create a constitutional democracy were lawyers. Mandela and De Klerk both were. Mandela’s long memory of fragments of honourable justice meted out in the apartheid courts played a part. Joe Slovo, Cyril Ramaphosa and Roelf Meyer were also lawyers. The negotiators found a tattered, partly discredited, but still-functioning and partially credible legal system.
They took it and salvaged it for better service under democracy. The constitution they crafted took the best from what preceded, and placed it at the service of a new, larger and more hopeful legal order.
This act of salvage was for a public who understood that the law in South Africa was, at least occasionally, a potential mechanism of right rather than exclusively an instrument of oppression. Under apartheid, the law was a ‘site of struggle’. As a result, a wide array of trade unions, community organisations, guerrilla fighters, detainees, politicians and ordinary people believed, from their own experience, that the law could be used to protect and to afford dignity.
The new Constitution was designed to foster the best in that tradition.
XIV: Law as a reparative project
Our new legal order offered our country an opportunity to engage in the greatest reparative project of all – to repair the injury of apartheid.
When I started as a human rights lawyer in the early 1980s, it was twenty long years after my father had appeared between two prison guards at the funeral of my sister Laura. My personal quest was to make the law more than only an instrument of confinement, more than only an implement of reproof, rebuke and correction. The law’s role, as I saw it, was also to repair.
The law could be confining, and oppressive and unjust. But it could also afford a means of healing, and restoration. In the law, while working with the often grimy realities of injustice, I found also a means of channelling my life’s aspirations, for social justice and for healing, into my daily work.
It was a long way from Laura’s funeral.
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