Counting Our Blessings
Interview to Adv Dumisa Ntsebeza during AfroCuration Event held in October 2019 at Constitution Hill, Johannesburg.
Interviewer: What does the Constitution mean to you?
Adv Ntsebeza: Well, I suppose the Constitution is important for its Chapter II. Chapter II of the Constitution is where we have all the rights and freedoms that are guaranteed by the Constitution. For the first time in the history of South Africa, everybody — including in some instances everyone not just every citizen, everyone who happens to be in South Africa — becomes entitled as a matter of fact and law to all the rights and freedoms that are guaranteed in Chapter II of the Constitution.
Interviewer: Please complete the sentence “We, the People can…”
AN: Well, We, the People can change our society from what it was pre-constitution days, what it was under colonialism, what it was under apartheid. We can change that guided by the Constitution. It’s not even a long journey because we are being reoriented to a new way of looking at things from how we have been looking at things in the past. “We, the People”, I didn’t say we the black people, we the white people; I didn’t say we the straight people or we the lesbian and gay people. It simply says “We, the People.”
Interviewer: Thank you for an informative talk. It was lovely to be a part of it, and my first question is based on the fact that you shared so many stories with us during the talk. I want to ask you what is the significance of young, black kids being at Constitution Hill writing and immortalising South African history?
AN: I mean, the ironic thing is that young people who have no idea what it was like in this country. I know from my daughter — I have a 20-year-old daughter — it is difficult for her to imagine that there was a time in this country when I couldn’t walk on this pavement because it was not acceptable, the law said I couldn’t. My kids do not understand that there was the segregation of a majority, where getting into a restaurant, café, movie or a shop you had to use separate entrances — it segregated us completely in terms of where we would be born, what institutions we would attend to learn if we were to learn at all. It even interfered with where we would die and be buried.
The thing is that to undo all that means we must begin to educate society and we have to be patient. We’ve got to be patient but we’ll get there.
Adv. Ntsebeza was born in the Eastern Cape, and like many young South Africans in the ’70s he was involved in the struggle. He was arrested in the mid ’70s and served time in prison, during which he completed his law degree. He represented a number of political prisoners throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. From 1993, he taught the Law of Evidence and Criminal Law, and from 1995, Human Rights Law at the Walter Sisulu University in Mthatha. He gave up teaching when he was appointed one of the Commissioners in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission from December 1995 to January 1999.
He is a founder of the South African National Association of Democratic Lawyers and served as its President. He also served as president of South Africa’s Black Lawyers’ Association.
In 2000, Adv. Ntsebeza became an advocate in Cape Town, where he became the first African to be appointed a senior advocate in the history of the Cape bar in 2006. He has practised in the Johannesburg bar since 2005. In 2012 Adv. Ntsebeza represented 36 families of striking miners who were killed by the police at Marikana in August 2012 before the Marikana Commission of Inquiry. In January 2017, Adv Dumisa Ntsebeza was appointed Chancellor of the University of Fort Hare. He was appointed to the Barloworld board in May 1999 from which he is retiring this year after 20 years of service.
This article was originally published on March 2020 in Folios n.2 “We, The People”, the Moleskine Foundation cultural publication.
