My husband, Eric Harber, who has died aged 87, was an active opponent of the Nationalist government in South Africa until banned in 1963. Then he moved to the UK, where he taught in London and supported the anti-apartheid campaign.
Motivated by his concerns for poverty among the black population, and by opposition to the apartheid policies of the government, he had joined the Liberal party of South Africa in 1960.
As a lecturer in the English department at Rhodes University, he was active in two particular campaigns: in 1962 he organised opposition to the award of an honorary degree to the state president CR Swart, a former minister in the apartheid government. In 1963, following corrupt elections to the homeland of Transkei, he collected affidavits from intimidated voters in an effort to establish the degree of corruption. Despite the efforts of the bodyguards of Chief Kaiser Matanzima, who engaged in a car chase, and of Special Branch, who tried to intercept him, he escaped with the affidavits. Reports of the corrupt elections were published nationally and internationally.
Eric became chair of the Eastern Cape Liberal party and was a founder of the University Teachers’ Association of South Africa. In 1963 he was banned for five years for his anti-apartheid activities. The following year he was offered study leave by Caius College, Cambridge, and accepted, although by leaving South Africa under a banning order he lost his citizenship and was unable to return until the change of government in 1994.
In 1969, as part of the Stop the Seventy Tour campaign, he disrupted the South Africa rugby match against Newport in one of the early games in the Springboks’ UK tour, for which he was charged with breach of the peace.
Born in Springs, near Johannesburg, Eric was the son of Ella (nee Johnson), a trained singer who taught secretarial skills, and Stanchell Harber, a hospital superintendent who had been a boy soldier in the first world war and fought in the second. As children, Eric and his sister, Eleanor, lived at their maternal aunt’s farm where Eric learned Zulu from the farm children. He went to school at Maritzburg college in Pietermaritzburg and did a BA in English at Natal University.
In the UK, he taught at various institutions, settling in London in the late 1960s; his longest employment was as a part-time lecturer in the English department at the Polytechnic of North London. In the 1970s he visited Russia, smuggling in bibles and typewriters.
Having converted to Roman Catholicism in 1956 he remained a devout Catholic and established a branch of Cafod (Catholic Fund for Overseas Development) in his then parish of St Thomas More, Swiss Cottage, where he met me. We married in 1987 and our daughter, Rosalind, was born in 1988.
Eric spent much of the last 40 years working on his theory that Shakespeare was influenced by Samothracian mythology and had access to a previously unidentified source. This work was published in 2020 as Shakespeare, Christianity and Italian Paganism.
Eric is survived by me, Rosalind and Eleanor.
