Friends, colleagues and former students of Professor Kader Asmal will be pleased to learn that a memorial bench in his honour will be placed in the famous Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens outside Cape Town on 8th December. A lifelong opponent of apartheid, Kadar and his wife Louise were founders of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Ireland in the 1960s. After the end of the apartheid regime, they returned to South Africa and Kader became Minster for Water Affairs and Forestry under Nelson Mandela in the first democratic government of his home country. He later became Minister for Education. He retired from parliament a few years ago and died in June 2011.
Kader Asmal had been a founder member of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, a lecturer in Lawin TCD for many years and a pioneer and leading figure in the movements for civil liberties and human rights in Ireland from the 1960s until he returned to South Africa in 1990. His memorial bench, which will look up at Table Mountain, has been carved from trees cut down in the course of the Working for Water programme he initiated as Minister for Water and Forestry and will be shaded by an African olive tree. The bench will be unveiled by his wife and co-worker Louise and their sons Adam and Rafiq.