Norman Levy obituary

South African anti-apartheid activist who went into exile after prison and torture but returned to help the new ANC government

Norman Levy, who has died aged 91, was an anti-apartheid activist who suffered arrest, torture and imprisonment in South Africa before two decades of exile in Britain and a return to his homeland after the end of minority rule. Back in South Africa he served on government commissions that concentrated on transforming the civil service and putting documents from the apartheid era into the public domain.

As one of the few white South Africans who sacrificed their economic and political privileges by joining the liberation movement, Levy was dubbed, rather clunkily, a struggle icon" by the post-apartheid media. Pallo Jordan, a minister in Nelson Mandela's first majority-rule government, described him as one of those who rather than betray their basic principles threw themselves body and soul into the freedom struggle to strive for a non-racial democratic order", adding that there was a high price attached".