South Africa

In August 1995 I was invited to South Africa to address the annual conference of the African Society of International and Comparative Law which was being held in the newly democratic Republic of South Africa for the first time, attended by 150 people from all over the continent including the Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations and the Assistant Secretary General of the Organisation of African Unity. The government minister who opened the conference spoke for all when he commented that the fact that the pan-African gathering was taking place in South Africa was the realisation of what until then had been an impossible dream. It was a high honour that I had been invited to speak there.

On arrival at Johannesburg International Airport I was met by a driver, let's call him Jairus, who had spent the previous two days virtually without a break ferrying people to the conference location in Rustenburg, a two-hour drive to the north of Johannesburg. He was clearly exhausted and almost asleep at the wheel so I felt it was in my interest to keep him talking as much as possible. As we drove he pointed out the various White suburbs we passed through coming out of Johannesburg and then on to Alexandra township where, he said, the living conditions “were not fit for pigs”. Jairus himself lived in Soweto. He told me that he had a son and a daughter aged 15 and eight years respectively and was able to send them to what had previously been a school exclusively for White children where, he said, they were guaranteed a good education. He had to meet the costs of their schooling and as a consequence had to work every hour possible to raise the necessary finance. Jairus expressed disappointment that general living conditions had not improved at all but hoped that, while his generation would have little benefit, his children would do so. He talked without bitterness about the folly of apartheid and how people had been taught to fear each other, about how White parents would tell their children that the ‘Kaffirs’ were dangerous people, about how they were kept separate, about how there was still an apartheid based on economics and wealth.