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Much has been made of the devastation of apartheid. And even more is written about how his naked brutality radicalized African responses. For much of the early years of its existence, the ANC, the main liberation organization, had focused on petitions, marches, and delegations. All civil. All optimistic. All respectful. It was hoped that one day the White Parliament would realize the error of its ways and change.
But when apartheid came in 1948, South Africa would change dramatically. DF Malan and his numerous successors – JG Strijdom, HF Verwoerd, JB Vorster – Everyone believed not just in white supremacy, but in black subjugation. And they went ahead with their application, without mercy. The 1950s were the days of the Group Areas Act, the Population Registration Act, the Separate Services Act, statutes that framed the great apartheid. Cities had to be cleansed of the “black menace”. The rights of Africans to urban land were not only restricted, they were erased, erased. Africans would be “temporary foreigners” in the urban centers of their birth.
This period radicalized the black youth of the time. Dr. Alfred Bitini Xuma, the cerebral, solid but kind president of the ANC, had been ousted from the leadership of the ANC by the ANC Youth League of Walter Sisulu, Ashby Mda and Anton Lembede for their belief in “decent protest.” With Xuma’s death, the era of Nelson Mandela’s ANC had begun. It would reject “delegations and telegrams.” What he wanted was to confront the regime, to equalize it in the streets, in the homes, in all the places where it manifested itself. If necessary, through armed struggle.
This period not only radicalized black youth; some young white men were also radicalized. One of them was a young George Bizos, from 1949 a law student at White Wits University, where Nelson Mandela and Arthur Chaskalson were also law students. George had managed to secure university entry within a few years after arriving in South Africa from Greece as a refugee boy fleeing the Nazi occupation, unable to speak English. It landed in a South Africa that would soon trade the horrors of World War II for the crime against humanity of apartheid.
George’s life experience and big heart instinctively led him to side with the oppressed and ally with those who resist injustice. This started in student politics, where George and Arthur and a few others resisted the exclusion of black students from a law school event, and George stood up to the Wits establishment on various fronts as a student leader. George and Mandela’s lives diverged at this time, as he would complete his law degree at Wits at Wits while Mandela suffered the humiliating experience of exclusion, apparently on academic grounds.
They soon met again, one as a lawyer and the other as a lawyer in the trenches of the struggle against apartheid. George would develop, in his own words, a 65-year friendship with Mandela, with the latter becoming a prisoner, president, and statesman, while George would remain Mandela’s trusted advocate, on the political and personal fronts.
George Bizos, of course, used the law as an instrument in the fight against apartheid. This meant providing legal representation to victims of racist criminal prosecutions, forced expulsions, and persecution at the hands of the apartheid state. But it also meant taking on cases aimed at dismantling the segregation of urban areas, weakening the power of the police by taking witness statements, and introducing fair administrative procedures in the hugely expanding administrative state.
As an accomplished trial attorney, George had an instinctive gift for reading and connecting with people. At the heart of this was his empathy. When he led his own clients as witnesses, his heart went out to them as they shared their stories. When he interrogated the police officers who had been imprisoned, tortured or murdered, his questions burned, demanding truth and simple human justice for that freedom fighter, activist or striking miner, and for their families. Although he was a master of the rules of evidence and the art of the courtroom, this was never what was meant for him. Although theatrical at times, he was by no means a showman. The courtroom theater was necessary because the courts were the only places where the police, endowed with unlimited powers by the state, could be made to respond, squirm, and confess. George used this space with determination.
George stood up to injustice and oppression despite the personal and professional consequences for him. For years during apartheid, he was unable to return to Greece to visit his mother and family because he knew that the government would not allow him to return. He took silk (senior attorney status) at the end of his career due to the political work he did. At the Bar, he was a strong ally in the fight for the admission of black defenders, beginning with Duma Nokwe, with whom George shared a camera. Although celebrated by the profession and the country after liberation, he was an outcast from the white establishment in government and the legal profession for most of his professional life. In court he faced open hostility from the apartheid security police, prosecutors, magistrates and judges. He never flinched. Delmas’s defendants nicknamed him ‘Matla a Tlou’ (strength of an elephant).
These stories, of courage in adversity, friendship in the midst of racism and oppression, sacrifice in the midst of abundance, inspired us to choose the path of the law and offered us a model of how to aspire to be, as human rights lawyers. . George was a central pillar representing the inspiration and aspiration of all young lawyers interested in human rights. We spent time with George at the Legal Resource Center (LRC), where he served for more than 25 distinguished years as a senior in-house attorney, a position for which Arthur Chaskalson had hired him.
It was during Rivonia’s trial against Mandela and the rest of the ANC leadership that George had also met with Arthur Chaskalson, as junior members of the defense team led by Bram Fischer. George and Arthur’s own friendship turned into a lifelong friendship. As George would say, Arthur would make the law and he would do the deeds, an arrangement they repeated at the Delmas trial. In his last years until Arthur’s death, George and Arthur met at the LRC, as Arthur spent one day each week in the Johannesburg offices after his retirement from the Bench. It was at lunch with Arthur and George in the Johannesburg CBD or in the LRC kitchen that we probably learned more than at any other time during our years at the LRC: about law and life, friendship and solidarity, politics. and the purpose. It was there that George and Arthur shared stories of their past and concerns for the future, but also enjoyed each other’s friendship. They were also lighter times.
In his role at the LRC, George was a colleague and friend, mentor and teacher. Mainly through his wisdom, stemming from years of trial and error. Sometimes instinctively. Although we both held leadership roles in the LRC’s Constitutional Litigation Unit (CLU) (at different times), it was George we turned to for advice. He was, of course, unruly in all the best ways, but he was the heart and wisdom that bound the CRA together. At the end of a long CLU meeting or even an LRC AGM where we had to go through a lot of reports on current cases, planning and budgets, George invariably brought up a new matter: someone had spoken to him or he had read in the newspaper, about the denial of rights to some person or community, and he felt strongly that we needed to intervene. In his later years, always determined to keep fighting, he trusted more and more of us all and it was our privilege to support and care for him in the workplace. Young LRC lawyers and investigators were asked to help him with the investigation of a case or speech, and in the process he passed on much of his history and values to us.
It was George who, immediately after hearing the shocking news of the Marikana miners’ murder on the radio at work, brought the LRC lawyers together to come to the scene, find independent pathologists, and make sure the families were cared for. George was devastated and furious that this massacre had occurred, especially in a democratic South Africa. On commission, he led the LRC team and was a beacon for the search for truth and the demand for justice. Several family members of murdered miners said it made them feel heard.
One of George’s most persistent refrains in the last decade was “don’t blame the Constitution.” He shared the pain and despair of South Africans at the despicable inequality and suffering of the majority of our people and the slow pace of change. He complained loudly and often about corruption and broken parts of government, including land reform, racial injustice and gender-based violence. However, he was emphatic in his view that the Constitution is not to blame.
Even after more than half a century of fighting for the law, much of the work that George and others had done remains unfinished. George was still eager in his later years to see justice for the Marikana victims, accountability for the unpunished apartheid killings of the likes of Ahmed Timol and many more, and most of all to see much greater progress in realizing the vision. constitutional framework of a more egalitarian society. , for which he had fought. These tasks now fall on all of us left behind. On several occasions in recent years, George has launched a challenge at public events. In a conference entitled The way to freedom, as part of the Freedom Month Lecture Series at his own Wits University on April 21, 2016, put it this way:
“The challenge is this: I want you to think of a way that you can promote the values of our Constitution in your community. Keep a record of it; record your progress; And whenever you think you’ve accomplished what you set out to do, challenge yourself to do something else. Do so in the name of our Constitution and the goals and values that underpin it, and be relentless in your pursuit. “
There is much to do. Our country is now the most unequal in the world by some measures. Many need access to water, sanitation and housing. Many lack food and medical care. For many, quality education is a distant dream. But a fortunate few enjoy the wealth of this country because of its white privilege inherited from apartheid and the new forms of privilege taking over a capitalist society. Some have accumulated great wealth in a short period of 25 years. The Constitution was conceived as a platform for sustained but radical socioeconomic change. George Bizos’s life revolved around empathy with others, the source of his courage. His vision of the Constitution was not a balm for racism and inequality, but a tool for his “relentless” confrontation. Honoring your life means fighting for your ideals. Diary. Tangibly. Relentlessly.
If we do not use the Constitution to confront the racism, patriarchy, inequality, corruption and the daily injustices faced by so many, we risk wasting the possibility of building the society that George envisioned in the Constitution and to which he dedicated his life. We risk losing the goodness and humanity that he embodied. George wouldn’t do it like that.
Good luck, George. DM / MC
Tembeka Ngcukaitobi is a senior advocate for the Johannesburg Bar Association and a former colleague of Bizos at the LRC. Jason Brickhill is a lawyer at the Johannesburg Bar and a PhD student and tutor at the University of Oxford, and a former colleague of Bizos at the LRC.
