‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order!’
By Joel Pollak
Rhoda Kadalie was born in 1953 in District Six, Cape Town, and became a pioneering feminist within the anti-apartheid movement, as well as the most prominent critic of the post-apartheid government.
After her family was forcibly removed from a “white” area in the suburb of Mowbray, she matriculated at Harold Cressy High School and graduated from the University of the Western Cape with degrees in library science, and anthropology.
She earned a Master’s Degree in Development Studies at the International Institute for Social Studies at The Hague, Netherlands, in 1986. She founded the Gender Equity Unit at UWC, and served in Nelson Mandela’s administration on the South African Human Rights Commission.
She then resigned in protest and founded Impumelelo, an organization devoted to supporting and replicating successful private-public partnerships for social development.
Predicted Donald Trump’s victory
She wrote popular columns in the South African press, both English and Afrikaans, and was among the first to warn about the corruption and mismanagement of the ruling African National Congress.
She was recognized as one of the most important opposition voices in the country – though she criticized opposition parties, too.
A rare pro-Israel voice in the South African media, she was also a keen observer U.S. politics, and was one of the few who predicted Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election. She moved to the U.S. in 2018 to be with her family, and died of cancer in April 2022.
This first, authorized biography tells the story of her life in the context of South Africa’s dramatic changes, using unique primary sources, and explores Rhoda’s lifelong commitment to robust debate and political diversity.
About the author
Joel Pollak is a South African-born writer and attorney living in Los Angeles, California. He grew up in suburban Chicago and graduated from Harvard College in 1999. He returned to South Africa as a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholar, and stayed on to work as a freelance journalist.
From 2002 to 2006, he served as the speechwriter to the Leader of the Opposition in the South African Parliament, Tony Leon, and worked on the mayoral campaign of Helen Zille in Cape Town in 2006. He earned a Master’s degree in Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town, then returned to the U.S. and graduated from Harvard Law School in 2009.
Once a left-wing activist, his politics shifted to the right, and he ran for Congress in 2010 as a Republican in his home district in Illinois, losing to an entrenched incumbent but mounting a campaign that earned national attention. He joined conservative media pioneer Andrew Breitbart at Breitbart News in 2011, where he currently serves as senior editor-at-large and in-house counsel. He is the author of over a dozen print and online books, including How Trump Won and Red November. He is married to labour economist Julia Pollak (née Bertelsmann),the daughter of the late Rhoda Kadalie, and they have three children.
- PUBLISHER | UJ Press |
- ISBN | 978-1-7764134-7-8 |
- Recommended Retail Price | R475.00 |
- Classification | Biography |
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