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 (now Gqeberha) with a progressive young law student named Geoff Budlender.   

“I mean, it was a nine- to ten-hour trip,” says Budlender. “A wonderful way to get to know somebody. So Steve had a big influence on my life. He made me understand how different the black experience was from the white experience. His Black Consciousness philosophy was completely persuasive. He opened my mind to a different view of the world.” 

Budlender is speaking to Maverick Citizen inside his office at the Huguenot Chambers, the Cape Bar’s central city hub. Last month, he was awarded the prestigious International Bar Association’s pro bono award for 2021 – a mantle which he wears gratefully, but lightly. He deflects congratulations with a smile. 

While discussing significant moments and landmark cases from his past – these include the abolishment of the death penalty in South Africa and the countrywide roll-out of antiretroviral medication – Budlender, in typical fashion, shuns the limelight. 

Colleagues describe Budlender as a raconteur and a mensch, and as a humble man, a humility probably well captured in his comment: “We always toned down our rhetoric, and were never shrill.”  

This was him elaborating on South Africa’s Legal Resources Centre (LRC), 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.  

At 72, Budlender’s current pro bono work includes cases on arms being exported from South Africa to the Middle East, and the government’s failure to provide meals to schoolchildren during the Covid-19 epidemic.  

The chairperson of the South African Human Rights Commission, Professor Bongani Majola’s voice is heartfelt as he pays tribute to Budlender.  

“I’m worried about underselling Geoff,” says Majola. “Geoff is a consummate human rights defender. He is very passionate about human rights. You know, with Geoff, when there was a problem, he saw more of a solution than a challenge. And nothing would deter or discourage him from going on; fighting on, giving it everything that he had. His work in human rights, it’s bigger than Mount Kilimanjaro.” 

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. 

In Budlender’s office, a large window looks on to Table Mountain. “How lucky are we to work here?” he says. Up ahead, sunlight glints off Parliament’s iconic 120 Plein Street high-rise building.  

Budlender pauses, his eyes shining, too.  

“Let me tell you a story about Steve Biko,” he says. “So, Steve and I, we were on this long road trip, during which I was at pains to explain to him how radical I was. How I wasn’t like other white people. Of course, I was putting my best foot forward. 

“Then, as we approached Port Elizabeth, I said to him, ‘Where would you like me to drop you off?’ And he said to drop him off at Barney Pityana’s mother’s house, in New Brighton, the oldest African township in Port Elizabeth. I said, ‘fine’. So we drove on for a couple of minutes. 

“Then Steve started laughing. I said to him: ‘What are you laughing about?’ And he said that he’s laughing, because I didn’t know how to get to New Brighton, and I didn’t know how to tell him that. And he was absolutely right.” 

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’.”

Budlender grew up in a comfortable middle-class home in the suburb of Mill Park, where he matriculated at Grey High School.  During his first year at the University of Cape Town in 1968, he was among 600 students who occupied the university’s Bremner Building for nine days, following the termination of anthropologist Archie Mafeje’s teaching contract due to pressure from the apartheid government. At the time, he joined the anti-apartheid National Union of South African Students, better known as Nusas. 

In 1972, Budlender, originally enrolled to study medicine, changed to a degree in law. “We had a lot of student protests and relied very heavily on lawyers to defend us. And I saw what lawyers could actually do to help people exercise their rights. It grabbed my imagination. It looked like dealing with issues that I cared about. And that’s why I decided to become a lawyer.”

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.  

He recollects: “In America, I saw public interest lawyers fighting for human rights in various kinds of ways, actively engaging with issues and trying to change the law. That seemed to me a really useful thing. And so back in South Africa, a small group of us came together…”

In 1979 Budlender, and fellow prominent lawyers Arthur Chaskalson and Felicia Kentridge founded the LRC. 

He recalls: “Government was completely perplexed, because here were people working inside the law, with the law, but challenging them through the law, and they didn’t quite know what to do about it.”

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.”

Advocate Geoff Budlender was awarded the prestigious International Bar Association’s pro bono award for 2021. (Photo: David Harrison)