M&G Reporter
If Ismail Mahomed does get the post of chief justice, there will be a sweet irony about it when he moves into the office in Bloemfontein. When he appeared before the Appellate Division in his days as South Africa’s first black silk he was forced to flee across the border before dusk in accordance with the ban on the presence of Indians overnight in the Free State.
Mahomed’s life and career have been marked by a personal struggle against racism which helped make of him probably the finest civil rights lawyer in the country. His grandparents fled the poverty of India to settle in the Transvaal as traders early this century. Mahomed himself was born in Pretoria in 1931, the oldest of six children in a devout Muslim family.
Taking his law degree at the University of the Witwatersrand, he joined the bar in 1957 and found himself facing ludicrous handicaps in the pursuit of his professional duties. He was unable, during his earlier years, to rent chambers in the building which housed the Johannesburg Bar, because it fell into a white area under the Group Areas Act.
For 12 years he was forced to borrow desk-space from colleagues who were out in court, resorting to the library when there was no room available — making it impossible at times to hold consultations with clients. Even after obtaining a Group Areas “permit” in 1969 he was barred for another five years from using the common room, by which time he had already become South Africa’s first black SC.
But he turned such handicaps to professional advantage. A notorious workaholic, he became an authority on the Group Areas Act and then won recognition as one of the leading experts on administrative and constitutional law.
He was widely recognised as one of the most gifted orators at the South African bar, on occasion being brought in to capital cases to argue in mitigation in the belief that his silver tongue was the only chance of cheating the hangman.
Appointed to the South African bench in 1991, he wrote Namibia’s progressive Constitution and is that country’s chief justice. He underwent major heart surgery shortly before the announcement of Arthur Chaskalson’s appointment to the presidency of South Africa’s Constitutional Court — a post for which Mahomed was strongly tipped. He is currently deputy president of that court.