SOUTH AFRICA: Dipak Patel tells Declan Walsh how he made the transition from the bomb factory to the board room
Dipak Patel was once a master bomb maker. As leader of the underground resistance to apartheid, he learned his trade in communist training camps and used it to attack the racist white state. Today he has a rather different expertise - making money.
As a senior executive with one of the largest banks, Mr Patel has risen to the top of South Africa's corporate ladder. Along the way, he has acquired the trappings of the job - a fine house, a Mercedes and a salary most South Africans couldn't dream of.
The 40-year-old banker's trajectory is a measure of the great personal advances of some non-whites since apartheid ended in 1994 - and of the personal contradictions that go with them.
A former Leninist-Marxist revolutionary, Mr Patel now finds work at the heart of capitalism in a white-dominated environment. "My chief executive once joked that he was honoured to have a communist on board," he said with a wry smile.
Growing up as an Indian in the coastal city of Durban, Mr Patel was subject to many, but not all, of the same constraints as black Africans. "We lived in 'group areas', your career possibilities were restricted, even the beaches were demarcated," he said."Ours was beyond the shark protection point."
At 16 he joined Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the ANC's underground armed wing. He was spirited out of the country for training in Angola, Cuba and the Soviet Union; back home he helped plan and execute bomb attacks on the security apparatus of the white state.
After 1994 he joined the Department of Transport, eventually become director general of the department. He also travelled to Ireland as part of a delegation that shared experiences of transition with the IRA. It included a secret meeting with the IRA leadership.
Two years ago, he took the bank job. It is less of a philosophical u-turn than it appears, he argues. As a fighter he dreamed of seizing white wealth and re-distributing it to the masses. But in power, the ANC realised that "would have led to the complete destruction of everything". Relations with his white colleagues are generally good.
Not all his former comrades have done so well, he admitted. Some joined the army, others found corporate jobs, and some are still unemployed. Two died in police custody before 1994.
"I have been catapulted into the top 1 or 2 per cent of this country," he said, stressing that "mine is not the typical case." But his situation does, in some ways, reflect a broader swing in ANC thinking. After coming to power the party discarded its socialist links for a policy of economic conservatism. That disciplined approach has brought admirable economic statistics, yet 40 per cent of South Africans remain unemployed.
Going down the socialist route in 1994 would have been a "stupid choice" in retrospect, Mr Patel said. But he admitted that the contrasts of South African society often bother him.
"Why do I keep a large house and drive a car most people couldn't afford in a life-time? I don't know. It's a painful contradiction," he said. "But I'm enjoying my personal life for the first time. Maybe I will do something better \. I hope so."