Legal eagle

A life spent righting the scales of justice

‘It was equally frightening to be his client as to be his opponent’

Yesterday Sir Sydney Kentridge KC celebrated with friends and family the momentous occasion of his 100th birthday.

Perhaps it’s fair to say that William is the most famous Kentridge, but for much of his 64-year career before his retirement in 2013 his father was, in legal circles and beyond, renowned for his brilliant crossexaminations, relentless rationality and dedication to a belief in the law as a tool for the betterment of humanity. These earned him the Order of the Baobab in South Africa, a knighthood in England, pretty much every major legal and human rights award worth having and the honour of having defended three Nobel Peace Prize winners — Nelson Mandela, Albert Luthuli and Desmond Tutu. No wonder he is regarded as the greatest living barrister.

As lawyer and writer Thomas Grant remembers, when he was called to the bar in 1993 Kentridge, who had “only been in England really properly for 10 years, was already king of the bar in England. He was known as this legendary figure but I never came across him.”

It wasn’t until 2015, when Grant wrote a book about another legendary English centenarian advocate, Sir Jeremy Hutchinson, that he received a letter from Kentridge to congratulate him and invite him to tea.

‘A very modest man’

As Kentridge talked about his life, Grant first heard of his historic work in South Africa. He says that while he knew Kentridge was famous in South Africa, “I hadn’t really known, to my embarrassment, much about his South African work”.

Later, at the suggestion of Kentridge’s friend, fellow lawyer and “huge fan” Edward Glasgow, Grant approached Kentridge with the idea of writing about him.

Kentridge is “a very modest man, a very private man — not somebody who wears his achievements on his sleeve. Edward and I made a joint approach to him but he was very against it to begin with. He said: ‘I don’t have any memories of the past. I can’t remember anything and anyway who’s interested? It was all a very long time ago.’”

After convincing his subject that the book would not be a “cradle to the grave” biography but rather focus on his work and cases, Kentridge agreed to participate, with a little encouragement from his four devoted children.

Grant began work in 2019, researching and interviewing via Zoom from London. The book, The Mandela Brief: Sydney Kentridge and the Trials of Apartheid, has been published, as promised in time for Kentridge’s centenary. As Grant quips, it puts its author “in a very specialist grouping. I’m a writer of books about centenarian lawyers.”

Kentridge was born in Johannesburg, the eldest of three sons of Morris and May Kentridge. His father was an attorney who, by the time of Sydney’s birth in 1922, was increasingly involved in Labour Party politics, becoming the party’s MP for Troyeville two years later, a position he held until his retirement in 1958.

World War 2 intrudes

Kentridge attended King Edward VII School in Johannesburg, matriculated in 1939 and enrolled at Wits University where the outbreak of World War 2 served to distract him from his studies in political philosophy and classics. He briefly toyed with the idea of becoming a journalist after securing a job at The Sunday Times as its university correspondent.

After obtaining his BA in 1941, Kentridge enrolled to fight with the Allies in the war and participated in the invasion of Sicily in 1943. He returned to South Africa in 1946 and thanks to an ex-serviceman’s grant was able to go to Oxford to study law. He was not motivated by his father’s career but rather, he told Grant, by participating in a court martial during the war. He’d found that leading witnesses, presenting evidence and conducting cross-examinations was “very exciting”. He was admitted to the South African bar in 1949.

Grant’s book focuses on Kentridge’s South African career, not only because he participated in some of the most significant political trials and cases in the country’s darkest days, including the Treason Trial, the Sharpeville inquest, the trial of Bram Fischer and the Steve Biko Inquest, but because of how Kentridge is intertwined with pivotal moments in South African history.

Grant hopes the book serves as “a celebration of the man, a celebration of great advocacy and the power of advocacy and what great lawyers can do”.

While some of his contemporaries were more vocal in their opposition to apartheid in the courtroom, Kentridge was “not a political lawyer. He had political convictions and was a member of the Liberal Party until it disbanded and he had a certain set of values that were diametrically opposed to the National Party programme, but he did not use the courtroom for sloganising purposes. He was a very precise man and very careful and always respectful to the courtroom and the judge as a supposed avatar of justice.” Grant believes this led to Kentridge being treated with a greater degree of respect by apartheid judges who could not simply dismiss him as a “sloganising barrister”.

Hypocrisy and lies

Like many advocates who took on political cases during apartheid, though he might not always have been able to achieve a just outcome for his clients, Kentridge dedicated himself to attempting to expose the hypocrisy and lies of the regime, using his relentless rationality and precision as his weapon.

The examples that Grant provides throughout the book, drawn from tens of thousands of pages of court transcripts, provide plenty of evidence to laymen and lawmen of Kentridge’s “natural aptitude for focused thinking”.

“He had an enormous and distinctive capacity to get to the heart of a case and work out what the real issue was and why it would be decisive, and to then present it to the court in a way which was ultimately very persuasive.”

Kentridge could be austere. He wasn’ ta “touchy-feely advocate, whether towards his clients or towards the court — there was a slight crystalline distance, but I think that was quite a good thing. There’s a quote in the book where people say it was equally frightening to be his client as to be his opponent.”

From Kentridge’s point of view this made sense, says Grant, because “mollycoddling your client is not going to do them any favours and you’re not going to win any cases by grandstanding. You had to be hard on your client otherwise you’d lure them into a false sense of security.”

Grant is keen to note that despite his nononsense persona in the courtroom , Kentridge was a devoted father and husband.

“A lot of lawyers get quite nervy when they’re on holiday but I think he had a certain confidence that he was a good lawyer and he knew that cases wouldn’t disappear and he could take time off. He was good in terms of differentiating his work and personal life.”

Kentridge and his wife, Felicia, married in 1952 and remained together until her death in 2013. He would often say that she, through her pioneering work in helping to establish the Legal Resources Centre, had done more to actively fight apartheid than he had.

He had an enormous and distinctive capacity to get to the heart of a case and work out what the real issue was and why it would be decisive, and to then present it to the court in a way which was ultimately very persuasive

Meant to be celebratory

Some critics will say that Grant’s book is hagiographical despite the modest nature of the man whose extraordinary achievements are its subject. The author is ready to plead guilty to such an accusation.

“But with mitigating circumstances I would respectfully suggest, because it’s not a biography and it’s meant to be celebratory, in a hard way because I try and get the facts right, but I also don’t have any apology for presenting a great figure who I hope will inspire.”

Grant knows that “typically the law has a bad reputation and lawyers are seen as vultures and people who are feeding off the ills of society”.

But if his book about a man who contributed an enormous amount makes readers think that “lawyers can be a force for good and human beings can do things that are forces for good — whether they’re lawyers or anything else — then I’ll be pleased”.