says many parents didn’t know how to write, and Max wrote applications for them to gain visiting rights to their children. To this day, Daphne expresses amazement at what the DPSC was able to set up for families defenceless against the detention system.

“The Colemans were able to pull the Black Sash, the medical profession, psychologists, business people, professors from universities, lawyers for human rights. I have always asked myself – and I’m still asking – ‘How did Max transform into a person supplying food parcels and toiletries to detainees in the township because we had none?’”

Max was also at the forefront of wider battles for detainees. The South African state sought to discredit accounts of torture and human-rights abuses suffered by detainees. But no court or media outlet was able to deny the information presented by the DPSC.

Azhar Cachalia, who represented the DPSC, says, “Max Coleman must take a lot of the credit” for the organisation’s capacity to present information vital to legal challenges to detention and to those supporting the detainees’ cause. As a consequence of its reputation for scrupulous research, the DPSC became South Africa’s voice to the world about human-rights abuses in the country, with Max and other members of the DPSC called upon to testify on the international stage.

The legal battles and challenges brought by Max, the media victories won, and the ongoing interaction with a repressive government are too numerous to describe here.

He fought a brutal state with every legal weapon he could marshal. But DPSC staff members remember, too, Max’s great personal kindness to them. They said Max never turned away anyone in trouble, never refused to help or to give.

The DPSC was heavily restricted from carrying out its work in 1988. But Max, Audrey, and the other members of the DPSC fought to the end for political detainees.

The African National Congress (ANC) was unbanned in February 1990, but in December of that year, the New York Times quoted Max as saying, “Our reports of torture and death in detention continue.”

And in November last year, when Max and Audrey were awarded the Order of Luthuli by President Cyril Ramaphosa, their call was once again for justice. “The freedoms Nelson Mandela and the ANC so bravely fought for, the vision of egalitarian, non-racial democracy, is today but a flickering glimmer of the light that shone brightly on 27 April 1994,” they said in a statement.

Max was a giant: a profoundly compassionate and principled man who was also a formidably effective fighter. He remains an example to us all of humanity in the face of unspeakable brutality, of the courage to fight for justice when the odds are stacked against us. And of personal kindness and generosity in the worst of times.

• Terry Shakinovsky co-wrote (with Sharon Cort) a book about Audrey and Max Coleman titled, “The Knock on the Door – The story of the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee”. She spent many hours interviewing Max and others about the Colemans.