Weekend happenings

Finally, I've done exciting things outside of work that are worth writing about!

Yesterday, Sandeep and I left work at about 3:30pm. Sandeep had met a South African LLM at UCLA who clerked for the now-Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court, Mogoeng Mogoeng. The Con Court was having an 'alumni' event for all past clerks in honor of the Chief Justice, and Nomonde invited Sandeep, who RSVPed for both of us. So we headed over to the Court for the 4pm event. We got there a little bit early, and the head of the alumni group greeted us warmly, assuming we were past law clerks on the Court. We chatted a bit with current law clerks and pretty immediately had to admit that no, we were just guests of someone who hadn't arrived yet. That seemed okay though. We talked to a South African clerk for a while, but she inevitably called over the American clerk and left us with him. Sigh. Almost impossible to have conversations with South Africans if there are Americans around, I swear.

We talked to the American guy for a while. He had graduated from a Louisiana law school and seemed intent on convincing us that a) the Louisiana bar is the most difficult bar exam in the country, and b) the bar exam isn't all that difficult, don't worry about it. I wasn't a huge fan of his, but he did suggest that Fulbright funding might be a way to get money to work in South Africa post-law school. I didn't know that Fulbright funded legal work, but now it's something I'm going to look into. The more you know!

We did chat to a guy named Dave, a white South African clerk who was very nice, but then he wandered off and we were sort of left on our own. We panicked a little bit about what to do, but the room had filled up a lot by then, and we spotted to people on their own across the room and decided to go introduce ourselves. Turns out neither of them were clerks either -- a South African guy and an American law student interning at another law NGO in Johannesburg. And of course the American goes to Duke Law (although he went to UNC for undergrad!), so he and Sandeep were off in their Duke bubble almost immediately. I don't know what it is about Duke, but I cannot escape it this summer.

Sandeep's friend, Nomonde, showed up shortly before the proceedings began. She is absolutely lovely, though I didn't get to talk with her very much.

The Chief Justice spoke for a while -- it was very informal, everyone was just standing around and he wasn't at a podium or anything. We were in the staff room. I honestly almost didn't pay attention to Mogoeng, because the first thing he did was acknowledge his 'colleague, Judge Cameron,' and I realized that the very tall gentleman in the room who I had vaguely recognized when he walked in was Judge Edwin Cameron, who is one of my personal idols. He is on the Constitutional Court, but he was also the first senior South African official to publicly disclose that he was infected with HIV. He was the first director of the AIDS Law Project (now SECTION27, one of my favorite South African legal NGOs), and I've read a great deal of his legal scholarship on HIV, including most recently lots of his articles against the criminalization of HIV. So I was in awe by his mere presence, and Justice Mogoeng's comments on the Judicial something-or-other Act didn't really capture me.

On the other hand, while Mogoeng was clearly talking about something controversial happening in South African judiciary, it was interesting to hear the head of the South African judiciary (that would be Mogoeng) openly acknowledge that the public is frustrated by perceived inefficiencies and in competencies of South African judges, and that the judiciary needs to do better. Mogoeng is incredibly conservative and has some opinions that are, quite frankly, disgusting (for example, he thinks the penalties should be lessened in child rape trials, because they tend to be less violent that rapes of adults -- UGH), so I didn't put much stock into the substance of what he was saying. But it was an interesting perspective on the integrity of the judiciary nonetheless.

After Mogoeng finished speaking, Nomonde took Sandeep and me over to meet him. He was very friendly, and he agreed to take pictures with us. I couldn't believe it -- can you imagine asking a US Supreme Court justice for a quick photo op? He seemed slightly confused about how he should pose, but he let us take the photos anyway. Nomonde is working now for Sonke, which is a gender justice NGO, and he seemed pleased that she was doing that work. We chatted alone with him a bit about where in the US we study law, and I mentioned that I was interested in working somehow in South Africa and threw in that maybe I would apply to clerk for the Con Court (why not? couldn't hurt to mention it). I could see him rolling his eyes internally, but he still said I should go ahead because, "You never know who might be appointed." Words of encouragement indeed!

I was wringing my hands over whether I should go over and introduce myself to Judge Cameron, but he was always talking to someone else. At one point, he headed over to the food table, and Sandeep and I happened to be standing right next to it. He stopped and shook our hands, and we introduced ourselves. He said, 'I'm Edwin.' Without thinking about it, I blurted out, 'I know!' Foot, meet mouth. He then continued on his way to get food. I never did get up the courage to have a proper conversation with him. I was so star-struck.

When we left, we offered to give a ride to the American law student from Duke. He had mentioned where he lives, and it's close to us, so we thought it would be nice. His name is Graham. I only mention this because he seems to have become our new friend, as we spent most of today with him as well.

This morning (Saturday), Sandeep and I went to pick up Graham, and then we headed out to the Apartheid Museum. This meant that I got to drive on the highways for the first time (on purpose)! It wasn't all that exciting, really -- I think I've gotten the hang of driving, at least during the daytime. I still do stupid things when it's dark and I can't quite see where I'm going. But we got to the museum without incident. It is, strangely enough, right next to an amusement park/casino. Something about that seems wrong...

Anyway, we got our tickets and our audio guides and headed in. I had heard amazing things about this museum, and it did not disappoint. It's probably the best museum I've ever been to -- ever. The very first thing that happens is you see this:

You realize you've been given a ticket that classifies you as either "white" or "non-white," and you have to scan your ticket to go through only one side. You can't get in the other side. You only stay segregated that way for a few minutes, but it's a really stark way to start the museum experience.

The museum is incredibly thorough, and it has amazing footage from the apartheid era that packs a punch unlike anything else. Obviously I know a good deal about the mechanics of apartheid -- I've studied it, I've done a number of apartheid-related tours in Cape Town, I've talked to people about it, I've read books, I've written papers and a thesis on it, etc. And it's horrible even in the abstract. But as you walk through the museum, you not only see signs and posters from the apartheid era, but especially beginning in the 1970s, you see live video footage of what was actually happening. Not just interviews with people who were there (and video footage of apartheid government officials selling their policies as 'good neighborliness' which, if you don't think too hard, could have actually sounded convincing), but media coverage of the Soweto uprisings and people getting beaten by police, and people lying in pools of their own blood, and dead bodies in the streets, and hundreds of thousands of black bodies protesting and singing and marching and running from the apartheid police.

There were these incredible interviews with people whose names I know, whose life stories I know, but who I've never seen as young people. The first televised interview Nelson Mandela ever gave, when he was already in hiding, where he first admitted that the ANC would have to use force and abandon peaceful methods of resistance. Steve Biko earnestly explaining Black Consciousness, followed by footage of the Minister of Justice claiming Biko died from a hunger strike and then backpedaling and asserting he had claimed no such thing and 'didn't know Mr Biko's cause of death' (the apartheid police viciously beat him in the back of a police truck, then drove him hundreds of miles and left him in a jail cell with no medical attention), followed by footage of Biko's funeral.

There was more. I could go on and on -- it was just a stunning museum. My favorite part was in the section on transition to democracy; they had huge screens set up with footage of the violence taking place in the townships and being perpetrated by the right-wing Afrikaner movement, and in the next room, they had smaller screens set up showing interviews with the chief negotiators of CODESA who produced the new constitution. As you're listening to the negotiators speak about what happened between the two sides (the apartheid government and the ANC, led by Mandela), you see through glass panes the footage of the ongoing violence and chaos that was still occurring at street level. That to me is one of the greatest miracles of the South African transition -- that despite the fact that the vast majority of South Africa was preparing for civil was, the fact that some of them even wanted civil war, that more South Africans were killed between 1990 and 1994 than during the previous decades of apartheid, these two opposing forces sat down and talked to each other. They didn't trust each other, and they didn't like each other, but they had all had enough of the violence, and they knew the writing was on the wall -- so they made it happen. And their diplomacy, and the fact that F.W. de Klerk was willing to recognize defeat, and the fact that Nelson Mandela emerged from 27 years in prison and didn't want to seek vengeance, saved South Africa.

I left the museum with my head full of all the reasons I love this completely fucked-up country. I'm sorry, I sat here for a few minutes trying to think of a better adjective for it, and I just couldn't. 18 years after the official end of apartheid, South Africa is still struggling with so many things -- with its identity in Africa, with crime and corruption, with women's rights and extreme poverty and inequality and racism and a million other nasty things. And none of it is easy, because of the twisted past that everyone is so aware of. But there is this pervasive sense among most South Africans who I've met that they are all in it together. That apartheid almost broke them apart, but it didn't, and none of these other things will either. There is a huge sense of pride evident everywhere in South Africa of what was achieved, not just in the 1990s, but by the African resistance in the 1970s and 1980s. There is this unconquerable South African spirit that infuses every interaction here; sometimes it makes things uncomfortable, and sometimes it makes things downright unpleasant, but it's always buzzing just beneath the surface, and I've never experienced anything like it anywhere else. It's that, I think, that got me so hooked on this country in the first place, and that keeps bringing me back.

Anyway, enough ruminating. Here are some photos from the museum, including some nice skylines of Joburg.

And then walk away free.