The rights man
Who will protect our dignity?
Human rights commissioner Chris Nissen, 62, has polished black shoes that are well worn. They’re on feet that have been pounding the streets in the struggle for people’s rights for nearly half a century — no wonder he walks fast and has no time for lunch.
Nissen’s calendar for March, written on a whiteboard in his Adderley Street, Cape Town, office, is crammed with trips and commitments. “I try to get to places where commissioners haven’t been,” says Nissen, who has visited all the provinces since lockdown began last March.
“From day one of level 5, we were on the ground,” says Nissen, who was appointed in 2017 as a part-time commissioner for the South African Human Rights Commission (HRC).
There is nothing part-time about this pensioner, whose first year as a commissioner was spent crisscrossing the country to get to grips with his mandate — national oversight of indigenous people, petty offences, places of custody and mental health.
Responding directly to rights violations is not the role of a commissioner, but Nissen invariably steps in when people come to him with “urgent complaints” that cannot wait for the official process outlined in a manual as thick as a Bible.
A walking advice office and veteran mediator, he doesn’t pull his punches when his efforts to engage the responsible authorities do not get results.
“Near Gqeberha we went to a place where the sewage had been running like a waterfall for the last three years. The officials gave us this and that story, until I told them: ‘If you don’t fix this within two days, I will have no choice but to charge you criminally.’ Then they fixed it.”
Last week he visited Kokstad in KwaZulu-Natal and next week he will be in Kimberley in the
Northern Cape, meeting hundreds of people about their problems, ranging from basic socioeconomic rights to abuses of civil rights.
On field trips, he asks HRC provincial officials to accompany him so they can follow up on violations.
At Kokstad police station, for example, he found about 50 people being kept in small holding cells. By law they can be held for only 72 hours to a week, yet some of them had been there for two years, says Nissen.
“I’m kind of an inside-outsider because, as an activist, I don’t follow all the rules that you have to log a complaint and so on. I just go out there and try and find a solution immediately, rather than people having to wait a long time,” he says.
“I’m a bit of maverick, but I’m an activist so I cannot be anything else.
“I don’t care which party is in power. They are all the same when it comes to poor and black areas,” he says, unusually sombre at the thought of the gross human rights violations still taking place 26 years after the constitution was adopted.
The absence of true public representation and leadership, and lack of communication with these communities, exacerbates SA’s “dysfunctional society”, says Nissen.
He gets into the fray himself, showing up again and again to defuse blazing protests in townships and rural towns across the Western Cape. Blackened by tyre smoke, he gets caught in the crossfire and is pelted with stones and smoked out by stun grenades.
“I was really scared two years ago going into Blikkiesdorp [a dense informal settlement on Cape Town’s outskirts] where the previous day they had killed five people,” he says. But that didn’t stop him going in to help make peace.
Nissen spends days, and sometimes nights, listening in English, Afrikaans and Xhosa to communities in uproar, in an attempt to avert violence and the destruction of buildings — with some officials, like Overstrand police chief Brig Donovan Heilbron, sharing his approach.
That doesn’t mean everyone wants to listen. When about 550 refugees camped in the Central Methodist Church in Cape Town in October 2019, on the strength of what they believed was a promise of being relocated to Canada, tensions ran high when Nissen told them this would not happen.
“When the Congolese pastor wanted to confirm this was not true, some people went for him and grabbed him by the neck. They were hitting the archbishop of Cape Town and when I threw myself in front of him they stomped on my knee,” says the parttime reverend, who still has a knee injury.
The HRC formally withdrew its assistance in this case after one of the ringleaders, a man with a criminal record, threatened in court to kill Nissen.
But the activist reverend has nine lives and after Covid-19 struck him in January, he recovered fully.
Nissen and his wife Charlene had fevers and coughing, with sore chests. “The first three days were tough. We would have to change the bedding three times a night from sweats, but now we are better,” says Nissen, who drinks a daily Khoisan brew of cancer bush leaves boiled as a tea.
He studied the Khoisan’s traditional religious heritage for his master of arts degree, which he earned from the University of Cape Town in 1990.
A student leader with a big Afro at school, Nissen was expelled in 1977 and could not study law because he did not have matric.
Instead, he studied matric subjects through a Black Consciousness cultural programme and joined the Federal Theological Seminary in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal. A college for students of different denominations, the seminary had an influential Black Consciousness movement.
In 1980 he earned a joint board diploma in theology and was ordained as a minister of the
Uniting Presbyterian Church in 1981. The first congregation he served was in Vhufuli, in Venda, but he was kicked out by the apartheid-aligned bantustan after six months.
Following his departure from what would become Limpopo, he moved to a Graaff-Reinet congregation and became a community organiser in the greater Karoo.
He was branded a “communist Red priest” by a newspaper after he spoke about the importance of our actions on Earth.
“I said that being a Christian was about our witness and our life and, even if there were no heaven, that would not stop me being Christian. They reported that I said there was no heaven,” he says, his face creasing in a smile.
Nissen played an active role in the United Democratic Front, working with Cradock Four leaders like Matthew Goniwe before they were killed by security forces in June 1985.
That same month, Chris and Charlene got married while he was out on bail on a public violence charge. Under a national state of emergency, they spent the first six months of their marriage apart because they were both locked up.
Later, Nissen worked for the Western Province Council of Churches and studied at UCT, where the dean of humanities had petitioned for adjusted entry requirements for the “lost generation of 1976”.
When the ANC was unbanned in 1990, Nissen formed ANC branches and, in 1994, joined the Western Cape government of national unity for the party. He was the MEC for economic affairs and served as its deputy speaker until 1999.
Nissen was the national co-ordinator of the Masakhane campaign for the department of constitutional development under then-minister Valli Moosa. Masakhane (“let us build”) aimed to involve communities in being responsible citizens and paying for services, acknowledging that the government cannot fix everything.
At the turn of the century, Nissen pursued a new skill to strengthen his hand in SA’s regeneration: learning to be a manager.
“I just wanted managerial experience, to work in an environment where you have responsibility for making executive decisions,” says Nissen, who joined a small fishing company in St Helena Bay called Umoya.
“For example, we exported live crayfish to Japan. That process has got a lot of nervous energy, from the catching to the processing, to make sure it is on the plane.”
Nissen started a company called Cape Empowerment with a business partner, since deceased. He also served as the chair of Boschendal board, and sat on corporate boards.
In 2013, he left boardrooms behind to return to the ministry, serving a small congregation in a shack in Khayelitsha and another in a school, before he got them more space.
Now he is a part-time minister for a congregation in the Strand, about 40km from his Rondebosch home in Cape Town. He spends his Saturdays officiating at funerals, sometimes two in a day.
The only dedicated time for family, including his three adult children, is after church on Sundays. “That is my time for cooking,” says Nissen, who gets a fresh kabeljou or yellowtail to grill on the fire.
Sometimes he travels the 140km to the couple’s house in the former mission station of Genadendal, an unofficial base for people from rural towns to petition him, whether for a landfill with dead horses to be cleaned up or for the Caledon authorities to set aside a Muslim burial ground.
He has streets named after him and a settlement, Chris Nissen Park, near the Strand. Tomorrow he will travel to Wittenberg in the Cape winelands, to celebrate Human Rights Day with farmworkers and respond to their needs.
If his life were a Netflix plot, people would find it hard to believe how long he has been committed to helping others get on their feet, yet Nissen is genuine. He cares.
“Human rights are fragile,” he says, holding out cupped, lined hands. “We hold people’s lives in our hands and, if we stumble and fall, they can be broken into a thousand pieces.”