I imagined that Zonderwater was a rehabilitation centre for alcoholics. That must be why he was there. My mother did not discourage this belief. Perhaps she encouraged it. Only much later did I realise that he was serving a jail term for car theft.
This first encounter with the law, as it held my father captive to exact accountability for a wrong he had committed against society, left in me a deep layering of thought and emotion. What was the law? In what lay its power? Was it only an instrument of rebuke and correction and subjection? Or could it be more? I did not know it then, but this vivid encounter imprinted and impelled my future life and career.
II: A second encounter with the law – and a first lesson in lawyering
My next encounter with the law was a decade later. The meeting was also dramatic, though much less personal. Jeanie and I spent the desolate years that followed Laura’s death in the children’s home. My mother eventually managed to get us out. As a boy child, in contrast to Jeanie, for whom a commercial school was deemed enough, lofty things were planned for me. My mother set her sights on nothing less than excellent schooling and, in my second year in high school, she succeeded. She got me into Pretoria Boys’ High. Then, as now, the school was a paragon of public-funded excellence. The teachers demanded concentration and hard work, and nurtured critical, open-minded thinking. They offered me a chance to change my life. With an eager hunger, I cast my entire self at it.
In January 1971, immediately after finishing high school, I was a 17-year-old conscript in apartheid’s army when the security police made a sensational arrest. The Very Reverend Gonville Aubie ffrench-Beytagh, an English immigrant who was the Dean of the Anglican Cathedral in Johannesburg, was apprehended under the Terrorism Act and locked up in solitary confinement without being charged. As his detention without trial continued, an international campaign pressed the apartheid authorities to charge him or release him. Cathedral bells throughout South Africa pealed out daily in protest. My year-long compulsory army service ground slowly by, month by month. With excited apprehension, I alleviated its tedium by following the drama of the Dean’s arrest and detention.
At last, in August, he was put on summary trial, accused of terrorist activities. The judge was an apartheid stalwart, Mr Justice Cillié, the Judge-President of the Transvaal. He presided over the tense contest in the Old Synagogue in Pretoria’s city centre. Converted to a courtroom after the Jewish community moved to the suburbs, its dark wooden dock had confined many famous political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela and those arraigned with him eight years earlier in the Rivonia Trial, and six years before that in the Treason Trial. As a young white teenager, I knew nothing about the Rivonia and Treason trials, and barely anything at all about Nelson Mandela.
The Dean’s trial during my army year was for me the start of a very slow, fitful and protracted coming to consciousness.
Defending the Dean was Sydney Kentridge, who later gained international fame for his withering cross-examination of the security policemen who bludgeoned Stephen Bantu Biko to death in September 1977. In the hot afternoons of Pretoria’s late winter, as temperatures rose before the spring rains started, I would slip away from my desk at the army’s monthly journal, Paratus, and walk the few blocks to the Old Synagogue. Conspicuous in my army fatigues, I sat in the public gallery, listening to Kentridge grilling the police witnesses.
Some had befriended the Dean, or worked their way into his confidence as his congregants; others attended meetings he addressed. Now they testified that he furthered the aims of the banned African National Congress by inciting violence and by distributing money to its supporters.
The Dean denied the charges. He virulently opposed apartheid, but insisted that his warnings that violence would inevitably result from its injustices did not amount to advocating bloodshed. One charge was that he had incited the women attending a meeting of the Black Sash, an organisation opposing apartheid, to commit violence. The meeting was at the home of its founder, Mrs Jean Sinclair, in the middle-class, white suburb of Parktown North, Johannesburg.
The charge seemed plain silly, but it was earnestly levelled. It revealed the security police’s apprehensions about the Dean’s anti-apartheid work, and that of other outspoken white critics. And history showed this concern was not misplaced. Apartheid was defeated by internal uprising, township defiance, international isolation and sanctions, a banking boycott, armed insurgency and the country’s increasing ungovernability. But its power was also sapped, crucially, by internal moral challenges to its legitimacy. Internal opponents, and the legal challenges that were part of their armoury, proved vitally important to this strand of opposition.
The Dean’s confrontation with the security police was a historic marker in that battle. And lawyers and the legal system played a central role in it.
A considerable part of the Dean’s trial was devoted to a visit that a wealthy Englishwoman, Alison Norman, paid to the Dean in 1970. She was the channel through which much-needed funds flowed for the Dean to distribute to the families of activists who were facing trial or who were already in prison – and the charge sheet named her as a co-conspirator with the Dean. The question was whether the funds she sent to the Dean were ANC funds. On an overnight train trip to Pietermaritzburg, a security policeman, Major Zwart, posing as the liberal ‘Mr Morley’, contrived an introduction to Ms Norman. The day after the train trip, according to him, after several beers and brandies in a Pietermaritzburg hotel, she tried to recruit him for the banned London-based Defence and Aid Fund, which gathered funds to help detained supporters of banned organisations and their families.
Kentridge’s cross-examination was meticulously detailed, but mesmerising. Trudge, trudge, trudge. Question by question. Seated in the stuffy upper gallery, reserved for women during orthodox religious observances, I learned my first lessons about good lawyering.
There are few flourishes and grandiose gestures. Much more grinding slog. And intense concentration on detail, amidst the high technical demands of legal form and process.
But something else also became clear as I followed Kentridge’s questions from upstairs, staring down at the inscrutable features of the Dean. If convicted, he faced a minimum of five years in jail. Kentridge’s commitment to avoiding that result, and his mastery of the minutiae of whether Ms Norman had or had not drunk brandy with Major Zwart, was propelled by an underlying, smouldering, incensed rage at the injustice of the system that was trying to imprison the clergyman.
Kentridge achieved renown as a lawyer not only because of his intellect and his mastery of the technical rules of procedure and hearsay. He made an impact because of his fervour in employing those skills against a system he abhorred. My 18-year-old self, gazing down through the upstairs railings, began to understand that effective lawyering lies in a combination of heart and mind and very hard work.
Despite Kentridge’s best efforts, Judge-President Cillié found the Dean guilty of terrorism. It was said of Judge Cillié that he had never been known to disbelieve a senior police officer. His judgment lived up to this expectation. When he sentenced the Dean to five years in prison, women in the courtroom gasped and sobbed. As he left the court, they began singing the stirring nineteenth-century English hymn ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’. But their defiance was edged with fear. The Dean’s conviction sent a chilling warning to all outspoken internal anti-apartheid activists. Their work put them at risk of conviction for terrorism, plus a long time in jail.
III: The Dean takes his case to the appeal court
Judge Cillié did not have the last word, however. Kentridge took the case to the appeal court in Bloemfontein, then the highest court in the land. Pending the appeal, the Dean was allowed to remain out on bail.
The appeal court moved swiftly to put the Dean’s case on its roster. It came up for hearing a short while after sentence was imposed, in the very month when, freshly freed from my army service, I began my law studies in Stellenbosch, a famously beautiful university town in the winelands bordering Cape Town. I was able to attend university only because I had won an open scholarship sponsored by the mining corporation Anglo American. The scholarship covered my academic and residence fees, and gave me generous pocket money – and a first taste