Maverick Life

The dust under the carpet — a story about the cost of justice and corporate power in post-apartheid South Africa

9 May 2025

In ‘In a Rain of Dust’ Professor David Kinley uncovers the truth behind asbestos mining, set in a post-apartheid South Africa.

Professor David Kinley's In a Rain of Dust takes readers back to a time when South Africans had no option but to fight for economic and social redemption in a post-apartheid landscape. The story follows a young British lawyer who tries to navigate a legal battle over the dreadful impact of asbestos mining in South Africa.

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Several judges were shaking their heads, exasperated by what they were reading. It was the moment he began to think that they just might win. After years of seemingly endless court battles fighting an unscrupulous corporate giant armed with the best legal team money could buy, an exhausting itinerary shuttling between London and Johannesburg, and countless hours taking victims’ statements and poring over hundreds of thousands of pages of medical records, scientific studies, legal documents and company reports, Richard Meeran could hardly believe it.

Meeran is the lawyer who in the 1990s took on Cape Plc, one of the biggest names in the dirty business of asbestos mining. He alleged that the UK-based company’s South African operations had caused the death of thousands of impoverished, predominantly black and coloured workers* and brought disease to many thousands more, all the while knowing of the dangers of asbestos to people’s health and welfare. It was a case of wilful negligence, cover-up and double standards. Yet despite a body of damning evidence, the whole case turned on arguments over arcane and entrenched rules about jurisdiction and the separation of parent and subsidiary corporations. Where was the proper place for the case against the company to be heard? In the United Kingdom, where Cape Plc was incorporated, or in South Africa, where its former subsidiary companies had operated? The answer was crucial.

Cape Plc wanted the case heard in South Africa, where the claimants (whose number would eventually swell to 7,500) would likely have no legal representation, as neither legal aid nor lawyers able to act on contingency were then available under South African law. Without legal counsel, any prospects of successfully suing the company were markedly reduced. If, on the other hand, the case was heard in the United Kingdom, as Richard Meeran argued it should be, the litigants could have access to lawyers funded by legal aid, and any finding of negligence might attract a significant award of damages that Cape Plc, as the parent company, had the financial capacity to pay. The problem for Meeran was that a century of established legal precedent favoured Cape. Tearing away the corporate veil that protected parent companies like Cape from liability for its own actions or failures in respect of subsidiary operations was a truly monumental task, and yet for the sick, the dying, and the families of the already dead, he felt compelled to give it all he had.

Thursday, June 19, 2000, was a muggy, early summer’s day in London as Meeran took his place behind the bar table in the sombre and surprisingly understated surroundings of the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords, then the United Kingdom’s highest court. The five judges before him – the Law Lords – were considering the reasons that, eight months earlier, three judges of the Court of Appeal below the House of Lords had unanimously sided with Cape. The Law Lords’ decision would depend on how persuaded they were by the arguments of the lower court, and as the House of Lords was the court of last resort, its decision would be final.

Meeran was surprised to see senior judges openly show such apparent disdain for fellow members of the bench. Their Lordships’ collective head-shaking was indeed a rare sight – and one, as it turned out, that was pivotal in this case. They were not impressed by the Court of Appeal’s reasoning (it had failed to take proper account of the evidence presented to it, they said) and duly held, unanimously, that the case against Cape could proceed in British courts. Given the weight of evidence of negligence that he had so painstakingly amassed against the company, Meeran was optimistic about the prospects of a favourable outcome. Victory was in sight. Or at least so he thought.

The story of how Richard Meeran had reached this point and what happened next is as remarkable as it is unlikely. The plot twists its way through anger and despair, unheralded heroes and despicable villains, unexpected saviours, and peculiar alliances. It mixes corporate skulduggery with political intrigue and the asceticism of law with the raw emotion of righting wrongs. “This is a story I’ve wanted to be told for some time,” Richard said to me when I approached him about it.

I first met Richard in London in the late 1990s, when the Cape litigation was just beginning. Always snappily attired – “trendy”, as one glossy business magazine profile put it, “dressed in a black suit and incongruously distressed Prada-like slip-on shoes” (it was 2001/2) – he’s nevertheless a rolled-up-sleeves lawyer when it comes to the hard graft of litigation. With long fingers often steepled in contemplation in front of a crookedly good-looking face, he has a ready, engaging smile and a slightly disarming intensity when listening to what you have to say. His voice is soft, with a light South London accent, measured in tone, precise and economical.

There is no babbling with Richard, no space-filling “ahhs”, “umms” or “you knows”. What he says is to the point and always worth listening to. He also has a forensically keen eye for both detail and the absurd, which makes him an astute collector of anecdotes and a compelling storyteller. What he told me back then about the events leading up to his taking on the case in the first place and the events that were unfolding as we spoke was indeed riveting. I was part of what was in those days a small but animated business and human rights movement, and Richard’s coalface litigation experiences added authentic bite to the airy pontifications that academics like me were making at the time. The bite is still there. Indeed, in many ways, talismanic cases like Cape laid the foundations on which businesses today are pressed to take human rights seriously, even if they don’t like it. There’s nothing quite like a writ claiming human rights abuses broadcast across media headlines to capture the attention of a corporation’s senior management.

When I initially broached the idea with him of committing the Cape story to print, Richard immediately launched a string of yarns about bowel-loosening, two-seater plane rides over the African bush with a cross-eyed pilot; church halls overflowing with desperate asbestosis and mesothelioma victims; depositions detailing the horrors of children playing in asbestos dumps or, worse still, employed to trample asbestos fiber into enormous sacks; women “cobbers”, who were often exposed to the worst levels of contamination; and “chissa” boys whose lives depended on how quick they could run after lighting the fuses of explosive charges. He told me about discovering piles of incriminating workers’ records in the offices of an abandoned blue asbestos mine; anonymously hand-delivered envelopes exposing smear campaigns against him; the selflessness of some South African doctors alongside the corruption of others; and the obsessive and bitter rivalry between the two sets of opposing lawyers. Two hours raced by. He also hinted at the intense interest that leading South African politicians had in the case (“they used to fly up to London for the day to sit talking in my office”) and flagged a deeper story about how a so-called vulture fund (perhaps the most despised form of financier, which says a lot) emerged as the victims’ improbable knight in shining armour.

I was hooked. DM

In a Rain of Dust by David Kinley is published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

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