Anti-apartheid lawyer who helped save stranded Kiwi soldiers during WWII George Bizos
George Bizos, the lawyer and civil rights activist who has died aged 92, fled to South Africa after rescuing six Allied soldiers from Nazi-occupied Greece and went on to become Nelson Mandela’s friend, confidant and saviour.
During his long career, Bizos defended all the major figures in the anti-apartheid movement before helping frame the postapartheid constitution and leading the fight against the death penalty and corruption in modern South Africa.
He was best known for his role in the Rivonia Trial, which culminated in June 1964 in the conviction on sabotage charges of 10 leading African
National Congress
(ANC) activists including
Mandela, and their detention on
Robben Island.
During preparations for the impassioned speech Mandela gave from the dock, Bizos is credited with inserting three words which saved the future president’s life. To avoid giving the impression that he was inviting the death penalty, the lawyer suggested Mandela add the preface ‘‘if needs be’’ to his declaration that he was prepared to die for ‘‘the ideal of a democratic and free society’’.
During his long years of detention, Mandela entrusted the care of his family to Bizos, a task complicated by the tribulations of his wife, Winnie, and the thuggish behaviour of her personal protection squad.
He acted as go-between with exiled ANC leaders during secret negotiations with the government about bringing apartheid to a close, as Mandela strove to keep the moment together and avoid the accusation that he was selling out.
In his forward to Bizos’s 2009 memoir, Odyssey to Freedom, Mandela wrote: ‘‘Throughout my imprisonment, George unwaveringly shared our confidence that freedom for all and the dawning of democracy for our country was inevitable.’’
On Mandela’s release, he helped to write the new constitution but refused an invitation to join the first government of the new Rainbow Nation, preferring to continue his legal career.
He resisted the immunity granted at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to those responsible for some of the most egregious offences of the apartheid years, including the 1977 murder of Steve Biko.
George Bizos was born in the village of Vasilitsi in the southern Peloponnese, Greece; his mother said he was born in November 1927, but the exact date of his birth is uncertain; under local custom greater attention was paid to saints’ days, while the village’s municipal recordswere destroyed during the Nazi occupation.
His father Antonios was the villagemayor, while, along with most local women, his mother Anastasia (ne´e Tomaras), was illiterate. Educated in a one-room schoolhouse with a single teacher for 140 children, the civil rights activist b c November 1927 d September 9, 2020 young George precociously followed along with the older students’ lessons.
His education was interrupted by World War II. A month before the fall of Greece in May 1941, 13-year-old George and his father came to the aid of seven New Zealand soldiers stranded behind enemy lines, offering to take them to safety on Crete in a fishing boat. After three days adrift they were picked up by the British warship Kimberley, when they learned that Crete had fallen. They were taken instead to the Egyptian port of Alexandria.
Now refugees, he and his father were given the choice between a new life in India or South Africa; under the impression one could pluck gold and diamonds from the ground, they opted for the latter.
Far from the streets being paved with gold, life in South Africa proved tough. Antonius got work in amunitions factory in Pretoria while George stayed with a series of expat Greek families in Johannesburg, paying his way by working in cafes and grocers’ shops.
Unable to speak English or Afrikaans, George soon dropped out of school , and might have spent his life working in a shop. Fate intervened two years later when a local teacher recognised his face from a newspaper article about his exploits with the Kiwi soldiers. She found him a place at her school and ensured he received tutoring to keep up.
He soon flourished, winning a scholarship in 1948 to the University of the Witwatersrand, where he took an interest in politics and began studying law. It was a fateful era, with the signing of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the coming to power of the National Party and the start of apartheid. Bizos became, as he put it, ‘‘radicalised’’ by all three, and began mingling with fellow students Mandela and Oliver Tambo, later president of the ANC.
On being admitted to the Johannesburg Bar in 1954, he said it was all but ‘‘preordained’’ he would be the lawyer of choice for the anti-apartheid movement. Mandela and Tambo began instructing Bizos to act as their advocate, and he built up a speciality representing those caught in apartheid’sweb of cruel prohibitions on ordinary life.
A warm and gentle man by nature, in court he was described as relentlessly persistent. During the Delmas Treason Trial (1985-1988) his clients gave him the Xhosa nickname ‘‘Tlou’’, meaning one with the strength of an elephant; when theywere convicted he broke down in the courtroom and wept.
Bizos never forgot his native land, enjoying Greek poetry and growing the fruit and vegetables of his home region. His wife Arethe (Rita) Daflos, whom he married in 1948 and who predeceased him in 2017, was also Greek.
He was awarded the Order for Meritorious Service, the International Trial Lawyer Prize, the Bernard Simons Memorial Award and the freedom of London, Athens and Johannesburg. He is survived by three sons.
His clients gave him the Xhosa nickname ‘‘Tlou’’, meaning one with the strength of an elephant.