Last week highlighted the powerful value of small justice. Adriaan Vlok, it was revealed, had apologised to the Reverend Frank Chikane by symbolically washing his feet.
And in a less high-profile case, the acclaimed struggle lawyer Shun Chetty was posthumously reinstated as an attorney. He had been struck off the roll in 1980.
As we assess the efficacy of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there is always the temptation to calculate it by the money that victims of apartheid and their families have or have not received.
Yet, the two examples of the past week show that atonement or reparation can take forms that are not only pecuniary.
In the Seventies, Shun was a somewhat enigmatic member of our family; the lawyer we sometimes saw in newspapers who was married to my cousin Fazila Varachia. He was ”in politics” as the family said and I understood little when he and Fazila abruptly left the country in 1979, other than that we had lost a pair of fairly cool cousins. Then they became our family ”in the UN [United Nations]”.
In 1998, in the first blushes of freedom, they returned. Shun to head the UN agency, the International Organisation for Migration; Fazila to a post at UNAids.
They returned to a lot else. Freedom. Their families and friends. And to the bush they both lived for. For Shun coming back was also part of a mission to clear his name.
In 1980, in absentia, he was struck from the attorneys’ roll on trumped up charges. These included the misuse of his trust fund, charges now widely recognised as smears against him in retort against his legal activism.
Shun’s colleague and friend John Brand of Bowman Gilfillan agreed almost as soon as they returned to act on pro bono basis to have him reinstated.
”As a lawyer, I was angered and embarrassed by the way in which the Law Society treated Chetty both before and after his flight from the country. The impression it sought to create by its public utterances and in the legal action it took again him was that he was a dishonest, unprofessional tout who misappropriated clients’ funds,” said Brand in his affidavit.
”… It is important to refute these allegations as I know them to be patently false.”
Ahead of his application, Shun met with the Law Society in 2000 to gauge its mood. It was favourable and life seemed on track. Justice was in sight.
An attorney, noted in the minutes of the meetings as M Husain, remarked that Shun had worked in ”… trying times, they were very difficult times … I am sure a lot of my colleagues, if not all, share the view that had it not been for people like yourself, the administration of justice would have been in a worse [position] … I would welcome back into the folds of the profession a person of your calibre …”.
Tragically, Shun died soon after this meeting in a botched heart operation. He was cremated and his ashes scattered over the Kruger park so that his spirit could roam wild. Fazila moved to Australia, but has returned to South African several times to ensure his last wish.
Last week, it was granted when the high court reinstated him as an attorney. Between 1974 and 1979, activist lawyers were few and far between. Chetty acted for members of the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress and the black consciousness movement, taking briefs from the parents of missing detainees, among many others.
”It was difficult and dangerous to get into the police stations in the townships and there were occasions when Chetty literally risked his life to get to the accused in order to interview them,” said Ilona Tip in an affidavit to support Shun’s reinstatement. His office, which she ran, was filled from well before 8am with people desperate to find their children or family.
”I think it is important to understand that our priority was to employ our resources to do whatever we could to assist people and our focus was not on the minutiae of accounting,” said Tip.
Between 1975 and 1977, Shun was instructing attorney in the trial in which black consciousness leaders, including Saths Cooper and Terror Lekota, were tried on terrorism charges; he was also instructing attorney at the inquest into the death of Steve Biko.
Those were dark years.
Shun’s passport was seized. Fazila told the court of a series of dirty tricks: obscene and threatening phone calls; his car was smashed; he was not told of court dates though the police knew him to be the instructing attorney. The couple skipped the country; Shun was struck from the attorneys’ roll in absentia.
Horst Kleinschmidt also said in an affidavit to support the reinstatement application that: ”I came to know Chetty as an attorney who had the courage to act both as a lawyer and a social support base at a time when virtually the entire legal profession and other institutions chose to avoid this.”
”Chetty was never adequately recognised or commended for the important role that he performed during this exceptionally difficult period.”
Perhaps, in time, his family will give consideration to the ways in which Shun’s brave and pioneering work can be recognised. Until then, I can imagine that he raised a toast among the lions to a sweet, if small, justice.
Ferial Haffajee is the editor of the Mail & Guardian