Joe Nxusani LRC Oral History Project 12 th September 2008

Transcription

1 1 Joe Nxusani LRC Oral History Project 12 th September 2008 This is an interview with Joe Nxusani and its Friday the 12 th of September (2008). Joe, on behalf of SALS Foundation, we really want to thank you for agreeing to participate in the LRC Oral History Project. Thank you. It s my pleasure, thank you very much. I wondered if you could start the interview, if you could talk about early childhood memories growing up in South Africa under apartheid and where you think your sense of social justice and injustice developed? I my earliest memories are of being a child in Soweto, in Meadowlands, which was the township to the south west of central Johannesburg. My mother was a Xhosa woman who at the time had been engaged in an unlawful relationship with a doctor who was practising as such at the Baragwanath Hospital. When you say unlawful, was that because he was white? He was white. He was somebody who d fled the Eastern Europe at the time of the Great War, and my mother was a nurse at Baragwanath, and in the late fifties and sixties, relationships between blacks and whites were outlawed, and I have early memories of being a young child, and I remember from time to time, this man arriving in a white coat, and he was, you know, he had this milky skin. I never quite understood what it was that made people around at home almost fearful but also coy at this man arriving in this vehicle, that wasn t similar to some of the other vehicles that local people in Soweto were driving. He had this distant look about him too. Obviously, he wasn t staying with us. And I wasn t quite sure what the relationship was between myself and him. But I knew there was something special because you know, the way he looked at me and so forth. But weeks would go by and I wouldn t see him. And the other thing that was I remember very distinctly was when he was about to come, there was always like a kind of jitter, a cleansing of the yard and people going around, put on their best dresses and a special type of food was being made, and that usually was an indicator of somebody important arriving. I also remember my maternal grandmother. I just remember her eyes because she had this habit of enveloping me in a blanket and burning some special herb. I ve subsequently smelt that herb travelling through various parts of South Africa, and I ve learnt that it s a herb to chase away the evil spirits. Right My grandmother and, I understand, my mother, hailed from Bizane in the Eastern Cape and were people that had strong Xhosa traditions, strong ancestral traditions and cultures. I didn t really know much of my mother s family. They were living in my grandmother s house, there must have been several sisters and children and

2 2 grandchildren. I wasn t also aware that there were that I had older siblings. I understand that there are some eighteen of us who were born from my mother. You know, in the years gone by, that was a sizable, sizable family. I didn t meet many of them, certainly in my conscious life, or since I became quite aware or educated, so I ve met probably about six or seven of them. The rest all died and some died before me, others disappeared, were never to be found. I think the one thing that stands out most in my mind was looking at a white VW Beetle arriving, and these vehicles had a GG registration, they were government vehicles. And I remember, I was quite a spoilt kid; I mean, I always had the best of clothing and bikes and cars and stuff like that, which to some extent distinguished me my brother and I from all the other kids around, where there was abject poverty. But I remember this Beetle, white Beetle, cream white Beetle arriving, a white woman in the car, she had a black lady with her, and I remember that look, you know, getting out, walking, scouring the yard for probably for me and my brother, and I remember walking in, going to the veranda and speaking to my mother, and then this silence in tone, and then this kind of this peer over the shoulders, almost a suspicious peer that adults give when they want when they re talking about children that they don t want to hear. And then screams, you know as a kid you re alarmed by adults, you know, freaking out, and I remember just that muffled noise in rooms, and trying to figure out what s going on, so I remember going to go and find out why my mother was crying and she just, she just freaked out, it was uncontrollable and I remember my granny and others trying to console her, to stop. They were speaking in the vernacular. And the next thing is the next memory I have was of being huddled into this VW, my brother and I part excitement but part fear, because you re not quite sure what s going on, you think it might be you re going for a ride, you know, which was a big deal then, but also looking at the at people s faces, there wasn t happiness, there wasn t a usual smile tears and fear and trauma. And then being driven away, I remember that, and almost kind of initially jovial waving but then ten metres into the ride you realise, you know, this is not a joyride actually, and then I remember the trauma of it all, just as a young child. You start really going into uncontrollable fear, screaming, and the lady, the African lady that was with her, taking out suckers and trying to console me. And then the next memory I have is arriving at the Orlando Orphanage Gosh. that s where they drove us to. And I think the idea then was to I think it was well, it was part of government s policy of miscegenation, and population control, remove from townships children born of, you know, inter-racial relationships and populate them back into own communities, try and re-educate them, give them a different social culture and try and re-integrate them into an appropriate, they call it, appropriate cultural or tribal group. This was the famous forebears of the Tricameral system, which we later had. But I think at the time it was an experience of trying to separate South Africa into these tribal areas. Anyway, we I remember running away. That s the next memory I have of the Orlando Home, the Orphanage. I remember my brother and I running through reeds and I have that memory, it kind of haunts me all the time. I just remember just trying to get as far away and, you know, in the distance people chasing us. I don t know why that memory I have subsequently been back to that scene and I can I now know that apart from it being a fairly marshy area, it was also quite a dangerous area. Often bodies were found lying dead around there, and it s

3 3 in the area between Orlando and a township that I subsequently went to to live in, Noordgesig, which is a coloured township adjacent to Soweto. We ran away a couple of times; maybe that s why that memory is in my head. And the next memory that really is crafted, etched into my, into my psyche, is being at the at an orphanage, in St Theresa s there in Durban, that was an orphanage that the government had used with many others they were largely designed as Catholic St Augustine well, St Augustinian institutions, where government would deposit children from these odd backgrounds, even if it was a person of say, Indian and white extraction, they d try and have that child adopted into a white family, or an Indian family. If it was African and white, they d try and integrate it into a coloured environment. So that was I think, one of the missions, I m not saying that the nuns actively participated in this, but they must have known this was part of government policy, surely. So I grew up in an orphanage. And I remember a lot of the nuns at the time didn t quite know how to deal with this, there they ve got this young kid who s barely who s three, four years old. I was very, very angry, very upset by all of them. I never really I don t think I ever overcame it, you know. As a child growing up, you kind of pine, you grow up with a lot of anger and you daydream, you know, you create a little family; you try and re-create the images of your mother. You don t have a picture of her, you don t have any and the names start to slip away and, you know, your mother s name slips away. You never because as a child, your mother s name doesn t quite etch in, certainly in African culture, you know, and I remember from time to time there were white people that came to visit us, once a year over the Christmas periods, there d be white people who d come and but it would all be hushed up, you d never quite know what s going on, no one wants to tell you, so you re left in the dark to speculate, and the white people are there and you can sense that something, that there s some inquiry they wish to make, but the environment in which it s happening is just too austere. And the nuns not really divulging any information about who are these people, how are they connected to you, why are they doing this, why don t they why don t the kids come and interact with you with more why are you just getting all these gifts once a year or so and it turns out that the that the person who was the social worker was none other than Judge Ramsbottom s wife. He was a judge in the WLD at the time. The one who removed you? Judge Ramsbottom s office, ja. And she, apart from she recognised I think, the need to try and have some connection with my father and his family or friends, and she facilitated it, which is something I really I subsequently spoke to her at least on one occasion when I came out of the orphanage, and she told me a little bit about this. Did she ever explain to you the reason why she had to do what she did? She said she just thought it was proper, you know, it was a phone call, you re treading on thin ice, it s a professional environment, and she no longer has the file, it s years after the event and conditions have begun to change in the country and so, anyway, going back to so that s what I remember in the orphanage. I was a very, very, very, very angry child. I was exceedingly frustrated and there was I grew up with a lot of hatred, you know

4 4 Of whites? Ja. Of whites, of people in stable unions, you know, families because that was the anti-thesis of what of who you were, so you hated these family units, you hated I hated whites, I hated them with a passion. And the funny thing about all of this is that I also grew up in the orphanage, what the the sub-culture there was one that was quite anti-african so even the housekeeping staff, instead of actually inculcating one s Africaness, themselves sought to rip it out of you, so you were discouraged from speaking your mother tongue. I lost the ability to speak my mother tongue as a child, because they it s also Xhosa, they re speaking Zulu. Many of the the aunties we called them, had coloured husbands and they had coloured kids in the orphanage. So they also wanted to de-link from that broader African culture, so they reinforced the sense of being white, of speaking English, the Queen s English, of getting an English education, and even the nuns, I suppose they were they had good intentions but everyone tried to and I remember them over the years saying, you ve got to change your surname, and I grew up thinking that my surname was Joe Nasi, because that s what everyone called me, that s what the nuns called me. Maybe because it was just difficult to pronounce the surname but I remember later years, them actively saying, look you won t get a job, you won t be able to reintegrate into a coloured community, you ve got to change your surname. My brother was quite keen on it but I was steadfastly opposed. I suppose it was always the only link I had to who I truly was, and I wanted to keep that, so I grew up wanting to hook into that historical sense of who I was. I wanted to go back and find my mother and trace where I d come from, you know? But I grew up being quite violent, quite angry, quite anti-establishment, I was exceedingly anti-establishment, and as punishment for that, there was a particular nun, Mother Sister Philomena; she died and she had this I thought at the time it was quite, quite hurtful of her to force me into working in the library. She d have me in this frigging library and everyone else would be playing soccer and I, day in and day out, I d watch and initially you cry and you kick the chair and you freak out but over the years you kind of just accept your fate, and she had this gentle way about her, you know, and she made a point of of getting me to read all the classics. I hated it initially, you know, but she so she d start off with Julius Caesar and over the years she d read parts and I would and I became so she I think she was responsible for that initial spark, you know, that enquiring mind of wanting to push the edge to the envelope, of wanting to ask questions, and not accept things for what people say they are. It turned out that it had quite a drastic effect on religion because it was a Catholic institution and they demanded that you become, that you exhibit these Catholic tenets, and I was I think that was one of the first anti-establishment sentiments I exhibited. I questioned God, I questioned their beliefs, their values, and I started reading about Karl Marx and Engels twelve, thirteen years I remember reading all this stuff, and getting and asking her to explain all these things, and they kept you out of politics because you were tucked away in an orphanage. In many ways I suppose I was better off than many other kids because at least I had a roof over my head. We ran away a few times because, you know, it wasn t all that rosy, there were some mean-spirited supervisors. I remember running away and coming to the harbour and eking out an existence at the harbour for two, three days, four days, living eating out of bins and coming, running up to shops bordering the harbour and stealing food and being caught and taken through the to the police station. And coming back and then being in

5 5 detention for a while and being released so and then at age fourteen sorry, at age thirteen, into my fourteenth year, that was 1976, the orphanage decided that they couldn t handle keeping on kids over the age of sixteen, so the idea was that initially, from a very young age, the idea would be to re-integrate you into society, either as a coloured or as a white, but I think in our case, my brother, he exhibited a few of the more of the Caucasian features than I did. It would have been impossible for them legally to have him integrated into white society and me into coloured society, so they kind of just, they just didn t know what to do. At the time we also weren t we weren t registered, officially, as anything, so I remember before we left this orphanage them filling in a thousand and one forms and then documents coming back saying that well, they re prepared to register my brother as a Cape coloured but they can t register me as a Cape coloured, they should register me either as a other coloured or leave me unregistered. And you know, you don t know what the hell these people are talking about because you re not quite sure how it manifests in society out there. Anyway, we, at age into my fourteenth year, we were placed into foster care, in Noordgesig, which was the very area that I d run through as a toddler. And we were shacked up with the Williams family. I couldn t speak Afrikaans, I couldn t really speak isixhosa, Zulu, I mean it was all very I mean I found that if I just spent a couple of days speaking to somebody in any vernacular, I d pick up on the language, and so too with Afrikaans, and even so with some of the other foreign languages. I subsequently travelled out of South Africa and I realised that I had a linguistic ability where if I spent a week or so with people of different, different language different languages, I was able to actually pick up on that language fairly quickly. My brother speaks about eight languages; he s able to pick up on the languages very quickly. These people, you know, typical coloured foster mother, she had a daughter who had gone through a not too dissimilar experience where he was an Austrian guy living in the country, and the Security Police had raided their home and she had a child from this guy and she had gone to live in Austria at the time, so there was this antipathy towards the system there, and that spurred it on. Right. And but I still was very anti-religious, anti-establishment. I absolutely hated authority. And I found that the only way to challenge authority at the time was to question it intellectually. It got me into a lot of trouble. We couldn t get into a school in Johannesburg because most well, firstly I wasn t both of us were not registered and at the time you couldn t you couldn t go to a coloured or Indian or a white school unless you could show that you were registered as such. And I remember 1976, May or thereabouts of that year, going to several schools with this foster woman and with the foster with the Child Services worker. We couldn t get into schools, you know, and you were a lot older then and you know, look after the first school you stay back but after the second school when you get a sense that something s wrong, you kind of, you walk into the principal s office with them and I remember at several of the schools, the principal saying, look, we re sorry, we can t have African children at this school because this is a school for coloureds and it will cause it will cause conflict and the children will be teased, and eventually, I think at the last two schools I kind of just freaked out and I remember having an argument with this principal. And the last principal kind of was absolutely stunned, you know, when he heard me speak and realized that I had a fairly good education, that in many senses it was certainly

6 6 the spoken language was way above what he had experienced in standard six and standard seven children, and that got us the day, we were to get into the school, and I went to the Riverlea High School, which is a sort of, you know, for the time it was a middle class school out in Johannesburg. Riverlea is one of the sort of more upmarket areas or was at the time, where uppity coloureds who had a bit of money and skin tone, were able to settle, and so it was a fairly, fairly good school and I never really attended school much. I soon realized that the education was so easy that it would take me a couple of days just to go through the syllabus and I then started working and I would go out and work. I was working in a factory in a place called Kliptown, which is about forty km s out, south of Johannesburg, and I d I was a machine operator and a fitter. We made garden furniture, so I would just assemble the garden furniture and a couple of days before the examinations, I d get wind that these exams are about to take place and I d I d kind of just stay absent from work and get the books, go through it and then just crack it, you know, ja. Right. And I also had this habit of selling answers to the kids just to make money to kind of get by. I had this the owner of the factory was a Mr Friedman, a Jewish guy, and I remember, I must have been seventeen, sixteen, and him coming to me and saying, you know, you re the guy you re the kid who s always leaving for a week or two or three and then coming back. And they ve told me that you re trying to put yourself through school but I don t condone this kind of behaviour, and at the time, you have everyone in factories have this fear of this of the boss. I think I d lost it by the time I was sixteen or thereabouts, completely lost all sense of fear of authority or any respect really. Except in its most formal senses, but I remember having this debate with him, saying, look you know, I wasn t born with a silver spoon that you were born and still sticking out of your throat, I m doing this because I want to be my own person, I don t want to be, I don t want to come work here for you for the rest of my life like all of these old men. I want to be somebody. And he said, well, what do you want to be? And I said, I want to be a lawyer. Where did you get that from? I.well, I knew my dad was a doctor, and I wanted to I wanted to use the instrumentality of the law to first of all, find out who he was, where he came from, where he was, why he allowed this situation? I also had a deep-seated, perhaps hatred, wanting to get back; I blamed him, blamed my mother too. You know, I wanted to make them pay. Right. The nuns had this habit of showing us a lot of movies. You know, two, three hundred boys, you need to kind of keep them busy so you give them lots of sport, but in the evenings, you ve got to make sure that they are gathered in one spot because if they disappear, you could end up in trouble, so they had a lot of movies and there were a lot of sponsors, so they would have these re-runs. And they used to show us these

7 7 movies: Justice for All was one that they showed over and over and over again. But they showed a number of other typical law movies. And it was a role that I kind of identified with. I was always the spokesman for some of the kids, I always stood in whenever they stumbled on their words with authorities and I d say, look, this is what he s actually trying to say, this is what happened. So ja, I think it was seated there, but it was more to kind of to be a voice for not only myself, primarily for me but for others too. I then I finished Matric and I wanted to be a lawyer. I had Dentistry in mind, or Medicine as well. We didn t have very good assistance at school. Career direction? Career guidance and the like, and I applied to go to the University of the Western Cape, because that those are the forms that everyone said were the ones applicable. I didn t even know there was a University called Wits up the road. And I think at the time the University of the Western Cape was changing onto this new computer system, and so they said to all students, look just come down. If you know that you ve made the grade, just rock up there and they ll do a manual registration. And I remember arriving there and them saying, well, you know, we don t have Medicine, but we ve got Dentistry. And I kind of went between Dentistry and Law and I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. And I did my first year there, in 1980, 1981, and I was soon catapulted into into the local politics. There was the unrest going on and there was a Committee of 81 established, I was on that committee. But I didn t have good Afrikaans, academic Afrikaans, and many of the lecturers that were attached to the University of the Western Cape required you to have good Afrikaans skills. In fact, they lectured much of their course work in Afrikaans. So I finished my first year at Western Cape and I then decided I was going to apply. Got new information about Wits close by, it s just up the road from where from town so UCT? No, no. I was at Western Cape but I then subsequently learned that there was the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg Oh, I see. it was close to home and I didn t, I couldn t handle the weather in the Cape. You know, they say it s the fairest Cape but phew, the weather s awful especially in winter. So I decided in the new year to register, it was 1981, at Wits and you had to apply for a permit at the time. And you kind of gyppo, you just put, I don t even remember what I put in there but all sorts of ridiculous information in the application. Got the permit from the Minister to study at this white institution. It was very different, because Wits was going through a radical change. There were more and more black students coming in. I was probably part of the first batch of students coming through. I remember in our first year class, Private Law 2, there must have been four, five, six at the most, black people, and I mean black people, whites, Indians I mean, Indians, coloureds, Africans, and the bulk of the students were white students, so it s a new environment, you know, you re dealing with a with a

8 8 student population that s a bit suspicious, but that is a bit more intellectually clued up, much more so than the homogenous sort of population at Western Cape, and I soon got embroiled in student politics. Joined the Black Students Society, was quite an active member there on and Wits was a melting pot for ideas. I made my first contacts with Umkhonto we Sizwe and became an underground operative and I soon started to realize that one could use one s education, one s position as a student, to get in and out of the country, smuggle arms, smuggle cadres, smuggle drop letters and the like. And I also realized that the opportunity was there for a new burgeoning trade union movement, and in 1982, when the Mine Workers Union was formed, Cyril Ramaphosa had asked for a couple of students to assist as legal assistants, so we d go out there on a Saturday and Sunday to the Union offices, help to register students, to take affidavits from workers that were dismissed who were dismissed, help prepare applications for reinstatement and the like, and Labour Law is the area that I subsequently developed a considerable expertise in, and I think that s where it was born. I had quite a few clashes with the University authorities over the years. I was shot by the Security Police at the time, detained a couple of times Gosh. but I think throughout even my student years, I always remember lawyers coming to our aid, bailing us out, in fact, Edwin Cameron was one of the first lawyers I remember who acted for us. We had we d broken into a into University accommodation. We didn t have you know, there wasn t accommodation for blacks. They had Dalrymple House and Men s Res at Wits and then they had Glen Thomas, which was a residence out in Baragwanath Hospital for black students, and apart from not having the monies, they simply just didn t allow black students in the Men s Res, but we noticed that there was an old building, a house that had been kind of abandoned on East Campus, and said to a few friends, let s just go and check this house out, we scoured the house out, realised that it had been an abandoned Biology Society house, and that s how wealthy the University was, all Societies got a house for its activities. We cleaned it up, you know, secretly, and we started living in the house. And after about a year, after about two years, one of the students who had stayed over during the vacations was killed. He was killed by people who called themselves the Ossewa Brandwag, which was like a offshoot of the AWB? the AWB at the time. And I think that gave the University the opportunity to open the residences. They feared that they might be sued, and I remember them saying, well, we re going to give you a full bursary to stay in Res, so for the remaining two years of residence, I had a bursary to stay on campus. And that s when I kind of made contact not contact but I interacted with (Arthur) Chaskalson and Slomovitz but it was (Arthur) Chaskalson who was lecturing Practical Legal Studies at Wits at the time. There was something about his quiet personality, his quiet intellect and his ability to get his message across in this unassuming way, that attracted me to the legal Edwin Cameron was also the other he was this quiet he was the chap that the advocate who represented us because they initially charged us with

9 9 trespassing on these premises. He did a deal. And so those were the two characters that I really impressed me at the time. I was to work with both of them later on. Right. So how did you get to the Legal Resources Centre? Well, when I finished my degree This would have been 1984? , okay. I well, finished 1984 but I was starting 1985, I didn t know what to do. I d been doing this underground work. Part of me had an affinity for helping people, but I needed money. I didn t want I didn t like working for these corporate firms. I had worked as a student too at Standard Bank where I was working as a part-time teller in their savings component, so I had a little bit of knowledge of how the banking sector worked and I knew I didn t want to work in that environment. It was too rigid for me. I d also worked at Sanlam as an insurance broker, training manager. They wanted me to get in there and become one of their first trainee managers, and I it s not something I liked. And I I think I waited until very late in the year before I decided I wanted to I wanted to join the Legal Resources Centre. I think it was in the Practical Legal Studies course that (Arthur) Chaskalson said to us that his certain notes or something could be picked up at 18 Sauer, or was it Pritchard Street you can go pick up these papers at 18 Pritchard Street, the Legal Resources Centre. Right. And that s I went down there to pick up these papers and I met Cecilie Palmer, her mother was still Ma Vesta Smith Ja, Ma Vesta (Smith) was and I d known Ma Vesta (Smith) from Noordgesig, grew up there. And they said: what are you going to do next year? And I said: well, I don t know, I m not quite sure; I might not entirely certain what I wanted to do. And they said: well, why don t you try an initial end of the year thingamajig. They had a they had some end of the year position then. I don t know if they still have it now. So I said, ok, I ll try that. A vac student?

10 10 Ja, the vac student thing. So I did that and I got in touch with people like Geoff Budlender, Paul Pretorius, Charles Nupen, Felicia (Kentridge), Sydney (Kentridge), Arthur (Chaskalson), Mr Zimmerman ja, I loved him, (Mahomed) Navsa, and I kind of, I really enjoyed what they were doing. At the time they were challenging the City Council s housing policy. I remember working on an application, on a review application to challenge their decisions to terminate leases for people that who they considered politically too active. And I remember working on this argument that government didn t have the power to distinguishing between citizens purely on the basis of some arbitrary criteria. And then I I think (Mahomed) Navsa said to me, you should come and stay with us for the next year. He always said, you know, you have a you have a devil on one side, and an angel on the other I was still very, very angry at the time. Part of that manifestation occurred in January or February of that year. Zim (Morris Zimmerman) and I were doing an application under Section 59 of the Labour Relations Act. Some woman was dismissed at a pharmacy in Randburg, and it was her last day. She came to us I think a day before the DA s lapse, and I prepared the papers and Zim (Morris Zimmerman) drove me out and we d phoned this pharmacist and he d said, no, no, we can come and deliver the papers. We came to deliver the papers and he took the papers and threw them in the bin. And anyway he said we must contact his lawyer and so we drove back to chambers to the office, redid a lot of the papers, we served on the attorney and when I phoned the attorney to go and deliver, he said, look I don t have any notion of what you re talking about, I have no instructions. And I began abusing this man, Mr Gio. It turns out he was (Arthur) Chaskalson s mate. (Laughs.) He reported me to (Arthur) Chaskalson, (Arthur) Chaskalson called me up and said, listen, you know, how he got this phone call from his colleague, colleague says that I ve been quite exceedingly irate on the phone and rude and I swore at him and he slammed the phone down and I hurled all sorts of abuse at him. I had quite a vituperative tongue then. I think I still do. Anyway, I didn t I was initially, when he was talking, in this quiet tone, what was going through my head was, what the hell is this guy talking about? Of course that s how you re supposed to behave to some smart aleck lawyer who s giving you the runabout. That s how Al Pacino did it in Justice for All, he abused the judge. (Laughs.) He sat me down, Arthur (Chaskalson). And he s very quiet, he said, you know, remember we re colleagues in this profession and you re going to have these situations where counsel or an attorney doesn t have an instruction and you can t personalise the fight. And he said, now I want you to pick up the phone and go and apologise to that colleague. And I picked up the phone and spoke to Mr. Gio and he was quite amazing in his humility. I thought to expect something else. Um Zimmerman was somebody who he had a liking for me. He just, you know, it s one of those I saw a father figure in him too, you know. It turned out he was Jewish part, well ja, was Jewish and I don t know, something about the eyes of Jewish men well not all, but some of them grow up with a kindness that s carried

11 11 through their genetic pool and he had this look about him, you know, when he looked at me certainly, and he didn t know my history at all. So I developed a special bond with Zimmerman and with (Mahomed) Navsa, with (Geoff) Budlender and the crew. I m just wondering as well, Joe, because if you look at the history of the organisation, when you were there, certainly Charles (Nupen), Karel (Tip), Paul (Pretorius) and Geoff (Budlender), to some extent were very much part of the NUSAS group, and you d had this really strong political background at university and I wondered whether that might have led to any tensions, either from your perspective or within the organisation itself, given that there were other people who might not have had that NUSAS background? Well, coming out of Wits at the time and being fairly active in the leadership of the Black Students Society, we d come out of the Congress sort of movement and tradition, at that time we had we were under sieges as a student population; 1984, De Klerk decided to introduce his educational measures, many of us were detained, I was detained, many people I had a girlfriend who was also who was also in the underground, who was arrested and convicted, Maxine Hart, she spent three years and so a lot of the students that had come out of the NUSAS tradition, perhaps at the time of (Charles) Nupen and Halton Cheadle and that crew, I think a lot of the conditions by 1984 were changing rapidly. The notion of peaceful opposition was beginning to change, with much more of an active type of peaceful protest, it no longer was just marches but it was more sit-ins, blockades, a much more aggressive type of civilian action, student action. So there was beginning to develop a likeness of tactics between a lot of the NUSAS people. You know, people like Brendan Barry and others who d come out of NUSAS, eventually became student representative heads, you know, the SRC, and they began pushing a much more aggressive line, I remember at the time, also, too, people like Neil Aggett had been killed, there were these assassinations: (David)Webster; and so that ideological difference which may have characterised the NUSAS Congress divide, I think was becoming less of an issue by the 80, by mid eighties. We started seeing the UDF form, which was a gathering of all these disparate forces, you know, under the banner of the UDF, and I don t at the time remember having serious fallouts, I mean, we d have serious political debates about what types of struggle to assume, with a lot of NUSAS people saying we ve got to go through a type of workerist approach, got to get the workers to lead the revolution, we ve got to get the workers to initiate the mass action, that you ve got to bring them on board. With us it was much more a case of bringing everyone on board but not having it led by workers, having strong intelligentsia, as it were, instigate that uprising. I did subsequently have differences of opinion, but not major ones, with people like Halton Cheadle and others, over approach. At the time when the unions were now fighting for survival, for registration, and contesting a lot of the exclusions in the LRA at the time, striking and so forth, but those were largely confined to Friday night, after Friday night sessions when certainly at Cheadle Thompson, where I subsequently worked, a lot of these guys would come over, the Nupens and all these guys, and we d have these debates about the appropriateness of their approach to the struggle. In the LRC, there were I think the significant difference was in...perhaps in managerial style. Geoff Budlender at the time was the Chair was the head of the office

12 12 Regional Director? Ja, the Regional Director. (Mahomed) Navsa, who d come out of a sort of Trotskyite workerist sort of much more militant type of schooling from the Western Cape; I remember I had I think when (Mahomed) Navsa was at Western Cape, I was doing my first year and he was finishing off, so when I came to the LRC he was already there for two or three years or whatever couple more years actually, ja, and so when he had left varsity a lot of the conditions inside the student movement was changing. There was much more of a toenadering, the appropriate word is, and less of the instances of organisations trying to pursue their own narrow interests at the time. But certainly, I certainly wasn t aware that it was playing a role. I do know that at some point a lot of the appointees that were coming through, one interpreted those appointees as in pursuance of a NUSAS mindset, a slightly more liberal mindset. (Mahomed) Navsa and some of the other more, the other more radical employees like Thandi Orleyn and others, they were keen on getting in people that had come from a struggle background, who d actually lived the struggle as opposed to having intellectualised it. And that was a big debate between us at the time, with, you know, Paul Pretorius and Charles Nupen, you ve written about the struggle, you ve spoken about it but you haven t lived in a hut. (interruption) And so within the LRC there was this sort of debate that was running, while you were there? Yes, it was it, you know, as a fellow, you don t really get too involved in it, you get the spill over, you know, you get the titbits, the tail end of it, but I knew that it was something that was going on and that there was a tension developing between Geoff Budlender and (Mahomed) Navsa. (Mahomed) Navsa, I think, was positioning himself for Regional Directorship, (Geoff) Budlender was still holding on, we all viewed Geoff (Budlender) as a bit of a as somebody who wasn t as easily approached as say (Mahomed) Navsa was. And a lot of us juniors, we ascribed that partly to race, but not so much, because race didn t manifest itself so sharply in the organisation, but I think more to political approach to approach to the struggle, and it wasn t long when Charles Nupen left the organisation, Paul Pretorius left the organisation, and we you know, the impression I got was that it was because of a difference of approach, not a sharp difference, but just I think these guys wanting to pursue more personalised interests, families growing and the like, whereas people like (Mahomed) Navsa were much more interested in pushing the organisation ahead and were less concerned with matters of family and the like. But it wasn t a debate I was intricately involved in, I just, I knew that it was there, I knew that at the national gatherings that we had, the annual gatherings, that these debates would surface. A lot of us students considered that they were quite meaningless and irrelevant, you know, because out there on the streets people were being shot, detained, dying, and that s where we wanted to focus our efforts, in helping others there, rather than in pursuing these fairly narrow intellectual debates that had no real, no real impact on people on the ground. In the early eighties, the LRC had major legal victories, the Rikhoto, Komani, Mthiya, did you think at the time, that given that Parliament was supreme, that legal victories

13 13 could actually be maintained? Parliament had the right to then overturn these legal victories but it didn t and I was wondering what your sense was of that? Throughout the period of the eighties, one of the things that the South African government always did was to try and maintain this lie that they had an independent judiciary and that there was a rule of law and that they respected the decisions of the courts. The way in which they tinkered with legislation after various judgments, was quite amazing actually, the language they used, instead of removing restrictions they would actually impose restrictions, so they would call legislation the Removal of certain Restrictions Act, when in reality they were actually imposing restrictions. For me, I always saw the LRC as a tool to achieve certain legal spaces but I never saw the LRC s work as being divorced from the broader struggle; I mean, I was even at the time still = Engaged? engaged in underground work, I was a courier, so I d come from a different place. You know, a lot of the people in the Legal Resources Centres saw themselves solely as lawyers and pursued a largely legalistic approach to the struggle. I wanted to get involved in getting my hands dirty, you know, and ensuring that that Security Police when he killed somebody had his up-comance. As far as Parliament is concerned, one of the things that we always knew would happen was that whenever we litigated against the State, that those spaces that were created, would not be immediately remedied by government, I mean it took government some time before they remedied a lot of the changes. Indeed, I think that a lot of the changes that were brought about through the LRC s challenge of the legislation also made government smarter, made them wiser. You must remember at the time, although we had a rabid President, a lot of the people around him, the Minister of Education, De Klerk, and the Minister of Justice, were people who were lawyers. Right. Who understood the legal reasoning of the judges and in many senses sought to respect that. We were also aware that there was a tension in Cabinet between the verrigtes and the verkramptes and that in Parliament too, that there was this ongoing tension between the right wing of the National Party and the left or the centre of the party, largely in the hands of people like De Klerk and others. We knew too that there was the voice of, the sole voice of Helen Suzman and (Van Zyl) Slabbert at the time, and that any changes that they sought to bring about would be echoed in the international media and that government didn t want to be seen to be reacting almost in this tit for tat way. So if you look at much of the legislation that was challenged and set aside, their reactions was not one to simply reverse the court s decisions. I mean, they would allow some space but they would try and resolve their own security sense of insecurity and I think that s where it was largely focused. If cases affected their sense of well being, they reacted with some considerable measure. But when it was peripheral, for example, if we challenged housing, provision of housing in cities, and where the Broederbond was responsible for allocating houses, they

14 14 would let that kind of thing go because it just affected a couple of people in the township. So I believe that the challenge that we that the LRC brought were necessary, they were said in our name, that one associated there with but for me it really didn t matter whether Parliament reacted or not, I always understood that these challenges were simply designed to create a legal space, and it did create a legal space for us to craft other types of applications, to move into areas that were previously uncharted and to challenge some of the policies and practices that government resorted to, that we previously hadn t thought of. Earlier on you said that you really became interested in labour law and I m wondering whether that might have been a bit of a frustration for you at the LRC, because certainly from what I can gather, Charles (Nupen) was really interested in Labour Law, but there was a caution against it. There was. Ja I never quite understood why that was so. I think it was perhaps because of their mandate, the LRC s mandate and the available resources at the time, and that was the one aspect. But I think the Labour movement, remember, had all these restrictions at the time. Right. And there s always been this antipathy, I think amongst people who do this kind of work, that trade unions have connections to the Communist Party, and one must eschew that link that antipathy also exists in the ANC, to this day, that really, the working class must pursue working class interests and working class battles, and that they must use their economic power. I found that Charles (Nupen) was much more deterministic, and had even though he d come out of the NUSAS ranks, there were much of his approaches to the trade union movements that echoed the Trotskyite sort of workerist movement, and I know that there was a debate going on within the broader labour movement, with Halton Cheadle being probably one of its key protagonists, arguing for a much more workerist approach, workers to lead the struggle and pursuing a worker-led struggle to this country s problems. The LRC, I think, you must remember many of the lawyers that were at the LRC, had no grounding in labour law. There was a preference for public interest work at large, other than the focus of labour law. The other problem with labour law, I think, was that it ate up so many resources, it meant lots of court time in the Industrial Court, reconciliation processes, and the other thing is that it meant large number of workers coming into the office, filling up the office, thus making some of the smaller or some of the other legal work overshadowed by this disparity in client numbers. And also I suppose, labour work didn t open up the kinds of spaces that the more public interest work opened up and that many foreign many foreign-based donors and sponsors were willing to finance. And I think that that is partly where the antipathy lies towards that, and I know that Charles Nupen left the LRC partly also because of the unwillingness to open up a fully fledged labour unit and to run it as such, and the desire by the LRC to kind of remain focused on core legal work. Labour work was also, certainly at the time, was fairly nebulous, you know, this concept of unfair labour practice was new at the time, it was and many felt that it was so imprecise that it really involved law and so many other things that the LRC was not

15 15 apt sufficiently expert at dealing with. It was I enjoyed the couple of applications that I did bring. We did, after he d left though, bring quite a few labour applications but we chose the labour matters, the idea being to advance law and pick a typical case that met certain A test case approach? Yes, take the test case approach. But in the end, I think both approaches were right. It seems to me that what Charles (Nupen) wanted to do was really being pursued by Cheadle, Thompson and Haysom, and by CALS to some extent. That brings me to my next question, because I understand that after your fellowship, you went on to CALS, is that correct? I went on to CALS, ja, that s right. And then, I was wondering what the reason was, because you could have gone and done Articles somewhere, but you decided to go to CALS and I I had thought of chasing the money, but I think I was still too angry, and I had too many scores to settle, and I hadn t overcome this upbringing. I think what I had did what I had done was I buried it in work, I forgot about my mother had passed on, I only met her when I was like seventeen, and she said to me she made me promise that I would write her story, and being in this environment kind of helped me, it just allowed it was stressful but it kind of allowed one the cerebral opportunity of pondering about these things, and getting access to documents and research. But it was also the underground work I was doing, you know, from time to time, I d have to get out of the country and I d have to leave on a Thursday night, Friday morning early, so it was easier to kind of do that at the LRC or even at CALS than in a corporate environment where you re in court, so that was part of the reasoning. But the other was I wanted to I was toying with the idea of going into academia, teaching, perhaps researching labour, human rights, constitutional stuff, but I also wanted to work with people like Professor Dugard, who was head John Dugard? John (Dugard) had lectured me and he was an interesting guy, quite eccentric in his own way, and Edwin (Cameron) was there, there were a couple of other people at the LRC, and I wanted to just see if I was suited to working in that kind of sedate environment, with a slightly more academic feel to it. But there were also connected to Cheadle, Thompson and Haysom, much of the salary structure, many of the people at at CALS were actually working out of Cheadle, Thompson and Haysom. It was really one; it was really Cheadle, Thompson and Haysom s legal academic arm, really. And I wanted to work in an environment of labour work, public interest work, I wanted to pursue that.

16 16 So from CALS you went on to Cheadle, Thompson and Haysom? So from well, even though I was working at CALS, I still had this link with Cheadle, Thompson, because as I said, Halton (Cheadle) was there virtually all the time, and I spent a lot of time in Cheadle s office, you know, working really for both. He became my principal, Halton (Cheadle), and I did my Articles there. It was a fascinating time, the late eighties States of Emergency? ja so much was changing, the various States of Emergency, the cases that we used to do, throughout the country these political trials, the SWAPO elections that we were involved in, a lot of the assassinations, the bombings, it was you could pick any area of the law and you could advance it. Cheadle s office was quite instrumental in advancing several areas around in labour law: retrenchments, redefining grounds for termination. Look, it wasn t novel in the sense that we Halton (Cheadle) or people in that office invented it, it was material that was already operative in much of Europe and in Britain, he just brought it from there, incorporated it into our law. That was novel. And argued for it to be adopted in this country. And one of the things that the firm did was it excelled in its commitment to worker rights, it had an enormous budget. We were getting budget from virtually all these agencies, and in many instances I thought that they had a bigger budget than the LRC, maybe from the lifestyles that the guys led. We were Friday nights I remember was we d have a every Friday night would be this huge, huge jol. We d have all these sorts, and these advocates acting for us and a couple of people from the LRC and other outfits and we d have these intellectual debates and they d go on till two o clock in the morning. It was a time of great, great intellectual stimulation. I started I started having second thoughts about the commitment to the struggle by some of my white colleagues. I think it s it was because, you know after a couple of years, you begin to wonder whether these people are doing this because of a deep-seated sense of guilt or whether they re doing it because it s something they re truly committed to and do they truly understand what this all means on the ground? I was living this in this I was born with it. For me it was more a struggle for survival, it was something I had to do, I had no real choice in it all, and I used to often wonder, with many of our white colleagues at the time, it was a for me, I got the impression that it was, to a large extent, an intellectual struggle. But that their lives were not mirrored by their commitments to the struggle. I got into a few pay disputes with Cheads, with the firm, and that was when I decided I I think I lost my or they lost their magic for me. What do you think made them lose their magic? When you go into the parking lot and you re driving a second hand VW, and you look next to you and you see Halton Cheadle s Discovery 4x4 with every contraption in it, and you go to their houses and you realise the absolute opulence, relative I suppose to you, that they re living in, and their expenses and trips they take, you begin to wonder if it isn t if it wasn t about appeasing that sense of guilt, appeasing their need for