Overview

Both a riveting courtroom drama and a real-life thriller, A Just Defiance tells the story of four young black South Africans who were arrested for a string of political murders in 1987. In gripping prose, Peter Harris - the white lawyer who defended the men - describes how he came to understand, while constructing the case to save the defendants from the death penalty, the chain of events that led them to undergo training at ANC camps in Angola and return to their homeland to execute some of the apartheid regime's most notorious collaborators. The shocking twists and turns of the high-profile trial kept the public in suspense during the dying days of apartheid. Harris' account of the trial is intercut with flashbacks to instances of the cold-blooded brilliance and deadly efficiency of the squad's operations. We see Nelson Mandela recently released from Robben Island as he begins negotiations that will eventually lead to the assumption of power by the ANC. We read about bomb-making and assassination attempts by both the ANC and the South African police. A critical and popular success in South Africa, this book is a tale of people driven to extremes by injustice and repression, and of ordinary citizens caught up in extraordinary events. Finally, it is the story of a country's search for reconciliation, one that captures the moral vertigo of South Africa's violent apartheid years.

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9780520273641

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Reviews

Many books written by lawyers about cases in which they were involved are at best tedious and at worst self-aggrandizing. Peter Harris's account of the 1985-9 trial of the Delmas Four is neither. The book, a gripping account of the last important trial of the apartheid era, is filled with personal accounts from the perspective of all those involved, most importantly the accused themselves. It reads like a legal thriller. -- Journal of African History The ANC's fight for freedom is relived in a gripping account of its armed wing's campaign of violence . . . Descriptions of prison visits, legal procedure and political developments could have been dry and dusty in the hands of a lesser author. Harris blows the cobwebs away and makes this a pacy courtroom drama, weaving in a compelling strand that follows the construction and journey of a bomb to its shocking destination. This is also a page-turner with a heart. Harris is an ever-present but unobtrusive narrator, a lawyer caught in an upside-down universe where the government, courts and police stand for injustice. -- Guardian This is a complex and fascinating book that operates on many levels and is all the better for it. It is a courtroom drama and a story of revolution and counter-revolution, some of whose characters display the highest form of bravery while others sink to the lowest level of obscene behavior. -- Irish Times

Author Information

Peter Harris practiced law in South Africa for 15 years before being seconded to the National Peace Accord in the early 1990s. He headed the Monitoring Directorate of the Independent Electoral Commission for the 1994 election and is currently Executive Chairman of the Resolve Group Management Consultancy, which he co-founded.

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