George Bizos

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

Defining moment: Nelson Mandela salutes cheering crowds upon his release from the prison in 1990

One of the four executors of Mandela’s will, the Greek-born lawyer met Mandela in the mid-Fifties when he represented him in the first of his many brushes with white authority.

Mr Bizos was among the defence team at the infamous Rivonia Trial, in 1964, at which Mandela and others were sentenced to life for sabotage against the state.
Then, when Mandela was sent to the prison on Robben Island, Mr Bizos was designated as his legal visitor, regularly catching the 45-minute ferry from Cape Town to the forbidding penal colony.

Until he was hospitalised, Mandela loved to reminisce about the struggle against apartheid, and the two men would swap old stories over a glass of chilled white wine. In recent months, however, their conversations became more difficult, for Mandela’s mental sharpness was greatly diminished.


George Bizos recalled poignantly: ‘His memory isn’t very good. He repeats himself and there are long silences.’
 
When Mandela’s synapses do briefly flicker, he speaks only of the distant past, reminiscing about the Fifties when, as a spirited young law student, he would challenge the segregation laws by sitting in the whites-only section of buses and trains.

He never talks about the trial or his years in prison; nor are there any reminders of that desperate time on view in his home. It is as though he has chosen to obliterate that entire section of his life, suggests Mr Bizos, who is still fighting major civil rights cases at 84.

Old confidant: George Bizos, pictured here with Winnie Mandela in 1991, was Nelson Mandela's lawyer for more than half a century. He said Mandela was largely unaware of the unsavoury behaviourof family members as he lies in a hospital bed