The Trial of Andrew Zondo: Defending Black Children / Criticizing the Racial State

• In Event: Temporalities of Catastrophe

Abstract

In agreeing to testify on behalf of Andrew Zondo, a young man who had confessed to bombing a shopping mall in Natal, South Africa on December 23, 1985, Fatima Meer participated in a long line of Black feminist radical action against the racial state and in defense of black children and black men and black women. The indelicate terrain of the courthouse witness stand offered her a hostile geography. Decades of scholarly and militant activism in the anti-apartheid movement granted Meer the status of courtroom expert. Yet her attempts to upend the legal process by making the law empathize with the slow catastrophe of Zondo's life and the ethical systems that compelled him to fight the South African state through force of arms were rejected outright.

In the final analysis, lawyerly strategies and courtroom politics are complimentary to the practices of organizing mass meetings, publishing broadsides and pamphlets, compelling people to change their understanding about events and their meaning-and hold fast to that alternative and counter understanding. The courtroom with all of its beautiful rhetoric and precedent and protocol gave Fatima Meer and the lawyers who worked on Zondo's case and others one platform but not necessarily the most important one to make meaning of the bombing of the Amanzimtoti Mall in the middle of the war against apartheid. The courtroom, as it were, could only fail, if it had ever been a space designed to cover and protect Andrew Zondo. And as we all know, the courtroom was not a space designed to enlarge and make sense of the life that he lived and the fact that his choice reflected the value of the other lives lost and taken without mourning, the Black lives destroyed as so much chaff and waste. This is what made writing The Trial of Andrew Zondo such an important contribution. In that book, Meer could re-articulate 1) the political and legal strategy to render Zondo into a person beyond execution and 2) could advance the project of revealing the South African legal system as complicit in slow death.

Author

• Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, University of California-Irvine