Homage to Sydney Kentridge, South Africa’s courtroom giant

Sydney Kentridge, the protagonist of Thomas Grant’s superb legal saga The Mandela Brief, is that trickiest of biographical subjects: a great man. Grant acknowledges ‘it is rare that, on closer acquaintance, a person touted as a “great” man or woman conforms to the initial description’, but the South African lawyer has been described by countless barristers as the greatest courtroom advocate they had ever seen.

Notable for the apartheid cases he conducted as a defence lawyer of especial distinction and passion, Kentridge has also been admired for his calm and assured bearing in court. The Observer praised him in 1968 as having ‘the face and bearing of an upper-class Regency buck speaking Afrikaans whenever he was obliged to with what sounded like a Knightsbridge accent’. That the advocate was Johannesburg born-and-bred was not considered noteworthy.

Yet this Regency buck was no gilded fop. He was an intense, forbidding presence in or out of the courtroom, and it was said of him in 1977 that ‘it is just as terrifying to be his client as it is to face him on the witness stand’.