Essa Moosa: Human rights lawyer, judge and activist
1936-2017
JUDGE Essa Moosa, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 81, was the first person antiapartheid activists in the Western Cape called when they were arrested by the security police in the 1970s and ’80s.
When they got involved in the struggle they were advised to memorise his name and telephone number, and to “call Essa” if they were in trouble.
And they did. Allan Boesak, Cheryl Carolus, Trevor Manuel, Christmas Tinto, Shirley Gunn and many, many others. Moosa himself was detained during a march in Cape Town in 1989 led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Tutu enjoyed telling the story of how, after the marchers were locked up, he told a police officer: “I want our lawyer.”
From the back of the crowded cell came Moosa’s quiet voice: “I am also here.”
Another client was Nelson Mandela, who Moosa visited regularly on Robben Island.
To call him a human rights lawyer, which he was before he became a high court judge, would be to understate his importance to people who were flung into prison, detained without trial, held in isolation, abused, tortured and stripped of dignity and hope.
They remember him as their “beacon of hope in dark times”. It didn’t matter who they were or what remote corner of the province they were being held in. When he got their call he climbed into his car and hit the road. He knew every prison in the Cape.
Money, or more often the lack of it, was never an issue. Whether his clients could pay or not didn’t influence the quality of assistance they got from him. All that mattered was that he was there and would defend them.
It was the moral support he provided as well as the legal that detainees found so critical.
Moosa was morally battered and bruised by apartheid, which he felt as a continual assault on his dignity, and this gave him an empathy for his clients that was unusual even for a human rights lawyer.
He was one of the first human rights lawyers to understand the importance of the aftercare ‘BEACON OF HOPE’: After the fall of apartheid, Judge Essa Moosa took up the cause of the Kurds of people emerging from detention. He set up a small unit in his office to support detainees when they came out.
Small, physically slight and self-deprecating, Moosa was an unlikely hero. His contribution to the struggle frequently went well beyond legal assistance.
This was a matter of ideology as well as compassion.
He not only supported the armed struggle, he believed it was imperative.
He was part of the network of those engaged in it. He facilitated meetings, conveyed messages and, when necessary, helped people leave South Africa in a hurry.
Moosa was born in District Six on February 8 1936. He matriculated at Athlone High School and worked as a bookkeeper at Woolworths because he had no money for university.
After applying to and being rejected by many Cape Town law firms, he worked as an articled clerk at Ephraim Kluk for five years while studying part time for a law diploma at the University of Cape Town.
In 1962 he opened a practice in Sir Lowry Road, District Six. In 1969, after it was declared a white area, he moved his practice to Athlone in defiance of the Group Areas Act, which prohibited Indians from working there.
His office was a sanctuary for political activists who met and planned there. This brought him to the notice of the security police. In the ’80s, when political assassinations were being carried out, two askaris — guerillas turned by the security police — arrived at Moosa’s chambers and asked to see him.
His staff turned them away and for weeks afterwards, without him knowing, followed him home to make sure he got there safely.
His two sons joined Umkhonto weSizwe and one night his house was raided by police demanding to know where they were. Fortunately they were in Zimbabwe.
Moosa was a founding member of the National Association of Democratic Lawyers.
He practised as an attorney until being appointed a judge of the High Court in Cape Town in 1998. He served for 13 years before retiring in February 2011.
In 2014, he was appointed to the Office of the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (the Hawks) as an investigating judge and handled complaints from and against employees.
After the fall of apartheid Moosa took up the cause of the Kurds. He was chairman of the South African branch of the Kurdish Human Rights Action Group and spent what time his duties as a judge allowed promoting their case for an independent state.
When the founder of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, Abdullah Öcalan, was on the run from the Turkish authorities and persona non grata in most European countries, Moosa persuaded Mandela to offer him political asylum in South Africa.
Öcalan was on his way to South Africa in 1998 when he was abducted in Kenya (by CIA and Mossad agents, Moosa believed), and flown to Turkey where he was sentenced to hang for hundreds of killings in PKK’s then 16-year war against Turkey.
Moosa went to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to support Öcalan’s appeal against the sentence, which was argued by Sydney Kentridge QC.
It was commuted to life imprisonment. Moosa spent the rest of his life campaigning for Öcalan’s release and trying to visit him in his island prison (he led a delegation to Turkey for this purpose last year), but the Turks never allowed it.
Moosa is survived by two sons. His wife, Fatima, to whom he was married for 50 years, died in 2015. — Chris Barron