President Cyril Ramaphosa has expressed his deep sadness at the passing in Cape Town of Mr Leon Levy, aged 96, who was the last surviving signatory of the Freedom Charter and Accused No 4 in the 1956 Treason Trial.
President Ramaphosa offers his deep sympathy to the family and friends of Mr Levy who took on numerous roles in the struggle alongside his equally committed identical twin brother, Norman, who passed away in July 2021.
Leon Levy, whose parents had emigrated from Lithuania, joined the Communist Party of South Africa when he was a teenager and became a trade unionist when he was 24 – two years before he was elected president of the South African Congress of Trade Unions that he had helped to establish.
He was among the organisers of the Congress of the People which adopted the Freedom Charter on 26 June 1955.
The six Charter signatories were African National Congress President Chief Albert Luthuli; Jimmy La Guma of the South African Coloured People’s Congress; Monty Naicker of the Natal Indian Congress; Pieter Beyleveld of the Congress of Democrats and Leon Levy of the South African Congress of Trade Unions.
In December 1956, security police arrested the Levy brothers as part of a crackdown on liberation movement leaders and charged the activists with high treason, which carried the death penalty as a possible sentence.
While Norman Levy was discharged later, Leon Levy remained on trial until his acquittal in 1961.
The brothers remained politically active, with Norman Levy serving three years after being convicted under the Suppression of Communism Act.
Leon Levy was subjected to two periods of detention, after which he went into exile in England, where Norman joined him after being released from prison.
President Ramaphosa said: “The passing of Leon Levy is a sad moment for us as fellow human beings. It is particularly sad for us as citizens of a South Africa that attained freedom from apartheid through the hard and sacrificial activism of Leon Levy and those who were in the trenches with him, including his brother, Norman.
“As we mark 70 years since the Treason Trial of 1956, we are obliged to pay tribute to the cohort of leaders and other activists who fought the apartheid state based on their belief in the inherent equality and dignity of all people.
“Leon Levy attached his signature to the Freedom Charter that lives on in our Constitution whose 30th anniversary we observe as well in 2026.
“Leon Levy was part of a generation whose contributions to a better life and a better world for all South Africans and humanity globally must never be forgotten or dishonoured.
“May his soul rest in peace.”
Africa Fact: In the mid-nineteenth century, William Clarke, an English visitor to Nigeria, remarked that: “As good an article of cloth can be woven by the Yoruba weavers as by any people . . . in durability, their cloths far excel the prints and home-spuns of Manchester.”
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