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1988

Nineteen eighty-eight, and it’s raining, drizzling – nothing unusual about that in Ireland. I’m sitting in the kitchen of Kader and Louise Asmal in suburban Dublin, feeling very, very at home – nothing unusual about that. And we’re doing work that we know is historic. It was one of those ‘pinch-me’ moments (maybe the first real ‘pinch-me’ moment for me) – knowing that we were entering into a whole new phase, not simply denouncing, imagining, mobilising; but beginning to craft the foundations of a new society. What was unusual was that, for that whole weekend, Kader didn’t smoke once inside that house! The way we put it, we were converting the Freedom Charter into an operational document that would protect the rights for which people in South Africa had been fighting.

2016

I was rushing to catch my plane at the airport when a middle-aged African man blocked my path and flung his arms around me. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ he kept repeating. ‘It wasn’t me,’ I interrupted, ‘I left the Court some years ago.’ But he kept his grip and carried on offering thanks. I had to pull myself away to reach the gate in time. But then as the plane lifted off my heart swelled with emotion. The Constitutional Court had ordered the President to pay back the public funds overspent on his private home. There was hope. Millions of ordinary South Africans were celebrating. This book is dedicated to them all. It is they who ensure that the Constitution lives on, deeply rooted in the realities and ideals of the nation.