The Mandela Brief: Sydney Kentridge and the Trials of Apartheid

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After an extraordinary career at the Bar in South Africa and England, he has finally retired. One of the finest lawyers and the greatest advocates, he played a much greater role in the history of his country than any other practising lawyer. De Vos, who had produced this political cornucopia, was powerless to halt the use now being made of it. By the time Kentridge had got Murray to accept that one was unlikely to find a Marxist-Leninist invoking Christian principles, his credibility as a witness, Grant considers, had been destroyed. I don’t think that is quite right. True, Murray had fallen into a series of elephant traps by identifying passages which turned out to be the work of Milton, Pitt, Voltaire and Lincoln, and in one instance of Murray himself, as communistic. But by treating him as an intellectual equal and exploiting his learning, Kentridge and his fellow counsel had made Murray an asset for the defence. While Kentridge would no doubt point out that it was de Vos who had unwittingly dealt him this hand, it required an advocate of Kentridge’s skill to avoid both underplaying and overplaying it. I well remember the arrival of Sydney Kent­ridge from South Africa into the arcane world of the English commercial bar, at which he began to practise in earnest in the early 1980s. He had not only a reputation for the quality of his advocacy, but also – less usual among commercial lawyers – a commanding moral stature, derived from his unwavering opposition to the apartheid regime in his home country.He continued practising as a barrister into his nineties. On his ninetieth birthday he argued as one of fifteen barristers a grueling three-day tax case in the Supreme Court in London’s Parliament Square. Kentridge’s powerful argument succeeded. The Mandela Brief: Sydney Kentridge and the Trials of Apartheid by Thomas Grant (21 Jul 2022) is available at the Book Lounge and for loan from the Jacob Gitlin Library . Invitation to the 12th Annual Steve Biko Memorial Lecture" (PDF). University of Cape Town. 2011. Retrieved 25 January 2013.

To take part in these immoral and illegitimate legal systems, so some argue, is to legitimise the system itself. The apartheid government prided itself on the importance of the law. The National Party told the world that its system was law based and that those opposing apartheid were operating outside the law and had to be dealt with as such. During the trial that Kentridge got to know one of his clients, Nelson Mandela, for whom he secured, alongside all the other defendants, an historic acquittal in 1961. Years later, after he had become president, Mandela would pay tribute to his advocacy, recalling his “the brilliance and courage of Sydney Kentridge... His manner was always understated, controlled and relentlessly rational. His cross-examination was devastating.” The next four years of his life were spent in uniform, first in Africa and then Italy. Kentridge was part of the invasion force that landed in Sicily in July 1943 and he still remembers being strafed by Stuka bombers — as well as the joy of VE Day, spent outside Mantua. He studied for a second degree at Exeter College, Oxford immediately after the war (once visiting Clement Attlee at 10 Downing Street with his father) and returned to South Africa to start a career as an advocate. But the vexed question is always raised: Should men and women of solid morality take part as lawyers in an immoral legal system. Should lawyers take part in the legal systems in, for example, Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa? Kentridge was called to the Johannesburg Bar in 1949 and practised there until the 1980s when he shifted his practice to London, where he still lives.

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Last November, Sir Sydney Kentridge KC KCMG turned 100. This milestone birthday was celebrated not only by his family but also by lawyers around the world who venerate Kentridge as perhaps the greatest advocate of the 20th century and a man of principle and courage. Jonathan Sumption, a friend and former colleague, once described him as “the barrister’s barrister…[with] a moral stature that no amount of forensic technique can impersonate”. Last year, he acted for Jeffrey Archer when he was facing expulsion and proceedings from the Conservative Party by its ethics and integrity committee. However, what will always dominate his legacy are his cases challenging the apartheid laws, policy and conduct by the apartheid government. Pay the debt forward: Public Protector asks her peers". Public Protector South Africa. 21 July 2015. Archived from the original on 8 December 2015 . Retrieved 13 August 2015.