South Africa’s best export, ever, was its Constitution – a unique, globally-respected document unlike any other, created after the biggest public participation programme the world had ever seen, “drafted by everyone in history who has ever held a placard for human rights” – but it means absolutely nothing if it’s not used.
Paying tribute to a significant time in South African history, the week celebrating Freedom Day, and the country’s first democratic elections, human rights lawyer Lwando Xaso, guest speaker recently at St Anne’s Diocesan College in Hilton during their annual Social Awareness Week themed “The Constitution and Human Rights”, was a particularly appropriate choice.
She told the young ladies in blue that their rights were “now enshrined in that document because of the drama, the tragedies … that precede all of us”, recounting, vividly, the story of the old South Africa’s painful, frequently violent, often tragic, metamorphosis into a new democracy, featuring role-players like Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Robert Sobukwe, with the pivotal Constitution Hill in both the background and the foreground.
Xaso, who obtained her LLB from the University of Johannesburg in 2005, and her masters in law (LL.M.) in constitutional governance and administrative justice at the University of Cape Town, has worked as a researcher for the Democratic Governance and Rights Unit, and clerked for Justice Edwin Cameron of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. She also contributed to the book One Law One Nation by Lauren Segal and Sharon Cort in celebration of the 15th anniversary of the Constitution of SA.
The road to our Constitution, she told her young audience, “was littered with dead bodies”, a rocky odyssey to transformation for South Africans embarking on the journey from one side of the bridge to the other.
“Our journey has been towards justice, freedom, accountability and equality, and although it sometimes feels as though we’re standing still, and regressing, we have covered some ground.”
Progress, added Xaso – who counts her time clerking for Cameron as a highlight of her career – included the abolition of the death penalty and corporal punishment at schools; the recognition of human rights for all, the battle against xenophobia, “and efforts to make us a less violent society”.
In fluid, verbal brushstrokes, this extraordinarily articulate lawyer described to the St Anne’s pupils Constitution Hill as a place that changed her life, “offered me wisdom, which when I first visited it at 13 or 14, left a deep impression”.
Built on a residential ridge, the highest point in Johannesburg at the time, a military fort was created in anticipation of an invasion by the British. A prisoner-of-war camp was also built, “and ironically, after the British victory, the Afrikaners were imprisoned in their own camp.”
The old fort was to be expanded into a prison complex, a place of degradation, violence and humiliation, “a microcosm of apartheid”, home, at times, to many of the country’s iconic freedom fighting stalwarts.
The Constitutional Court, she added, symbolises both the injustices and the triumphs of the past.
The old fort and POW camp,“this abandoned prison, this stain on history, has been transformed into the pinnacle of justice, the guardian of our Constitution… something which which had been fought for before I was born.”
With creativity, it’s been turned into something bigger.
“So whatever pain you hold, use it to make it your own creative offering as well: we come from a country that turned a prison into a human rights precinct. That is transformation.
“It’s not about avoiding the pain, when it’s so heavy you can barely move forward. It’s about using the pain to build something constructive that can shape the future,” she told the girls.
“When they chose the old prison at Constitution Hill as the apex of the ConCourt, they demolished the original awaiting-trial block but reclaimed and cleaned some of the old red bricks, which they incorporated into the new court building.
“You can’t build a new country without rebuilding the past.”
No set of laws, observed Xaso, “can make you all love each other; no set of laws make you compassionate; no set of laws can make you trust each other, and no set of laws will stop corruption”.
“But as South Africa makes its transformative journey across this bridge, from our violent past to one of promise in the future, remember that it’s not just transforming St Anne’s or the country. It’s about transforming yourselves. It’s the decision you make to live up to the values of our constitution, and how we will move towards being a compassionate, beloved country.
Xaso said whatever struggles she had encountered in her life “are faced under better conditions than those under which my grandparents and parents struggled”.
“In its young adulthood, our actions today will determine the nature of our constitutional democracy for generations to come.”
Pictured below from left to right
Image 2: Lwando Xasa
Image 3: Imana Dimba, Sisanda Mbekwa, Lwando Xaso
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