PROLOGUE
A’ THE TIME that I was called to the Bar by Middle Temple in July 1952, I had paid little or no attention to the consti-. tutional and legal problems of South Africa. But in 1958 I was asked by the newly created International Commission of Jurists to attend as an observer, together with Fred Lawton QC (then a leading practitioner in England, later to become a Lord Justice of Appeal) the forthcoming opening of the trial in Pretoria of 156 people charged with treason.
I duly attended those preliminary proceedings which began on 1 August 1958 (and ultimately were aborted), and over the following years I visited South Africa as an observer of other political trials, that is, until 1965.2British subjects did not require a visa to visit South Africa, but the Minister of the Interior, unsurprisingly, possessed the power to take away that privilege and render any undesirable visitor a prohibited immigrant. Accordingly, I duly received a letter from the Secretary to the Minister of the Interior depriving me of the visa privilege. It was a long letter - two full pages of A4 paper. It chronicled (very accurately) all my misdeeds over the years, writing and lecturing against apartheid and constantly consorting with defence counsel in the political trials. The letter ended as follows: ‘I am instructed by my Minister to tell you that you have seen enough of South Africa, and South Africa of you - I remain your obedient servant’! (That official sentiment might rank with the remark that Smuts is reported to have made when Mahatma Gandhi (whose spiritual qualities Smuts admired) left South Africa before the First
1 On the spelling of his middle name - with two ‘a’s - I have followed the entry in the South African Baptismal Register, as did his biographer, Professor WK Hancock, and as does the Middle Temple Bench Book.
2 I subsequently wrote an article in the International and Comparative Law Quarterly on the beginnings of the trial, which appeared in the issue of January 1959, pp 59-72.
World War, in similar circumstances, to the effect that South Africa was glad to see the back of the Saint!) I have treasured that excellent piece of poetry. I thought that one day it might be my passport to revisit South Africa. Alas, I did not return until two years ago, when Middle Templars conferred delightfully with judges and lawyers there. On that occasion I was astonished to find that there was no formal celebration of the centenary of the Union of South Africa and its court system, which remains the same today, except since 1994 with the overarching power of the Constitutional Court.