‘I Am’: a Testimony From South Africa

The world is still so very far from assuring human rights as a birthright for everyone. International, governmental and civil society organizations hold the vital cumulative responsibility for what is the basis of all justice. But there are, in many countries, individuals whose personal conduct is the exposition of the ideal that every day is the day to affirm and assert human rights.

I think of such an individual who happens to be of my own country, South Africa. As with any whose life has become a legend--and this one has even been impersonated, in a movie, by Marlon Brando--the story is to be told traditionally: Once upon a time, the 1941 gales of war blew a 13-year-old Greek boy to our shores. He was to become a South African civil rights lawyer of international standing, a devastating cross-examiner of apartheid’s torturers and killers. When George Bizos won a case during the apartheid era, during the transition after its end in the early 1990s, and now as we approach our second universal franchise election, it was not, and is not, just a professional victory, but an imperative of a man whose deep commitment to human rights guides his skills and directs his life.

Bizos has been defense counsel for names that have made the history of our country’s liberation, from Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Bram Fischer, Winnie Mandela and others, to the younger generation of Patrick Lekota and Pop Molefe. He has been counsel in the crucial inquests, including that of Steve Biko, that first lifted the lid on the stench of apartheid’s systematic atrocities; and he is now leader of the team to oppose applications for amnesty on behalf of the families whose husbands, wives, mothers or children were murdered by that system. And, of course, Nelson Mandela could tell us of the outstanding qualities, perceived early on, that since the mid-1950s when they were rebellious young men together, have made Bizos permanent counselor to one who was to become president.

Bizos’ contribution to the legal foundations to ensure human rights in a new South Africa moves far and wide into our national reconstruction, with membership of the ANC’s Legal Constitutional Committee, later advisor to the negotiating team in drawing the interim constitution and Bill of Rights, then his appointment by President Mandela to the Judicial Services Commission for reform of the judicial system to eradicate the travesty of justice that was its apartheid past.

Bizos’ commitment to democracy is sometimes attributed to his long line of Greek ancestry; he was born to it in Korani, southwestern Greece. But democracy has constantly to be reborn, far-flung from its beginnings among the Greek philosophers that Bizos can quote with casual ease. He says that he has learned a contemporary democracy from many of the black fellow South Africans in whose lives he has been involved as their legal defense and in personal relations.

Long before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was visualized, he pursued relentlessly in the courts the truth of what was being done to those who suffered under and had the courage to oppose a tyrant racist regime. This is evidenced in the book that he had to be persuaded was essential--for us, for our country--for him to write. Bizos’ book is about his continuing search for truth as the human right of justice: the truth about more than 60 people who died in the hands of the security police during apartheid, and most important, the failure of judicial officers of the time to recognize that truth staring them in the face. Their incredible verdict, again and again, was “no one to blame”; and that, with a question mark, is both title and j’accuse of his extraordinary book.

We South Africans, like the Chileans and Argentines, have the hermeneutic experience, whether as those who were involved in evil or in the struggle against it, or stood by and let evil happen, to interpret its testimony within and in relation to ourselves.

I contemplate that 13-year-old boy stepping ashore in South Africa in 1941. There is a newspaper cutting from that year, with the smudgy reproduction, a photo of the boy beside his father, himself a resistance fighter against the Germans on Greek soil. The boy wears a jaunty cap. He looks out surely and determinedly from under the visor. The eyes say: I am here. I am not a refugee, I am not an exile: I am here, to take on this country and my life--I am. That is my responsibility and human right.