At a Glance
The Eastern Cape, Legal Training, and the Path to Human Rights Advocacy
Griffiths Mxenge was born in the Eastern Cape in 1935 — in the tradition of educated African professional activism that the mission school and Fort Hare tradition had been producing for decades. The Eastern Cape's distinctive role in South African liberation politics — the region that had produced Mandela, Govan Mbeki, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, and many others through the specific combination of mission education and the direct experience of colonial dispossession — shaped Mxenge's formation in the way it shaped all of the region's activists: with a particular clarity about what the liberation struggle was for and what it would cost to win it.
Training as a lawyer in apartheid South Africa required navigating a system that was designed to restrict Black professional advancement while making limited exceptions for those who demonstrated exceptional ability and persistence. The legal profession's racial barriers were not absolute — Black South Africans could qualify as attorneys and, with greater difficulty, as advocates — but they were real and significant, and the professional landscape that Black lawyers navigated was shaped at every point by the racial hierarchy that determined which clients, which courts, which firms, and which judges one had access to.
Mxenge built his legal career in Natal, where the combination of the large Indian legal community — which had a longer tradition of professional legal practice than the African community — and the dense activist networks of the Durban ANC and Indian Congress created a context in which a committed human rights lawyer had both a community of professional colleagues and a steady flow of political clients who needed representation. His move from the Eastern Cape to Natal was a professional and political calculation: the conditions in Durban were favourable for the kind of practice he wanted to build.
Robben Island and the Radicalisation of a Lawyer
Mxenge's imprisonment on Robben Island in the late 1960s — for activities related to his ANC membership — gave his subsequent legal work a dimension that purely professional training could not have provided. He had been through the apartheid state's repressive apparatus as a prisoner rather than merely as a lawyer representing prisoners, and the direct personal knowledge of what detention, trial, and imprisonment meant in the lived experience of a political prisoner deepened his understanding of what he was doing when he defended activists in court.
The Robben Island experience also connected him to the community of political prisoners who were being held there through the 1960s — the Rivonia trialists, the PAC prisoners, the activists from various regional ANC structures — and to the political traditions and analysis that the island's informal university was maintaining and transmitting. When he returned to Natal after his release, he carried both the personal experience of imprisonment and the political formation that the island's community had deepened.
His legal practice in the 1970s was built on this foundation. The activism of the Black Consciousness movement — which Steve Biko and his colleagues were building in the Eastern Cape and which was spreading across South Africa through SASO and the Black People's Convention — was producing a new generation of politically active young Black South Africans who were being arrested, charged, and tried under the security legislation with increasing frequency. Mxenge was among the lawyers who defended them, bringing to that work both his legal skills and his direct personal knowledge of what the system he was working within was capable of.
The Vlakplaas Decision and the Assassination
The apartheid security police's decision to assassinate Griffiths Mxenge was not impulsive. It was a calculated assessment that a lawyer who consistently and effectively defended ANC activists — who understood the security legislation, who knew how to challenge the admissibility of confessions obtained under torture, who built cases for his clients with the rigour of a man who had himself experienced what his clients were going through — was sufficiently dangerous to the security apparatus's effectiveness to warrant elimination. The logic was bureaucratic in the most chilling sense: Mxenge was being assessed as a problem to be solved rather than a person with rights.
The Vlakplaas unit — the security police's dedicated assassination force, based on a farm near Pretoria that gave the unit its name — was the instrument through which the apartheid state acted on these assessments. The unit had been established in the late 1970s and was responsible for a series of killings of liberation movement activists both inside South Africa and in the Frontline States. Its methods were designed to look like something other than state assassination — robberies, attacks by political opponents, accidents — because the apartheid government understood that open acknowledgement of its assassination programme would have significant international consequences.
Mxenge was found stabbed to death at Umlazi Stadium in Durban on 19 November 1981. He was forty-six years old. The circumstances of his death were immediately understood by the legal and activist community as a political assassination, but the security police denied involvement and the standard mechanisms for investigating murder — police investigation, prosecution, accountability — were inoperative in a system where the police who were responsible for investigating political killings were the same police who had carried them out. The truth about his murder was established only through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process more than fifteen years later.
Victoria Mxenge and the Double Assassination
What made the Mxenge family's story uniquely terrible in the already terrible history of the apartheid state's use of assassination against the liberation movement was what happened four years after Griffiths's murder. Victoria Mxenge — Griffiths's wife, who had continued and expanded his legal practice after his death, who had become a prominent UDF activist, and who was by 1985 one of the most important human rights lawyers in Natal — was also assassinated. She was shot dead outside her home in Umlazi on 1 August 1985 by a Vlakplaas hit team.
The decision to kill both a husband and a wife, four years apart, by the same security apparatus, was a statement about the apartheid state's assessment of what this family represented: not a single dangerous individual but a tradition of commitment, a professional and political partnership, that the security police judged to be sufficiently threatening to warrant the elimination of both its members. The Mxenge children — who lost their father in 1981 and their mother in 1985 — were the most direct human cost of this calculation, and their situation became one of the symbols that the liberation movement and the international anti-apartheid community used to demonstrate what the apartheid state was prepared to do.
The TRC and the Account of What Happened
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's investigation of Griffiths Mxenge's murder was one of the most important in the Commission's work on the security establishment's assassination programme. Eugene de Kock — who had led the Vlakplaas unit after Mxenge's murder and who became, through the TRC process and his subsequent criminal prosecution, one of the most important sources of information about the security police's methods and operations — provided testimony about the Mxenge killing that established both what had happened and who had ordered it.
The Commission's findings gave the Mxenge family and the public the account of what had happened that the apartheid state had denied for years. The acknowledgement that the security police had killed Griffiths Mxenge, that the killing had been ordered by officers acting within the security establishment's chain of command rather than by rogue individuals, and that the same apparatus had subsequently killed Victoria Mxenge — these findings were not surprising to those who had known the family, but they were politically and legally significant as official acknowledgements of the state's responsibility.
Legacy
Griffiths Mxenge's legacy is partly personal — the specific legal work he did, the clients he defended, the cases he won and lost, the human rights practice he built in Natal through the 1970s. It is partly the legacy of the human rights legal tradition he represented: the tradition of lawyers who used their professional skills in the service of the liberation movement, who understood that the defence of political activists in court was itself a form of political struggle, and who accepted the personal risks that this understanding imposed.
His death, and Victoria's death four years later, is also a legacy — a statement about what the apartheid state was prepared to do to maintain itself, and about the specific kind of courage that it required of the people who chose to work against it in full knowledge of those consequences. Griffiths Mxenge knew, by 1981, what the security police were capable of. He had been to Robben Island. He had defended activists who had been tortured. He had watched colleagues face the same harassment and threats that he faced. He continued his work anyway. That continuation, under those conditions, is the essential fact of his legacy.