The Mandela Brief: Sydney Kentridge and the Trials of Apartheid

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The cookie is set by Krux Digital under the domain krxd.net. The cookie stores a unique ID to identify a returning user for the purpose of targeted advertising. Felix in Exile (1994) was made just before the first general election in South Africa and questioned the way in which the people would remember those who died in the fight against apartheid.

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. The case list of Sir Sydney Kentridge chronicles some of the most defining moments of the last 40 years. Last year, he acted for Jeffrey Archer when he was facing expulsion and proceedings from the Conservative Party by its ethics and integrity committee. Kentridge really shot to prominence during the Treason Trial, where he was part of a team of lawyers under the leadership of Isie Maisels, QC, appearing for the 156 accused. Each member of the team was assigned certain of the accused to lead in the witness box. The young Mandela was assigned to Kentridge, who gave the former a daily lift to the trial in Pretoria in his car. During these drives they would discuss the trial, Mandela’s evidence in it and wider matters of the world. Mandela and all other trialists were eventually acquitted. But his greatest triumph came in his work on behalf of the family of Steve Biko who died of injuries in police custody in September 1977.

Thomas Grant KC has performed a real service by enabling us to get a vivid sense of some of Kentridge's most important cases . . . This is a powerful, but easy, read The relentless use of primary colours ultimately erodes the reader’s trust. Grant might have done better to heed the maxim, used by an observer to describe Kentridge’s advocacy, that less is more.

Kentridge retired at the age of 90, precisely 64 years to the day after he had first been called to the Johannesburg Bar. The Bar is acutely aware that not only have they chosen a fine mind but also a barrister whom Lord Irvine also considered first choice in his own battle to overturn a sex discrimination verdict against him earlier this year. In that case, Sir Sydney almost single-handedly reversed an employment tribunal's decision that found that Lord Irvine had acted illegally by appointing his close friend Garry Hart as his special adviser. Once again the Bar has asked Sir Sydney to ride to its rescue. He is now leading a committee of barristers charged with defending the Bar's alleged restrictive practices. He will have to counter arguments made by the Office of Fair Trading whose report this year questioned the need for the rank of QC and the restriction that forces the public to first instruct a solicitor before they can see a barrister. Sydney Kentridge was born in Johannesburg in 1922 and matriculated in 1938 at the King Edward VII High School. He married Felicia Geffen in 1952. They have two daughters, two sons, two granddaughters and two grandsons. Education

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The cookie is set by CloudFlare service to store a unique ID to identify a returning users device which then is used for targeted advertising. Records the default button state of the corresponding category & the status of CCPA. It works only in coordination with the primary cookie. He continued to practice law at the highest level in London, where he became a QC (currently KC) in 1984. On his 90th birthday he argued – and won – a substantial tax case before the Supreme Court. He retired at the apex of his profession.

It is impossible for the court to come to the conclusion that the ANC acquired or adopted a policy to overthrow the state by violence … While the prosecution has succeeded in showing that the Programme of Action contemplated the use of illegal methods (e.g. strikes, boycotts etc) … for the achievement of a fundamentally different state from the present, it has failed to show that the ANC as a matter of policy intended to achieve this new state by violent means. a b c Gapper, John (18 January 2013). "Lunch with the FT: Sydney Kentridge". Financial Times . Retrieved 7 April 2013. He defended the P&O directors over the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise, and acted for Dr Nigel Cox who was charged with murder in a case that explored the role of the law in euthanasia. For the Government he successfully resisted the attempt by Lord Rees-Mogg to frustrate the Maastricht Treaty and for the Serious Fraud Office he argued against the claim by Ernest Saunders that his trial was unfair. Through the great set-pieces of the legal struggle against apartheid - cases which made the headlines not just in South Africa, but across the world - this biography is a portrait of enduring moral stature. Kentridge’s lustre in Britain grew in 1984 when Albert Finney played him in a dramatisation of the in­quest into the death in police custody of the activist Steve Biko, where he represented the victim’s family. Gradually, the London legal establishment became more aware of his involvement in the notorious Treason Trial (1958-1961), in which more than 150 political campaigners were arrested in a police raid; the inquiry into the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, when 69 protesters were killed by police; and the fact that he had acted as counsel for both Nelson and Winnie Mandela, as well as the implausibly-named clergyman Gonville ffrench-Beytagh.

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When the trial began in August 1970 Kentridge, brought in as leading counsel, took the preliminary point that the new indictment was so similar in detail to the one on which the accused had been acquitted that this amounted to an illicit retrial. To his and everybody else’s surprise, the judge (Justice Viljoen, an individual with no liberal credentials) accepted the submission – still known in Law French as ‘autrefois acquit’– and stopped the trial. The work by Kentridge and his team, matching each detail of the second indictment with the first, had been colossal, but the submission it yielded was unanswerable. Rights campaigner Felicia Kentridge dies". Sunday Times. South Africa. 9 June 2015 . Retrieved 17 June 2015. There can be no doubt that Kentridge’s brilliance and hard work made a dramatic difference to many of his clients and indeed to the Thus, witnesses “splutter” or “whimper” under Kentridge’s ­“devastating” cross-examination and “patrician nonchalance”; ­Mandela’s bearing in the witness box is “princely”; prosecution ­counsel are “preposterous”, ­“sheepish” or exhibit “a lather of confected rage”. Subtle this isn’t; and when a modest joke of Kent­ridge’s is described as “an immortal retort”, the narrative tips into hagiography – justified in life maybe, but less welcome in a book. It is also an error of judgment for Grant to demote the murderous speeches and (probably) activities of the “sanctified” Winnie Mandela’s later life to the status of “controversies”.