LEGAL HERO: Geoff Budlender, a raconteur and mensch whose work in human rights ‘is bigger than Mount Kilimanjaro’

Along the Garden Route’s winding, tree-canopied roads their friendship formed. It was December 1970. Steve Biko was catching a ride from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth with a progressive young law student named Geoff Budlender.

This was him elaborating on South Africa’s Legal Resources Centre , which he co-founded in 1979, and its dealings with a perplexed apartheid regime. The LRC represented vulnerable people for free, often in high-impact cases against the government. It continues this work today. Budlender recruited Majola to work at the LRC in 1996. Majola adds that Budlender has been a mentor to scores of young human rights lawyers in South Africa.

Relating the anecdote, Budlender chuckles. “Indeed, I had no idea. I was over 20, had spent most of my life in Port Elizabeth, but I didn’t know where New Brighton was. And that just goes to show what life had been like. Steve had a marvellous sense of humour, though. He was very entertained by this and we both laughed. And he said, ‘Well, don’t worry, I’ll show you how to get there’.”

After finishing studying in 1975, Budlender articled at a Johannesburg firm specialising in political defence, working, among others, on the trial of ANC veteran Tokyo Sexwale, who had been charged under the Terrorism Act. In 1978, a trip to the US revealed to him that the law could do more than defend – that it could bring about change.

Most of the centre’s funding was from outside South Africa. “The funders were fantastic. The first big funder was the Ford Foundation from New York. Then we got money from the Carnegie Corporation in New York, also the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. We got some money from Anglo American, from Harry Oppenheimer.

Majola also reflects on the case: “Geoff did so much work, he even approached the makers of nevirapine, a German manufacturer, who then offered to give the drug to South Africa for free. But there was so much hostility towards the litigation team.

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