Lawyer represented Mandela but did not share his faith in reconciliation
By day Priscilla Jana worked as a lawyer, tirelessly representing, often pro bono, the whole gamut of South African anti-apartheid activists from the lowliest foot soldiers to Nelson Mandela, whom she would visit at the maximum security prison on Robben Island. She became a lawyer, she said, simply ‘‘to challenge the savagely unfair regime by exposing it through the courts of justice’’.
Yet her commitment to the cause went even further than that. By night she belonged to an underground cell of the African National Congress, acting as a conduit for funds and secret messages, supplying details of security installations so they could be attacked, and once retrieving a stash of AK-47s on behalf of a newly arrested client before the security services found them.
Jana, who has died aged 76, was passionate, radical and uncompromising. She was undeterred by several fire-bomb attacks on her Johannesburg home in the late 1970s, or by police harassment and arrests, or by a five-year banning order.
In the 1980s she refused to meet US president Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher because they would not recognise the ANC or support sanctions against South Africa. Nor, after apartheid had collapsed, did she share Mandela’s readiness to reconcile with its perpetrators. ‘‘I sometimes think one can go too far with forgiveness,’’ she said.
Devikarani Priscilla Sewpal was born to Indian parents in Durban. Her father, Hansraj, was a teacher who vehemently objected to the rigid racial segregation that South Africa’s white minority government imposed during Jana’s youth. She inherited his social conscience and organised, aged 15, a student walkout at the Pietermaritzburg High School in support of starving potato farmers.
She won a scholarship to study medicine at Sophia College in Mumbai. There she met Reg Jana, another South African student, and they married against her parents’ wishes in 1964. Back in South Africa she again defied her parents by switching to law, which she studied by correspondence course.
At the same time she became involved in the emerging Black Consciousness Movement, and was arrested for staging a mixedrace performance of Romeo and Juliet. She experienced a moment of epiphany when she heard anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko speak. ‘‘I realised you didn’t have to be African to call yourself black,’’ she wrote in her 2016 autobiography Fighting for Mandela. ‘‘I had been aware of the vacuum in me, not belonging to black or white, just being ‘different’. Now I could be part of a group. I had found solidarity, and I felt uplifted.’’
The bulldozing of her family home as part of the government’s racial segregation programme sealed her commitment to
‘‘The notion of violence ... did not come naturally to me. But I found myself wholeheartedly behind it.’’
fighting apartheid. In 1974 she joined the Johannesburg law firm of Ismail Ayob and soon found herself representing student activists involved in the Soweto uprising. That exposed her to ‘‘the real horror of apartheid’’ as her clients were tear-gassed, beaten, imprisoned and exiled.
She became a close friend of Winnie Mandela, which led to her first meeting with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island in 1977. She was, she believed, the first woman to hug him in 13 years, as his wife had to speak to him through a glass screen.
She became Mandela’s personal lawyer and used subsequent meetings to transmit coded messages between him and ANC leaders such as Oliver Tambo, then based in Zambia. Other inmates sought her help and, in time, she said: ‘‘I represented every political prisoner on Robben Island.’’
She simultaneously belonged to an underground ANC cell led by Thabo Mbeki, the future South African president. ‘‘The notion of violence, causing explosions, blowing up powerful institutions, did not come naturally to me. But I found myself wholeheartedly behind it,’’ she wrote.
In 1979 she set up her own law firm, but within weeks the regime hobbled her work by issuing her with a five-year banning order under the Suppression of Communism Act. It prevented her meeting more than one person at a time, and barred her from political activities or leaving Johannesburg. It ruined her marriage, though she and her husband did not divorce until 1989.
Though childless herself, Jana raised and later adopted a baby girl named Tina who was left in her office by a young woman unable to cope while her activist husband was in prison. A month after her divorce she married Reagan Jacobus, a lawyer 15 years her junior, but the marriage soon fell apart.
So did her friendship with Winnie Mandela after Stompie Seipei was beaten to death by her bodyguards, the so-called Mandela United Football Club. Mrs Mandela, who was convicted of kidnapping the 15-year-old, ‘‘had allowed herself and, more importantly, the anti-apartheid movement to be dragged in the dirt for all the world to see’’, said Jana, who declined Nelson Mandela’s request that she represent his wife.
Nevertheless, Nelson Mandela and Jana remained close. He visited her law firm to thank its staff after his release in 1990, and arrived grief-stricken at her home after separating from his wife in 1995. ‘‘He had emotionally collapsed. Nothing in his life had affected him as much as this,’’ Jana recalled.
Post-apartheid, she led the Independent Electoral Commission that oversaw South Africa’s first free elections in 1994. As an MP she served as deputy chairwoman of the justice committee, overturning apartheid-era laws, and helped to set up both the human rights and truth and reconciliation commissions. She later expressed regret that the latter failed to elicit genuine remorse or reparations from apartheid’s leaders.
In 2001 Jana was appointed ambassador to the Netherlands, and later became ambassador to Ireland.
She died disappointed by the ANC government’s failure to tackle poverty and inequality, and lamented its leaders’ pursuit of personal enrichment. ‘‘We finally put apartheid, colonialism and slavery behind us after 350 years,’’ she wrote, ‘‘but we are not yet reaping the rewards of that great fight.’’ – The Times