Photos/SA 01 — Anthony, founder of the Karoo Mobile Law Clinic.jpg in the Consultancy folder. Anthony's surname is still to be verified from Mark's contemporaneous notes, from the CLAIRE archive (Al Cook is the named connector), or from Lawyers for Human Rights records. The interview was conducted approximately ten months before the clinic's 10th anniversary (referenced near the end: "We're going to have our 10th anniversary next year"), placing the recording in approximately mid-1998. This is Mark's MicroChronicle work continuing into the post-apartheid transition period, and pairs with the South African High Commissioner address (also recorded c. 1998–99) as parallel macro-and-ground-level views of the same transition. The interviewee's narrative is fluent, reflective, and unusually self-aware — characteristic of someone who has spent years explaining the work to outsiders. This version preserves the voice and structure of the interview while adding section breaks and standardising place names.First of all — what we're going to do — we'll go through this after it's done. If you have to stop and pause and think, it's not a big deal — because we'll be transcribing it, it'll be all text form, and it'll be up on the net. And you'll see it and you'll say "well, hold on Mark, this is how I want it," or something like that. So feel comfortable with what you're saying.
OK. I was born in South Africa, near Durban, in KwaZulu-Natal as it is now. I went to boys' boarding schools, like we did in those days. I used to travel two and a half days by train to get to school. So I thought it was very exciting — because that's where I learnt anything that was important in my life. Like how to blow smoke rings.
Sorry to interrupt — why did you want to leave South Africa behind?
I was just more comfortable. I won't pretend it was a political exile or anything as conscious as that. I just knew that the way life was here for a white male South African — especially of privileged background — was not comfortable. I knew that somehow it wasn't true, it wasn't the full picture. Somehow I was being conned, but I didn't quite have the consciousness to know exactly in what way. I just knew that it wasn't sitting correctly.
I had an opportunity, in the late 1980s, to come up to Colesburg in the Karoo. I had a double motivation. One was, I saw a gap for a rural legal service. There was nothing of the kind anywhere in the country at the time.
You said "we."
I moved up here with my family, but I started the law clinic. What happened was I came into the Colesburg community and I started looking for two community activists really to work with me. Someone who knew the community, who knew the problems, and who would be my contact with the community. I could provide the legal expertise and the status of a professional person in a small town; they could help me with identifying the problems and the people who were in need of a service.
Because I was now, as it were, a notable change in the community, there were a lot of repercussions among the white community. The white Chamber of Commerce would not allow me to rent any premises in town. Anybody who looked like they were going to rent us new premises would receive a delegation that they would be boycotted if they supported me.
In fact, the head of this local security police, it turned out later, had one of my records — a record that I'd made when I was younger. When he found this out, he asked for my autograph — and we never had any more visits from the security police.
Things have really changed, looking back at that. I can trace it to a few things. One is that because I'm also farming in the district — slowly I've got to know, I'm talking of the white community now — we meet over the counter at the farmer's co-op and talk about the rain and the sheep prices. That has already made a difference. There's a human being behind it.
When the politics started changing, the law clinic occupied a very particular niche in the communities. I've only spoken about the white community until now. The black community supported us from the beginning.
What we have done at the Law Clinic is try to bring together a group of staff that gives the kind of balance we need for our work here. I've got one black lawyer and three black paralegals, who also do educational work besides paralegal work.
We've developed and initiated a pilot project for a rural legal aid service — using a kind of public defender system. We get black graduates out of universities — where they really struggle to train as lawyers because they're not getting the opportunities — to come and practise as a public defender. Under the auspices, the supervision, of one of the local attorneys' firms. They do the work for the state, of criminal defences. They train as lawyers and graduate at the end of a period. They get a job — and they also are beginning to change the culture in the white attorneys' firms. Suddenly, for the first time, those firms have a black member of staff. Just internally, as well as vis-à-vis their clientele, it's a huge shift. This is a very conservative area.
The other thing I do is I get involved in work with small — what they call emerging farmers — black farmers' groups who are trying to get an opportunity to farm commercially for the first time. My work is to persuade municipalities who own grazing land to hand it over, lease it at a nominal rate, to subsistence farmers — so they can begin their work.
I want to explore the '80s a little bit, and why there would have been resistance to you and the clinic. What were the law cases that the whites would have been anxious about?
OK. A lot of our cases involved police abuse of power — police arresting people, especially if they were politically active, for no reason at all, or for very flimsy reasons. Who would ill-treat them in the cells. Who would prosecute them in court without having a real substantial case. So that immediately was a kind of political polarisation — because the police and the government were identical, really, at that stage. We just became seen as the enemy. One of the things, we were considered to be communists — which was not the thing to be seen in mid-town mid-South Africa.
For me, moving out of commercial practice at the bar — where you solved the disputes of rich people — to be able to spend the whole afternoon with an elderly lady who had lost her pension, or some man who couldn't get unemployment benefit, or someone whose child had been lost when taken into police custody — often they're just bureaucratic problems that we solve. Often we just open channels for people to talk to each other. Only as a last resort do we go to court. But we have that backup. We've got about a 90% success rate in our cases.
I think the real problems in the judicial system are not so much that you've got magistrates or judges making outrageously unfair decisions. I think generally if the evidence points in one direction, they'll honour that. But I think it's the personal and subliminal and indirect things that make black people, especially in the countryside, feel that it's just not their court.
Can you tell me about how you got involved with CLAIRE?
Yeah. I think Al Cook first put me onto CLAIRE. Al Cook's been in and out of South Africa doing interesting things for a long time. He came here one day and he came and counted sheep with us — that's what I remember. We counted sheep and drank some beer. Then he wrote when he got back to Canada and said "there's a group who would really like to send some students out — I'm sure they'd like to come to the Karoo."
Can you give me your reflections over the last — how many years has it been that the Karoo Mobile Law Clinic has been working?
We're going to have our 10th anniversary next year. We're proud of it because it was the first law clinic. When we started, nobody had even — the idea seemed to have not occurred to anybody — to have a sophisticated rural legal service for people who had no access to lawyers, to corridors of power, to influence, to anything really.
That's tremendous. Thank you.
- Karoo Mobile Law Clinic, Colesburg — first rural law clinic of its kind in South Africa, founded ~1988–89, operates across approximately 500,000 square kilometres of the Karoo
- Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) — South African legal NGO founded 1979, the original funder of the clinic
- CLAIRE — Canadian-based organisation (apparently Canadian Lawyers Association for International Relations and Equality, or Canadian Lawyers Abroad — full name to verify) that sends Canadian law-student interns annually to the clinic; Al Cook is the named connector
- Charmaine — the second CLAIRE intern, a black Canadian woman whose presence "made a difference in the town" simply by being confidently friendly
- Kahin Ismail — the third CLAIRE intern, interviewed by Mark separately (see South African Interview 02)
- Goyasa Township — the black township in Colesburg where Kahin lived during his internship
- The autograph moment. The local security-police chief who tormented the lawyer for years turned out to own one of his records from his musician days, asked for an autograph, and "we never had any more visits from the security police." Funny, specific, totally true to the texture of a small town under apartheid. Stand-alone short-form candidate.
- The white community boycott and its slow erosion. The Chamber of Commerce refusing him premises. The post office refusing him a post box. The security police breaking into computer systems. Then over time, the farmer's-co-op counter, the rain and the sheep prices, "there's a human being behind it." The micro-mechanics of social reconciliation in a community that did not want to reconcile. Pairs editorially with interviews 02 and 03 from the Czech series — the post-revolution reckoning is the same process running in reverse: there it's former colleagues realising they can't pretend they were never communists; here it's former boycotters realising the boycotted person sells sheep at the same co-op.
- The famous white clients who tiptoe in after hours. "Some of the more famous ones only come after hours. They phone and ask me to stay late, and they tiptoe in and wouldn't be seen dead there. But that's fine." The continued private dependence on the public dissident — a universal pattern in post-authoritarian transitions, equally present in the Czech interviews (the colleagues who took back their Party cards but kept their positions).
- The neutral chair role during the 1990–1994 transition. The lawyer's account of being called in to chair negotiating forums precisely because both sides distrusted each other and he had a track record of serving the black community while being a white professional. A genuinely scarce political role that emerged in transition periods and that almost no one is positioned to fill. Mark himself in his future studio work is positioned to play a structurally similar role — bridge between frontline democracy defenders and international NGOs in CEE.
- "The law was seen as the white man's instrument." His account of subliminal courtroom racism — language, attitudes, who represents whom — is among the cleanest single-paragraph accounts of how a formally fair judicial system can be experienced as systematically unfair. Directly applicable to 2026 questions about whether liberal-democratic institutions, even when formally functional, work for the publics most exposed to authoritarian disinformation. Same question, different institutions.
- "There was a middle ground, and some white people were willing to participate in a way that was sympathetic." His ten-years-on reflection. The same construction-vs-deconstruction theme: what was built in Colesburg was not the law clinic itself but the discovery, by both communities, that there was a middle ground that hadn't been there before. The studio's editorial line on rebuilding the public sphere in CEE is the same proposition.
- Public defender pilot programme (Section 11) — the practical institutional bridge: black law graduates, who couldn't get articling positions in white firms, brought in as state-funded public defenders under supervision in those same white firms, which gradually changed the firms' internal culture. An institutional design lesson that travels well to post-authoritarian transitions generally.