Justice Dikgang Moseneke adds a gripping chapter to the history of the struggle in his fascinating and must-read book, writes Thami ka Plaatjie.
Justice Dikgang Moseneke’s biography, My Own Liberator, is a welcome instalment in the increasing body of African literature and biographies.
When it made its first budding shoots through the snippets in the weekend newspapers, including The Sunday Independent, we could not help but relish this new read which promised to shed light on the struggle through the eyes of former Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke.
The title is somewhat self-assuring and emphatic in its claims that the author is his own liberator.
Moseneke’s stance is a deliberate departure from, for example, Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History. Moseneke does not want to apportion blame to anyone let alone history, but seek to assign his liberation to his own designs and devices.
He seems to negate the dictum of his own political mentor and muse Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe who argued that we are all tools of history and history will always find new tools to accomplish its mission.
Moseneke is grossly mistaken to assume that he can liberate himself outside the many historic motions that have defined and shaped the tenor and contours of his very existence.
The author was part of a mass democratic struggle and was impacted upon, shaped and chiselled in that furnace of the broad crucibles of struggle and to minimise the impact and profound role of these socio-political imperatives in the making of his own liberation is reductionist in the main but also amount to missing a pivotal handle.
We are all products of our people’s vital struggles and owe our ultimate liberation to those collective fights, collective imprisonment, collective suffering and collective triumph. We joined the ranks of the struggle to liberate others and ourselves in the process and this, Moseneke seems to miss.
Like their Xhosa Mfengu counterparts, the Mosenekes, at a very early age, deciphered the meaning of education and became not just landed gentry but an enlightened African detribalised family that took its place in the middle class of the time through lifting themselves up by their boot straps.
Moseneke’s paternal grandparents were both qualified teachers who had defied the odds to instil a family legacy of enlightenment. His grandfather was a student of Sefako Makgatho of the ANC and his father later achieved a great feat when he became a school principal.
The face that the author has triumphed against all odds is salutary, and the influence of Christianity in his upbringing, parental solicitude, political and social influence have all been instrumental in the making of a young man who ended up ascending the highest echelons of the South African judiciary, and leaving an indelible imprint in the country’s jurisprudence.
Dikgang, as his name denotes, became the news maker who rose from being a student activist to a prisoner and a deputy chief justice. Named after his grandfather born in 1877, Moseneke lived in his pioneering shadow, and wrestled with imponderable questions.
“I remain curious about why he made the choices he did. What was the source of his courage to forge ahead with his studies?” Moseneke asked. This question seems to have troubled the young Moseneke, “I often wonder what choices my grandfather made in the face of rising African resistance to missionary hegemony. What did he think about colonial land dispossession?” he asked. Moseneke’s life became a quest to answer questions and weighing best possible options, and to offer a rejoinder that is lasting and beyond doubt. The life of a judge also called to mind such weighing of options in the pursuit of justice. The symbolic blind arbiter of justice conceals her face to be indifferent to the status, station, race and gender of those who appear before her, save to be guided by the inner truth and to choose its beaconing and laud wailing that yearns to be settled and atoned, and to decide without fear, favour or prejudice.
Dikgang, at an early age, became a welcome guest at Robben Island, and has carried with him the pain of loss of land suffered by his family when they were evicted from Lady Selbourne, and the hurt of seeing the bodies of the Sharpeville Massacre victims, triggered a rejection against racism.
All these travesties and visitations of racisms fashioned a formidable response from the young man who sought a moral, political and an intellectual rejoinder to these strange and inexplicable and inhuman acts.
The Pan Africanist Congress gospel, as told by Sobukwe, found lasting resonance with this young man who then embraced it with passion.
The house that Samuel had bought with his savings at No 259 Fortune Street in Lady Selbourne went up in smouldering of dust, and the Mosenekes, like many others, were sent packing to Atteridgeville where they were compelled to fashion a new home and Spartan existence. Kilnerton High School in Pretoria boasted some of the great teachers, such as Moseneke’s father, Stanley Mogoba.
Kilnerton was followed by a stint at Hofmeyr High School in Atteridgeville. The ideas and preachings of Sobukwe had swept most African townships and caught them by storm.
The positive action plan and the cry of freedom in our life time with 1963 ordained as the year of the liberation of South Africa, brought Moseneke into the vortex of political activism.
Thus, his induction into the Pan Africanist underground politics under the aegis of the student movement, Asusa, with Ike Mafole led to his eventual arrest.
The hunger strike on Robben Island for demanding recreational sports is told with great and fascinating detail. However, another side of Moseneke that he concealed stuck out like a virulent pimple.
He is not musical at all and his attempts at being artistic are at best a downright failure.
His artistic limitation is accounted for by the fact that it was his younger brother Mighty who was artistic in the family.
The lack of an account or reference to the many vital and memorable songs that were composed on Robben Island makes Moseneke’s narrative bereft and renders it somewhat insipid.
The serious mindset of the young Moseneke belies the nascent base that germinated a predilection for legal studies.
His childhood ambitions of being a medical doctor were pruned by the harsh realities of life and oppression.
The story of the many soccer clubs on Robben Island and its luminary players such as President Jacob Zuma is told with fascinating hilarity.
The near love affair with the Cape Town girl is told with childhood nostalgia.
The arranged first love is depicted with the matured eyes of a 24-year-old lad in his prime, fresh from the life of prison.
Soon began the toil of banishment and the attendant hardships of that limited freedom and the adventures of finishing university studies that had given him renewed purpose.
The meteoric rise in the legal profession belie a stern and determined young Moseneke, to whom hurdles and the glass ceiling did not exist. Soon Moseneke found himself establishing a law firm with legal alter-egos.
The request to assist in the matter involving the Pretoria Football Club that was eventually bought by Zola Mahobe is told with humour and candidness.
The many trips and the attendant escapades are brought to the reader without any judgement but with the frank eye of a keen observer of social relations.
The journey of establishing the Black Lawyers Association and the guiding hand of legal veteran Godfrey Pitje heralded a new epoch of jurisprudence activism in which Moseneke was instrumental.
The separation from the PAC is told with a heavy heart as the emergent state in that movement Moseneke comes to rebuff.
When he was accosted in his house and made to hand over the cheque that he got in Nigeria, which was later cashed in Lesotho without any accounting for its expenditure, was the final straw.
This made him cut ties with the political home that had raised him.
I still recall with vividness when his letter of resignation was read at a PAC conference in Bloemfontein where a number of people wept at the loss of a leader who was destined to take the mantle of Sobukwe forward.
The stay at Codesa and the jostling for the ultimate national constitution was an enterprise that he gave his all to.
The brief stint in business was viewed as a necessary digression to hone skills in another direction.
Moseneke’s life was eventful and illustrious in its own right.
Though he did not ascend to the highest office of chief justice, he was in all manner of reason more than that office.
He may not have donned its chair and attired its robe but the myriad lessons learnt, struggles overcome, lives touched and lives saved and glass ceilings broken make him eligible for our singular and enduring admiration.
He is well suited in all manner of ways to earn a place in the annals of our political and jurisprudencial struggle for justice in South Africa.
His many historic judgments will be endearing for those to whom the quest for freedom is still evasive.
Through this book he has allowed us a sneak preview of his still incomplete life and this book is recommended for its wit, depth and lucidity.
* Ka Plaatjie is adviser to Human Settlements Minister Lindiwe Sisulu and head of ANC research.
Editor’s note: The Ahmed Kathrada Foundation in collaboration with Wits University Press and Pan Macmillan is hosting a book event on Saturday (January 28) at which Moseneke will share a stage with another former Constitutional Court justice, Judge Albie Sachs, at the Apartheid Museum in Joburg.
The two justices will, in conversation with freelance journalist Niren Tolsi, discuss the writing of South Africa’s constitution, their personal experiences around constitution making and upholding its principles, as well as the challenges that the country faces to advance equality, human dignity and freedom.