South Africa

TRIBUTE

George Bizos: A brilliant advocate who helped South Africa on its odyssey to freedom

George Bizos: A brilliant advocate who helped South Africa on its odyssey to freedom
Advocate George Bizos receives a Luminary Award from the Free Market Foundation on February 19, 2014 in Johannesburg, South Africa. (Photo by Gallo Images / The Times / Daniel Born)

George Bizos began his career defending victims in rural areas, in small cases not much publicised. ‘The law was all we had in SA, the very last post of hope under apartheid,’ he said.

George Bizos, who died on Wednesday at the age of 92, never recovered from the grief of losing his close friends, former chief justice Arthur Chaskalson who died in 2012, Nelson Mandela who died in 2013, and Nadine Gordimer who died in 2014. 

In an interview, Bizos said, “I don’t want it out there but I am wondering for whom the bell tolls now.” He then began reliving his past, focusing on his friendship with Mandela, a key theme in a life story marked by achievements as a civil rights lawyer and human rights defender, by his dual citizenship as a Greek South African, by his experience as a refugee in the Union of South Africa at 13, and his love of classical Greek literature and philosophy.

Bizos began his career defending victims in rural areas, in small cases not much publicised. “The law was all we had in SA, the very last post of hope under apartheid,” he said. Later, his reputation as a cross-examiner in the dock was renowned; he perfected what he called “the stage whisper” and he was able to rip terror into the hearts of apartheid’s state-sanctioned torturers and murderers.

Refused citizenship by the South African government, Bizos waited 32 years for a passport; he said the distance from home set up an “almost pathological” yearning. He desperately wanted to take his wife, Arethe, and their sons, Damon, Kimon and Alexis, to the ancestral home.

At Bizos’s 75th birthday party, Chaskalson said, “With George in the room there could never be a lull in conversation”. For Bizos was a great talker and storyteller; a pateras, husband, father of three sons, a grandfather, warm friend and host. A brilliant advocate, he was happiest in his home, rising early to tend to his garden, even mentioning his vocation as “keen vegetable gardener” on his CV, alongside his numerous awards and acknowledgements.

Bizos was increasingly disappointed by those who “make up the facts to support conspiracy theories, question the motives of prosecutors and judges when things don’t go their way, and people who took part in the Struggle who think they should go unpunished – one person, Allan Boesak, who had 16 judges in three courts, claimed he did not have a fair trial”.

“Patriotism is the last refuge,” he said, “the issue is not what you have contributed to the Struggle, but [whether you have] committed an offence.” 

Representing the Legal Resources Centre where he worked as Senior Counsel, at the Farlam Commission of Inquiry into the police shooting of miners in Marikana, he pointed to similarities in the police shootings at Sharpeville when police opened fire on an anti-pass protest march.

His voluminous memoir Odyssey to Freedom (2007) dramatises the major trials in which he acted and provides background to his dual identity as a Greek South African. Asked where he felt he belonged most, he said, “one does not ask a child which parent he prefers”. This is a quote from the poem Ithaca by Constantine P Cavafy. Bizos’s exile from Nazi-occupied Greece, which he famously fled on a boat during World War 2 was dramatic.

Refused citizenship by the South African government, Bizos waited 32 years for a passport; he said the distance from home set up an “almost pathological” yearning. He desperately wanted to take his wife, Arethe, and their sons, Damon, Kimon and Alexis, to the ancestral home.

For Bizos, identity was “a state of mind”. Notwithstanding his secondary and tertiary education in English he always thought and dreamed in his mother tongue, he told me. He spoke often about wisdom, such as he hoped he had achieved through his personal trials. His struggle with English and Afrikaans in South Africa during his first two years in the Union kept him out of school. His father went to work in Pretoria; the young Bizos worked as an assistant in a Greek-owned store, sleeping in a single room, displaced and alone, longing for his mother and siblings. Later, with the help of some kindly school teachers, he regained the super-confidence he described in Odyssey where he recounts his display of an obnoxious streak at school in Kalamata. 

At Wits University, where he studied towards an LLB, he was on “the amorphous left” on the Students’ Representative Council but belonged to no political party; he described himself as “an undisciplined fellow”. It was only when appointed to represent the ANC’s legal and constitutional committee in the early 1990s that he enquired whether he would need to apply for a membership card. No, he did not have to go through the process, said Cyril Ramaphosa, then the ANC secretary-general, but he would arrange an exemption from toyi-toying.

As a junior counsel his breakthrough came when he achieved the acquittal of 15 protesters arrested for public violence during an anti-pass protest in Lichtenberg. This victory attracted the attention of the great Vernon Berrangé, a famed and feared criminal defence and human rights lawyer, whose devastating cross-examinations were legendary. Berrangé mentored Bizos and sent a lot of work to the young counsel, as did Mandela and Oliver Tambo whose combined legal practice was a household name among black South Africans.

As a junior member of the African National Congress defence team in the Rivonia trial in 1963-1964, Bizos’s star was set and Mandela on Robben Island made him his contact with the ANC. Incredibly, he was invited to eat seafood with the prison authorities on the island while his client Mandela was sent back to his cell. His vow that he made then to take Mandela home to his grandfather’s olive groves was finally realised in 2001. In a hotel in Athens, Mandela experienced a déjà vu, and believed he had been in Greece before, possibly in a previous lifetime. Bizos’s devotion to Mandela and details of their friendship was chronicled in Sixty-Five Years of Friendship (2017).

Despite his status as a people’s hero, in his own community, Bizos was not always appreciated. His advice to those who touted the idea of “Greek blood” to consult a haematologist earned him no friends there but he had friends everywhere.

Unlike Mandela, Bizos experienced no catharsis in forgiveness and in No One to Blame? In Pursuit of Justice in South Africa (1998) he wrote of several unresolved murder cases of detainees in prison, including Steve Biko, Ahmed Timol and Neil Aggett. Bizos acted as the counsel in numerous political trials including Bram Fischer’s, and in the inquests of Biko, Timol and Aggett. Having defended Winnie Madikizela-Mandela in her numerous trials between 1958 and 1992, which he said he had been instructed to do by Mandela himself, he was devastated when two members of the Mandela family turned against him in 2013.  

Bizos often said the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was born of a necessary compromise, but it did not bring justice. “I am greatly troubled about the high-profile people who avoided telling the truth to the truth commission or publicly. The truth commission has a structure to grant amnesty in acknowledgement of the truth, at a price,” he said.

On the team that opposed amnesty applications for the murders of Ruth First and Jeanette and Katryn Schoon – Bizos’s stellar performances revealed the extent of his anger and disillusion. He told me, “The victims haven’t the means to use the justice system in order to get redress; they cry out for justice.” He could afford to be objective, he said, but he was not a victim – he nonetheless felt their pain, identified with the oppressed. How else could he have fought as he did? 

He was enraged by the politicians who lied at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and claimed not to have known about the torture and abuse of the security forces. In 2017 he testified at the reopened inquest into Ahmed Timol’s death. The judgment, affirming that Timol was murdered by members of the Security Branch after interrogation and torture and that he did not commit suicide as they had claimed, was a vindication.

George Bizos was born on 14 November 1927, in the village of Vasilitsi, south of Koroni on the Messinian peninsula of the Peloponnese. He was christened in the Greek Orthodox church, and said that he “responded to the liturgy”; he considered that the trial of Jesus Christ was “the greatest political trial of all”. 

His co-founding of Saheti, the South African Hellenic Educational and Tutorial Institute in Senderwood, Johannesburg, in 1974 has yielded excellent results. As a democrat he insisted being Greek was not a prerequisite for attendance, but pupils would certainly learn about what Greeks had to offer the country.

Bizos’s work took him beyond the borders of South Africa – he acted as counsel at the trial of the Namibian nationalist leader Toivo JA Toivo and he served as judge on Botswana’s court of appeal from 1985-1993. 

In March 2001 Bizos spoke out about the absence of rule in Zimbabwe – Robert Mugabe, who refused to accept that the Zimbabwean courts could rule on the legality of his land-grab programme, did not distinguish between the rule of law and rule by law, he said. Bizos defended Morgan Tsvangirai, the president of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), who in 2004 was acquitted of charges of treason and intent to kill Mugabe.

He was appointed Ambassador of Hellenism by the Prefect of Attica and Athens in 2006 and in 2009 he launched the South African Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon. This was part of a lengthy legal wrangle over the refusal of the British Museum to reunite the Parthenon Marbles in the New Acropolis Museum in Athens. He was pleased with the honours bestowed upon him, yet aware that “popularity is temporary”.

Despite his status as a people’s hero, in his own community, Bizos was not always appreciated. His advice to those who touted the idea of “Greek blood” to consult a haematologist earned him no friends there but he had friends everywhere.

“Ithaca has given you the lovely voyage,” writes Cavafy in Ithaca. That Bizos had two Ithacas may explain his embrace of duality, his ability always to see the other side. Now that this lovely voyage is over, he has left the country bereft. DM

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