Challenged injustice: Jay Surju
OBITUARY
JAY SURJU (1962 -2019)
Workers’ rights lawyer Jay Surju, who was born on August 25 1962, died on January 15.
He represented major trade unions in landmark cases against multinational corporations, provided free counsel in student struggles at universities and at schools, and challenged injustice from the 1980s until his death.
He was widely consulted on legal matters in local and international media and was in private practice at the time of his death.
Surju was a complex and prickly human being with a rough demeanour, but his friends knew him as a generous and gentle soul, a trustworthy friend and comrade. At his memorial service in Durban, half the speakers described how, when they would visit him, they were not sure whether he would tell them to fuck off and get out of his office, or make them a cup of tea. He was fierce and his friends were not spared his sharp tongue.
One of six children from a working-class family, Surju pursued his dream of becoming a lawyer, studying first at the University of Durban-Westville and then at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, (now the University of KwaZulu-Natal) where he completed his LLB.
As a student activist on the eve of the first state of emergency in 1985, Surju was up all night printing and distributing pamphlets at the University of Durban-Westville to arrange a mass meeting in protest. When 150 students turned up the next day for the meeting, they were rounded up by South African Defence Force soldiers and detained at Westville Prison.
He subsequently became involved in various anti-apartheid movements, including the Defiance Campaign in 1989, and was a founder member of the National Association of Democratic Lawyers.
Surju opened a small practice in Durban and devoted himself to cases involving trade unions, working-class people, the poor and the marginalised.
Workers who embarked on a so-called wild-cat strike, but who were in fact launching a new union, were dismissed from their jobs and began a struggle for compensation and reinstatement that lasted for years. Surju travelled between Durban, Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage to represent them.
Going up against the big law firms employed by Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen, he described the courtroom drama in short energetic bursts. “They had a team of lawyers from the big white firms who laughed when they saw a charou on the opposite side, but I chowed them, bru, I chowed them, and they weren’t laughing after that,” he recounted to a friend at the time.
Surju also provided counsel to pupils at the Mashiyamahle Secondary School in Ndwedwe, university students, domestic workers and refugees.
In 2011, when he successfully represented subsistence fishermen in Durban, who were being denied access to piers run by Transnet in and around Durban harbour, he had the opportunity to combine his great passions in life: fighting injustice, fishing and the law.
Possessing an extraordinary power of persuasion, honesty, perseverance, commitment and love of the truth, he asserted this as a student activist, a member of the legal profession, a committed socialist, dear friend and loving father to Mishkah.
He never lost the common touch and his door was always open to workers, the poor and the damned of the earth, who would otherwise have been denied access to legal representation. He complained about, obsessed over and fixated on the little things, but he would never deny anyone who needed it the assistance of his razor-sharp legal mind.
Surju was an unsung hero to thousands because of his uncompromising commitment to fighting injustice, especially when it was waged against the poor and the downtrodden.
The struggle has finally ended for Surju. Hasta la victoria siempre! — Friends and family of Jay Surju