Special Hearings — Legal Hearings — 1997-10-27

UNKNOWN: ... students right up until (indistinct) submission made for you as late as 1968 in our law school the majority of LLB-students were Black.
 Now, that was because a lot of them - if you had been previously registered at the University you were able to continue your studies as well.
 But by mid-1975 it had dropped right down to less than four percent of the class and I'll come back to it later as to how we dealt with that.
 We certainly had a problem also that our staff was not representative, there was nothing to stop them being representative, but our staff was not representative of the South African majority and population either.
 Some successes then. Apart from Professors Matthews and Van Niekerk, I'll tell you a little bit about later, but we did have academics speaking out, so much so, apparently and I can't think for the life of me why, in Pretoria we were known as the Kremlin at one stage. I don't know why we were. Maybe it was Ray's underground activity, but that's -some Government circles referred to us as that.
 In 1973 one thing we did do was organise a legal aid conference where unfortunately the Legal Aid Board declined to come, but the most important thing that came out of that legal aid conference, was the catalyst or law clinics. At that time UCT had a student run clinic and WITS had started one the year before, largely I think influence of Arthur Chaskalson. I started one the week after the conference in my office. The security police got very interested, because Ray was doing things at the same time, but eventually that started off. We had few hiccups as you would expect. The Law Society in Natal wasn't too sure what this was about, but we got them to agree to come on our management committee. We got them to come and supervise on Saturday mornings down at the Garment Workers Union and I remember the president having a bit of a shock when he saw workers rights up there and saying, what's this? This is communism. What is this communist stuff doing up here on the walls and so forth, but the Law Society didn't stand in our way and we were able to start running clinics. 
 In the 1970's, 1978 to be exact, we started introducing courses which could then be used to circumvent the permit system, because if a student could show that a course was not available at a historically Black university, they got permission to come to us. So by doing that legal aid was one of the courses that law students helped to motivate. We did that one. No-one else offered legal aid. It wasn't available anywhere else. So we started being able to - and that worked reasonably well from 3,9 in 1975 we're up to 20,6 Black students by 1980; that's five years later even though the Act was still in force. By '86 we're up to 40 percent. Today we're sitting at about 82 percent or something. 
 We also in 1984 revamped our law curricula because we started realising what we're teaching was pretty irrelevant to a lot of what was going on in South African society. We actually introduced a course, Race and the Law, to try and focus specifically on how race was impacting on the legal system and so on. So we would count that as a success.
 In '86 we introduced the street law programme which again, I would count as a success. I just want to share one - there's been a lot of talk about how we can educate - we need to educate the citizens and the judges and that for me was a very valuable experience. Even though it was the height of the emergency, we got Judge Wilson to come out to the school in KwaMashu and the kids wanted to know about the death penalty, so they asked him how many death penalties have you imposed and how do you feel about doing the death penalty? Now, for a judge to be accountable to a bunch of school children was for him a very interesting experience and a very good way of exposing the kids. Judges are human beings, judges can see that people are also interested in what their doing. That's maybe the sort of thing that we could continue doing. 
 The other thing we would do this - I know that Justice Pius Langa won't mind and Bugu Shabalala won't mind, but we trained some of the early Black judges as well. One of the things we wanted to do was to expose the school kids to the fact that you can have Black judges. This is back in 1986, '87. So what we used to do we ran mock trials. We'd get sitting judges as well, Judge MaCall and others, Wilson sat for us, but we'd get senior Black advocates to sit as judges and so Justice Pius Langa sat for us, Justice Phosa sat for us, Lewis Skweyiya sat for us, Bugu Shabalala sat for us. So we did do some judicial training in those days as well. The thing was that the school kids saw through us, because we had a colleague, Carthy Govender, whose now Human Rights Commission, we got him to sit, the kids followed him out to the car park and said, but hang on, you're not a real judge. You're not driving a Mercedes Benz. All the other guys got into a Mercedes Benz. So we were trying to sort of conscientise the kids then and again I think it is a good way of educating the judiciary.
 In '87 we established a centre for Socio-legal studies and I - it's a pity I think in a way CALS, has been left out of it, the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at Wits has done a tremendous amount and did a tremendous amount and we are linked up with them in a labour programme.
 We also in '89 did a community law centre to try and serve rural communities and get rural communities who are some of the most disadvantaged communities in South Africa access to paralegal training.
 I think what I'm going to do now is just move on. In the documentation I've given you, just some brief points on Prof Matthews and Prof Van Niekerk. I thought what I would do is just do a tiny bit of anecdotal stuff, but I've put quite a lot of stuff in here, because often people say, but what could we do as law professors and law deans. I'm not saying what I did was fantastic, but I want to show you what I could do by merely saying, I'm dean of a faculty, these are the sort of things I was able to do at the time and get away with them if you like.
 The - apart from the legal aid courses I've mentioned, one of the things I did when I did a book on outline of legal aid in South African in '82, I wanted to start alerting the judges so what I did was I got Judge Milne to come along in '83 to open a legal aid conference and to do that he had to read the book and that book had lots of statistics about unrepresented accused. I've got it in a footnote there. You can see later he used that. He told me he wrote to the authorities, he wrote to everybody. He was shocked. He didn't realise hundreds of thousands of guys - he'd never appreciated those guys were all going to jail without legal representation. When you're a dean you can phone up a judge very easily and say please come and open a conference or so. 
 The street law programme I was able to open doors with the Association of Law Societies, I'd like to compliment particularly Mr Cox who helped us get the funding for that, but because it was a dean who was interested I could get access to them, I could get access to judges to come and sit in the cases and things as well.
 One thing I did in '87 which gave a chance to bring in other colleagues, we had - the reaction was always on our campus so what I decided was in '87, I'm going to set up a legal reaction unit. So we were on 24 hours notice and our object was to deal with the police and to put pressure on the police every time they did anything. I've put in a couple of incidents there. Our record was 365 students being arrested, medical students. We told them if you arrest these guys, we'll keep the magistrates up till two in the morning getting bail. We don't care, we're going to do it. They did it. We had the registrar the suitcase of money. We kept them up till two o'clock in the morning.
 When they come to break up our meetings, I'd say to them, you can't move unless you give us a receipt for everything. We haven't got paper. Lend us a pen, professor. Sorry guys, go and get your own paper. You're just putting pressure on them all the time.
 The fact that a law professor was prepared to stand up and do these things, the cops, for some reason the cops think you're in authority, you're an authority figure if you're a law professor and so you're able to negotiate and it's easier to negotiate and there's lots of stories we haven't got time to go into.
 One of the things I used to do - there were a lot of our male White students who would say they have been called up and they don't want to go into the Army. So, I'd say, okay, we will register you for a higher degree. So I had all sorts of guys on higher degrees extending their things. We kept some guys there for six or eight years, keeping them out of the Army by registering them for degree.
 There were other guys who would get called up for these three week camps and didn't want to go into the townships, so, as dean of the faculty I would write a letter to say this student is required to spend his long vacation doing research. This is part of - for his degree he's doing a research project you guys have got to do research. For some reason, because I was dean of the faculty these letters were believed very often. So, you could do those sort of things.
 Also just getting involved in marches and all the usual stuff. It makes a difference sometimes when there are senior academics present as well. It's not just always the foot soldiers who have to do it. You can assist them.
 You guys have mentioned this thing about the chief - the magistrates and those videos. What happened there was one of my colleagues was attending a braaivleis with a colleague who was prosecuting. She told her the story. The colleague told me the story. I phoned the newspapers and told them the story and said, you tell the story. I will comment as a law professor and then we can get the ball rolling and we did it. So we blew the whole story and it hit the front page. As you know the Milne Commission was set up, but if a law professor phones a newspaper and says here's an interesting story, the newspapers tend to listen and they can come back to you for comment again.
 Another occasion, in '89 it was, after NADEL I wanted to try and bring the Association of the Natal Law Society and the Society of Advocates together with NADEL and BLA to condemn a hunger strike. It was very fortuitous because there were a visiting overseas delegation from a New York Bar or one of these overseas guys were coming to see me, they were in my office and I thought I'd better alert the Law Society, they're going to be helluva of an embarrassed because these guys are going to be here, BLA is going to be down there making a statement, LHR is going to be making a statement, what about you guys. So I phoned the Society of Advocates and said, I think it was Malcom actually, he's not here, he might remember; wouldn't you guys like to make a statement? It's going to look a bit bad with all these foreign lawyers in the country if you guys don't say anything. Once they agreed I phoned the Natal Law Society and said listen the advocates are going to make a statement, don't you guys want to make one? So we had them down there at a meeting; NADEL, BLA, LHR everybody condemning plus the Law Societies condemning it. Again, if you're dean of a law school, it's easier to open those doors and do those sort of things.
 I've listed a whole lot of other things about warning the medical profession that if they do this sort of stuff they were doing with collaborating with security cops about providing detainees, they were in for trouble. 
 Just to say; not everybody's supposed to be part of - you don't have to be in the barricades as a law dean, but sometimes it's helped. If I can just finish off with one last one. When the liberation movement guys were busy trying to negotiate with the cops to get joint patrols in the townships because of all the violence going on in KwaZulu Natal, they would always get the run around. We could never meet you, sorry the brigadier isn't available, the commissioner isn't available. If I phoned up as dean for some reason, they would give us a hearing. So I would arrive there with the guys and what have we got, tea and biscuits and everything is sort of set out again. It's much easier to do that. Then when they start calling our bluff, we say, okay, don't worry guys, we know that Didcott's on duty this weekend, we'll just phone him. No, no, hang on, professor. We go out, make a phone call, he can come back and see. So, again you can pull rank if you like. You can do things. There were things that could be done. Okay. I just wanted to share some of that with you. There were things that we could do as deans.
 In the presentation I've made I've just mentioned names of a few colleagues. So again then, most of - a lot of our colleagues did not get involved and certainly the dangers I think of criticising the regime apart from the 1970's when there were prosecutions, after that I don't think academics, particularly White male academics were in that great danger.
 I actually at the time, because I didn't want to go to military service, didn't have a - I'd renounced my South African citizenship to keep out of the Army and I was able to do that. So I could have been sent out of the country any time. It wasn't done to me though. I was a White male. I used to try and be good to the security cops as well though of course, because if they were there recording us, I'd say, thanks guys, you've got your video there. I want to give you a lecture for ten minutes now that I want you to take to the police colleges. What it's going to be is all the violations of our rights as citizens in the previous week and then I'm going to tell you what your powers are in terms of the emergency regulations. After that I'm going to address the meeting. That sort of stuff, you bring the cops in. So I'm sort of nice to them. They come up afterwards and say, Professor, we liked what you said, but hell, you've made us look stupid, man. You know, those sort of things we - sorry, I'm rambling a bit on anecdotes.
 Okay. So at the end of the day, I don't think our university did as much as it could and again I think that we owe an apology for some of the things that we didn't do. We should have spoken out more as a law school, less as individuals and again we would apologise to any people in the South African community whom we could have done more to help.
 Thank you very much.