Peter Rodda

Campaigner against apartheid

Peter Gordon Rodda, teacher, writer and political activist: born Piet Retief, South Africa 5 August 1937; married 1964 Barbara Bruce (one son; marriage dissolved 1975); died London 28 March 2003

Peter Rodda was both an activist in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and, in exile, its victim. Yet he rose above the mental and physical illnesses that cut short his own literary career to achieve a particular position as friend, mentor and wit in literary and political circles linked to his early life.

From a Swaziland boyhood he went to Kearsney College in Natal and to the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, where he found a political home in the extra-parliamentary, radical Liberal Party. In his lively student days there and at the University of Cape Town he wrote prolifically in student magazines, the Liberal-supporting fortnightly Contact, Ronald Segal's Africa South and, most memorably, The New African, where his "Peter Cod's Diary" was found by many hilarious and hard-hitting, by others deeply offensive. Much poetry appeared in Ophir (often under the name "Richard Tudhope") and other journals.

His breadth of mind was already observable in his membership of both the non-racial Liberal Party and the white Communist Congress of Democrats, successfully cutting across their mutual hostility. He was out in front in the dangerous days of the Emergency that followed the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 and, after high-school teaching in rural Natal, as a lecturer in English at Rhodes University in Grahamstown and Port Elizabeth.

Rodda's anti-apartheid campaigning role made him a certain target when in 1964 a sabotage unit to which friends of his belonged was exposed and he suffered detention, solitary confinement and harsh interrogation. Perhaps this triggered the latent mental illness that plagued him for decades, wrecking his teaching career and ending his happy marriage to Barbara Bruce.

They had begun life together in his Rhodes days but decided, as South Africa entered its most politically oppressive years, to move to Britain. It was here, teaching in Hertfordshire in the 1970s, that his career as a playwright developed. The Time of Breaking, based on his experience as a prisoner, Biko, performed and co-written by Alton Kumalo, played both in the London fringe and the provinces, and Bush People was read in the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs. But intermittent mental illness hindered his progress and, though his treatment was effective from the mid-1970s, the onset of cancer brought his literary work to an end.

However, he was still there generously to assist other writers and researchers. The scene of this vicarious literary life was his book-crammed Shepherd's Bush flat, a Mecca for visitors from southern Africa and for his host of exiled and English friends. His warmth of personality brought people to him in droves, though many were deeply saddened by his bodily state – an amputated leg never healed. He himself was philosophical, almost light-hearted, about his physical ills.

His Natal circle, led by his closest friend Jonathan, son of Alan Paton, who had loved Rodda almost as another son, tried to bring him out for a reunion in liberated South Africa but this was beyond his strength.

Randolph Vigne