A member of the African National Congress, Moolla was arrested and eventually found not guilty in the 1956 Treason Trial.

[3] Moosa “Mosie” Moolla was born in the small, (then) western Transvaal town of Christiana on 12 June 1934 where his father ran a successful import-export business.

Boarding with a Transvaal Indian Congress (TIC) stalwart, Mrs. Ouma Bhayat, and surrounded by other TIC activists such as Dr. Vallabh Jaga, Dr. Zainab Asvat and Dr. Abdulhaq Patel, Mosie was recruited into the newly launched Transvaal Indian Youth Congress (TIYC).

He was elected to the organisation's executive committee and then as the joint honorary secretary and finally as Chair, a position he held for nearly a decade.

In his matriculation year, 1952, Mosie participated in the Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws and was imprisoned for close to a month.

Members of the Secretariat such as Walter Sisulu, Joe Slovo, Rusty Bernstein and Yusuf Cachalia were banned under the Suppression of Communism Act.

It therefore became Mosie's responsibility to ensure that all decisions of the Secretariat were effectively conveyed to all provincial and regional committees of the National Action Council.

Mosie was one of thirty - including Nelson Mandela, Helen Joseph, Ahmed Kathrada and Walter Sisulu - to stand trial for the entire period until 1961.

Mosie then left the country illegally, and made his way to Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika (now Tanzania) which housed the exiled leadership of the African National Congress (ANC).

In 1964, Mosie joined Umkhonto we Sizwe and in 1965 was sent for a year to Odesa Ukraine in the then-Soviet Union for military training.

From the time of his escape in 1963 until 1968, the apartheid state denied Mosie's wife, Zubeida, and their children, Tasneem and Azaad, passports.

Zubeida, could not obtain a work permit in Zambia, and was forced to send the children back to South Africa to live with her parents because she could not support them.

In 1991, he was elected as secretary of the TIC and served as a member of the TIC/NIC delegation to the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA).