Judge Edwin Cameron, whether intentionally or not, has always been an activist. The former Constitutional Court judge, who retired last year, has written two personal memoirs which both received acclaim. He talks to Manosa Nthunya about his writing life
In South Africa, we are increasingly becoming accustomed to the fact that from time to time a judge, particularly from the Constitutional Court, will, to our delight, pen a book.
His first memoir, Witness to Aids, was published in 2005 and his second, Justice: A Personal Account, in 2014. With his second book, “my aim was to show the law as an oppressor, as the imprisoner of my father, as something that should be applied to social justice ends”. He tells me that this was a very difficult book for him to write: “The first book was agony. Every word was anguish. Writing about stigma, infection, recovering from it.
What made it possible to challenge government was a ruling by the Constitutional Court that the state was compelled to offer antiretrovirals. It is in Cameron’s second book that the importance of a constitutional democracy is interrogated more deeply. The ways in which the law, like a human being, is under constant change and how in that consistent metamorphosis it can be perceived as either nefarious or necessary.
Even though the sense, for most, is that the law should be used to respond adequately to our history, there are also those who are intent on abusing it to further their ambitions. “My whiteness bought me the privileges that apartheid was designed to secure for whites. It secured for me access to a first-rate high school and an excellent university. These opened the way for me to get a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, and to start my legal career,” Cameron writes.
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