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’. The clients – who included Nelson and Winnie Mandela, the anti-apartheid lawyer Bram Fischer and the family of the murdered activist Steve Biko – nevertheless remained hugely grateful to him, with Mandela saying: ‘His brilliance shone out, and with it the promise of the career to come.’

Kentridge subsequently had a long and distinguished practice at the British Bar, but The Mandela Brief wisely concentrates on his earlier career in South Africa. Although it is easy to assume that, when he began his advocacy in 1952, he was already dealing with a legal system of hideous bias, it took some time to dismantle what Grant calls the country’s ‘enviable international reputation for the quality of its judges and jurisprudence’, mainly brought about by the 1967 Terrorism Act – a blunt instrument designed to enforce apartheid rules that saw the state plumb new depths of oppressiveness.