The year that was–10 | 2024 in books: Love, hope and resistance—Part 1

READING books is about enlarging the imagination and opening out possibilities that one may not have considered or about affirming ideas that seem a bit out of place.

Doing a review of books of the year is about cultivating a reflective space from which to think of the tumultuous world we live in from a space which is a bit removed from the din of the contemporary world.

This act of reading or list-making is, however, about the world we live in. 

As Emily Dickinson put it:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant—

Success in Circuit lies

…

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind—

Thomas Grant, The Mandela Brief

The Mandela Brief: Sydney Kentridge and the Trials of Apartheid is an account of the work of Sydney Kentridge, a lawyer who for a large part of his career resisted apartheid using the framework of the law. Apartheid South Africa had created a “vast and comprehensive legislative apparatus for the segregation of the population in every aspect of life according to a theory of race, together with the absolute privileging and supremacy of the minority deemed to belong to one of those supposed races”.

Under such conditions what did the struggle for justice mean?

One of the interstices in the Apartheid system for resistance was the space of the law. This was because the Apartheid State had an “obsessive adherence to a legitimising semblance of the legal form”.

Kentridge made the most effective use of this form of the law in his defence of Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela and many other anti-Apartheid activists who faced the wrath of the Apartheid State.

Kentridge was the key lawyer in the Sharpeville Inquiry set up after the Sharpeville massacre by the Apartheid State. Sharpeville, like Jallianwala Bagh in India, was the site of one of the gravest crimes committed by the Apartheid State when incessant police firing into an unarmed crowd resulted in 249 deaths as per the police records. (The deaths were possibly more.)

Public pressure led the government to institute an inquiry with several weeks of public hearings. Though the result of the inquiry was an exoneration of those who perpetrated the massacre, the “poignancy of the bereaved and maimed inhabitants of Sharpeville were reported around the world”. The “mendacity” of the police witnesses was “exposed by the cross-examination of Kentridge and his colleagues”.

The death of one of South Africa’s most famous anti-Apartheid activists, Steve Biko, in police custody, led to an inquest before the magistrate. In the inquest, Kentridge’s cross-examination exposed to an international audience the falsity of the story of the State that Biko had died due to a hunger strike and pointed towards the true cause of death, a violent brain injury.

The cross-examination showed the failure to comply with even the laws of the Apartheid state. Packham reproduces extracts from Kentridge’s cross-examination of Colonel Peter Goosen, who is the head of internal security.