Johannesburg - Dikgang Moseneke is in fine spirits. The former deputy chief justice has every right to be. Nominally retired from South Africa’s highest court, he’s just written a beautiful memoir that is simultaneously poignant and enthralling.
My Own Liberator charts a life from Pretoria’s version of Sophiatown, Lady Selborne, to Atteridgeville and Robben Island as South Africa’s youngest political prisoner, lawyer, silk and finally being acclaimed as one of our most revered jurists.
Back to the TV room of the family home in the elite Pretoria suburb of Waterkloof: dapper, even in a pair of jeans and open-necked shirt rather than the green robes of the Constitutional Court in which we are most accustomed to seeing him, Moseneke has the air of a man on a mission, rather than a pensioner pottering about.
He’s turned down more speaking engagements than he cares to remember, but even so he has the Unisa Founders’ Day address in a fortnight, where in typical style he’ll grapple with the issue of university fees, as seen under Section 29 of the constitution, which guarantees access to education.
Afterwards, he is presenting the next Helen Suzman memorial lecture, has a stint at the London School of Economics in January as an occasional lecturer and then he jets off in April to New York University, where he will teach as a visiting professor for a semester.
He’s also an honorary professor at the Wits Medical School, where he lectures on bioethics, and wants to head to the University of Cape Town to join Judge Dennis Davis in teaching at the summer school.
He’d also like to teach at Fort Hare and Turfloop. “I’d like to do some inspirational speaking and contextualise the law and its importance for the students there.”
The one thing he doesn’t want to do is get on the public speaking circuit, even though it is lucrative. By the time he returns from New York, his next book should be out. This second volume of his memoirs will focus on his time as a Constitutional Court judge and ultimately deputy chief justice.
“I have stories to tell. I would like to tell the fascinating stories about coming to court and learning from the best like (inaugural chief justice) Ismail Mahomed, Arthur Chaskalson, Johann Kriegler and Albie Sachs.”
In typical Moseneke fashion, he won’t shy away from the controversies either, such as being overlooked for the position of chief justice, not once but three times by President Jacob Zuma, and of the profound friendship that developed between his last boss, Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng, and himself.
Being overlooked was a boon for Moseneke, he says. “It increased my intensity to be a good judge, to focus on the job, get it done quite well and teach and train new judges.”
The work he did in that capacity and at law schools across the world, including the papers he delivered at conferences at home and abroad, will form the basis of a third, more scholarly volume.
The second volume of his memoirs underscores his desire to inculcate a sense of calling and of the enormity of the responsibility of accepting a position on the bench for new judges - something that he shied away from until he was in his mid-fifties, and finally felt mature and settled enough for the job.
Sir James Rose Innes, the country's chief justice from 1914 to 1927, is the only other senior judge to have written a book that explains exactly what it's like to sit on the bench in judgment.
Moseneke’s memoir on the bench will be a much-needed and timely addition.
His first volume though, My Own Liberator, has set a very high benchmark. Written over four years, it is dedicated to his wife and family.
“I might look very social and relaxed, but this place was a den of activity, of writing, of being a recluse,” he remembers.
“The challenge was to be anecdotal,” he says, “to tell the story, not to be too clever. We judges are the voice from the mountain, we hold the tablets so we tend to bellow, so this was about searching for humility, the little boy growing up in Atteridgeville seeing people come back from the war; all those memories, a grandfather who rises from nothing to become head chef, the forced removals, everything.”
It was a bid, he says, to also explain his concept of African humanism, as espoused by Robert Sobukwe, the founder of the Pan Africanist Congress, and because of this belief, his sentence of 10 years on Robben Island at the age of 15 - the youngest political prisoner. This in turn fed into the concept of being, as the book says, your own liberator.
“It’s like a little ditty that doesn’t go out of your head. You want to sing it every second. I can’t outsource my duty to sit up and read volumes and volumes. I am the judge, I must produce quality outcomes.
“You, my boy, you have to clean your own shoes, you have to wake up like your grandfather at 2am and stoke the boiler. That responsibility stays with me. If you want things to happen, if you want freedom, if you want dignity, if you want a good government you can’t sleep on the job.
“You are your own liberator. It taught me about the two tramlines of personal agency and collective agency, and we tend in society to take the shorter route of relying on collective agency: the government must do, the bosses must do, and we rarely (point the way to) our children, as my forebears happily did - they must skill themselves.
“I needed to write that in my story and let it come through and remind our young people, yes, there are things we can demand but there are other things that we must do; we must pick up our litter, we must clean where we live. That’s how we are going to get ourselves liberated in the broader sense of the word.
“The notion that political liberation is the only one is a false one.”
Saturday Star