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He was one of the world’s most celebrated lawyers, a soft-spoken but fearless defender who defended Nelson Mandela in an epochal trial in apartheid South Africa.
But for his son, attorney George Bizos, who passed away this week at the age of 92, he was also a passionate vegetable grower who was gardening in his pajamas.
When he wasn’t in court or writing legal documents until late at night, Bizos enjoyed growing vegetables at his home in the Johannesburg suburb of Parktown.
“Very prominent people would often come to visit him and he would sit on the patio and carry them around the garden in muddy slippers and pajamas,” his son Damon Bizos said in an interview.
“We always try to tell him: ‘Dad, please, you know, the ambassador from this or that country will come to see you, or the vice president or the president will come, can’t you put some clothes on? and he would say ‘listen, this is who I am’, and he left. “
Bizos came to South Africa as a 13-year-old war refugee from Greece and trained as a lawyer, dedicating himself to upholding democratic values and human rights.
He represented Mandela during the 1964 Rivonia trial, in which Mandela and seven others were sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of trying to overthrow the apartheid government.
Many expected the death penalty.
Instead, Mandela and the others became living emblems and rallying points in the fight against white minority rule.
Damon, one of Bizos’ three sons, said that his father’s eccentricities were the outer face of a strong individual.
“He was his own man,” said Damon, 62, a professor of surgery at the University of the Witwatersrand. “He did what he thought was right.”
Bizos continued working until he was 90, and one of his last major cases secured government payments in 2014 for families of 34 miners shot to death two years earlier.
“He managed to do a full day of work until he was 91,” Damon said. “We always try to ask him to slow down.”
Bizos’ funeral, yet another in a string of anti-apartheid heroes, is expected next week.
