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Jana in Johannesburg in 1984 and, below, as ambassador to Ireland in 2007In 1974 she joined the Johannesburg
law firm of Ismail Ayob and soon found
herself representing student activists
involved in the Soweto uprising. That
exposed her to “the real horror of apart-
heid” as her clients were tear-gassed,
beaten, imprisoned and exiled. In 1979
another client, Solomon Mahlangu, 23,
was hanged amid international outrage
for the shooting of two white people,
not by himself, but by a fellow activist
with whom he had sought refuge from
the police in a storage facility. Jana was
his last visitor, and emerged from Pre-
toria Central Prison bearing his final
words: “Tell my people that I love them.
They must continue the fight. My blood
will nourish the tree that bears the
fruits of freedom.”
She became a close friend of Winnie
Mandela, which led to her first meeting
with Nelson Mandela on Robben Is-
land in 1977. She was, she believed, the
first woman to hug him in 13 years as his
wife had to speak to him through a glass
screen.
She became Mandela’s personal law-
yer and used subsequent meetings to
transmit coded messages between him
and ANC leaders such as Oliver Tambo,
then based in Zambia. Other inmates
sought her help and in time, she said: “I
represented every political prisoner on
Robben Island.”By day Priscilla Jana worked as a law-
yer, tirelessly representing, often pro
bono, the whole gamut of South Afri-
can anti-apartheid activists from the
lowliest foot soldiers right up to Nelson
Mandela, whom she would visit at the
maximum security prison on Robben
Island. She became a lawyer, she said,
simply “to challenge the savagely unfair
regime by exposing it through the
courts of justice”.
Yet her commitment to the cause
went even further than that. By night
she belonged to an underground cell of
the African National Congress, acting
as a conduit for funds and secret messa-
ges, supplying details of security instal-
lations so they could be attacked, and
once retrieving a stash of AK-47s on be-
half of a newly arrested client before
the security services found them.
She dressed in brightly coloured sa-
ris, but was passionate, radical and un-
compromising. She was even unde-
terred by several fire-bomb attacks on
her Johannesburg home in the late
1970s, or by police harassment and ar-
rests, or by a five-year banning order.
In the 1980s she refused to meet Pres-
ident Reagan and Margaret Thatcher
because they would not recognise the
ANC or support sanctions against
South Africa. Nor, after apartheid had
collapsed, did she share Mandela’s
readiness to reconcile with its perpetra-
tors. “I sometimes think one can go too
far with forgiveness,” she said.
Devikarani Priscilla Sewpal was born
to Indian parents in Westville, a Dur-
ban suburb, in 1943. Her father, Hans-
raj, was a high-school teacher who ve-
hemently objected to the rigid racial
segregation that South Africa’s white
minority government imposed during
Jana’s youth. She inherited his social
conscience and organised, aged 15, a
student walkout at the Pietermaritz-
burg High School in support of starving
potato farmers.
She won a scholarship to study medi-
cine at Sophia College in Mumbai.
There she met Reg Jana, another South
African student, and they married
against her parents’ wishes in 1964.
Back in South Africa she again defied
her parents by switching to law, which
she studied by correspondence course
with the University of South Africa.
At the same time she became in-
volved in the emerging Black Con-
sciousness Movement, and was ar-
rested for staging a mixed-race per-
formance of Romeo and Juliet. She
experienced a moment of epiphany
when she heard the anti-apartheid ac-
tivist Steve Biko speak. “I realised you
didn’t have to be African to call yourself
black,” she wrote in her 2016 autobio-
graphy Fighting for Mandela. “I had been
aware of the vacuum in me, not belong-
ing to black or white, just being ‘differ-
ent’. Now I could be part of a group. I
had found solidarity, and I felt uplifted.”
The bulldozing of her family home as
part of the government’s racial segrega-
tion programme sealed her commit-
ment to fighting apartheid.
She was, she believed,
the first woman to hug
Mandela in 13 years
Obituaries
Neurologist who helped
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John Spalding
Page 60Priscilla Jana
Brightly attired anti-apartheid lawyer who represented the Mandelas and didn’t believe in compromise
WENDY SCHWEGMANN/AFRAPIX VIA JULIE FREDERIKSE COLLECTION, SAHAJana simultaneously belonged to an
underground ANC cell led by Thabo
Mbeki, the future South African presi-
dent. “The notion of violence, causing
explosions, blowing up powerful insti-
tutions, did not come naturally to me.
But I found myself wholeheartedly be-
hind it,” she wrote.
In 1979 Jana set up her own law firm
in Johannesburg, but within weeks the
regime hobbled her work by issuing her
with a five-year banning order under
the Suppression of Communism Act.
That prevented her meeting more than
one person at a time,
and barred her from
political activities
or leaving Johan-
nesburg. It ru-
ined her mar-
riage, though she
and her husband
did not divorce
until 1989.
“The
Eightieswas a decade burdened with confronta-
tions with the state and the judiciary,”
she recalled. “It was a fight all the way,
often beaten back by the intransigence
of the government, and sometimes
gaining victories, small and large, over
the system.” One such triumph was a
1985 Supreme Court ruling that the two
doctors, Ivor Lang and Benjamin Tuck-
er, who had attended Biko during
beatings in police custody that caused
his death in 1977, were guilty of unethi-
cal conduct.
Though childless herself, Jana raised
and later adopted a baby girl named Ti-
na who was left in her office by a young
woman unable to cope while her activ-
ist husband was in prison. A month
after her divorce she married Reagan
Jacobus, a lawyer 15 years her junior,
but the marriage soon fell apart.
So did her friendship with Winnie
Mandela after Stompie Seipei was beat-
en to death by her bodyguards, the so-
called Mandela United Football Club.
Mrs Mandela, who was subsequently
convicted of kidnapping the 15-year-
old, “had allowed herself and, more im-
portantly, the anti-apartheid move-
ment to be dragged in the dirt for all the
world to see”, said Jana, who declined
Nelson Mandela’s request that she rep-
resent his wife.
Nevertheless, Mandela and Jana re-
mained close. He visited her law firm to
thank its staff following his release in
1990, and arrived grief-stricken at her
home after separating from his wife in- “He had emotionally collapsed.
Nothing in his life had affected him as
much as this,” Jana recalled.
In post-apartheid South Africa she
led the Independent Electoral Com-
mission that oversaw South Africa’s
first free elections in 1994. As an MP she
served as deputy chairwoman of the
justice committee, overturning apart-
heid-era laws, and helped to set up both
the Human Rights and Truth and Re-
conciliation commissions. She later ex-
pressed regret that the latter failed to
elicit genuine remorse or reparations
from apartheid’s leaders.
In 2001 Jana was appointed ambassa-
dor to the Netherlands, an important
post given that country’s historical ties
to South Africa. One of her first acts
was to smash a portrait of Hendrik Ver-
woerd, the former prime minister and
so-called father of apartheid, that was
hanging in her office.
In 2006 she became ambassador to
Ireland where she got to know Gerry
Adams and hung a photo of the IRA
hunger striker Bobby Sands in the hall
of her official residence. Irish republi-
cans had also supported the ANC’s
struggle against apartheid.
Yet Jana died disappointed by the
ANC government’s failure to tackle
poverty and inequality, and lamented
its leaders’ pursuit of personal enrich-
ment. “We finally put apartheid, co-
lonialism and slavery behind us
after 350 years,” she wrote, “but
we are not yet reaping the re-
wards of that great fight.”
Priscilla Jana, human rights
lawyer, was born on
December 5, 1943. She died
of undisclosed causes
on October 10, 2020,
aged 76Sir John Meurig Thomas
Professor Sir Mich-
ael Pepper writes:
Sir John Meurig
Thomas (obituary
November 20) was
a proud Welshman
and fluent in the
Welsh language.
However, this
knowledge was not just of cultural sig-
nificance as he put it to practical use in
the numerous committees which he
chaired. He prevented those on either
side eavesdropping on his notes and
comments by writing them in Welsh.Hamish MacInnes
Dr Doug Dean
writes: Despite
being a quasi-celeb-
rity Hamish Mac-
Innes (obituary No-
vember 25) was an
unassuming man
who was always up
for an adventure.
As a young, unknown climber in Cana-
da, I had grown up reading about his ex-
ploits. When I moved from Canada to
Northumbria for work, I dropped him a
line introducing myself and asking
whether he would be interested in
climbing a route or two around Glen-
coe some time. A call came one after-
noon. Hamish said that the conditions
were ideal, the weather was stable, no-
body would be in the hills mid-week,
and I should get my backside to
Glencoe that evening. The next morn-
ing at 6am, I was awakened by Hamish
knocking at my B&B window saying:
“Come on, if we get an early start we can
do a route and then have the rest of the
day for a ridge walk.” Hamish was much
older than I, but superbly fit and I had to
work hard to keep up with him.Sir Roy Beldam
Simon Brown, QC,
writes: I need to add
how impish and art-
ful Sir Roy Beldam
(obituary Novem-
ber 24) was. He gave
his opponents and
judges nicknames
displaying their
characteristics. He would find out the
judge’s interests and use them in his sub-
missions. It didn’t always work, as with
his jousting with Lord Denning, or “Old
Tom” as he called him. In a Chancery
easements case in 1977 about the mean-
ing of “at all times hereafter”, he sent me
to the library to dig out all the cases for
an appeal against the decision he had
won. The evening before the hearing we
learnt that we had drawn the Master of
the Rolls. Roy handed me his copy of
Smith’s Leading Cases (7th Edition 1947;
AT Denning) and told me to flag it up at
particular pages. Denning was sceptical
of Roy’s submissions so Roy turned to
his trump card with the words: “May I
take your Lordship to the most erudite
7th Edition of Smith’s Leading Cases and
of that on page... ” “Oh no, Mr Beldam,”
came the retort, “I am not falling for that.
When I edited it I was a young man and
thought it was right but now, older and
wiser, I think I was wrong!”Lives remembered
If you would like to add a personal view or
recollection to a published obituary, you
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