When Kholwani Nyathi, editor of The Standard called me and requested that I write an obituary for the late Professor Reg Austin within a matter of a few hours my first instinct was to refuse on the ground that it cannot be done at such short notice, but then I thought that would be a disservice to a great man who had the most profound influence on my life.
For a long time, I just didn’t know where to begin, what to include and what to exclude and even where to end.
Do I begin at the beginning or do I begin at the end or for that matter somewhere in the middle?
Let me begin at the end. A few weeks ago, Regs (as our professor and chairman of the Department of Law at the University of Zimbabwe he refused to allow us to call him anything else other than Reg) daughters Bea, Josephine and Laura contacted me saying they were organising a surprise 91st birthday celebration for Reg and wondered if it was possible for me to be in London on the day.
Unfortunately, it was not possible. I wish I had the sixth sense to tell that would be the last opportunity for me to see the great man alive.
A few days ago, I started receiving news that Reg might be late.
I couldn’t believe it so I reached out to his daughter Bea and asked her if what I was hearing about Reg could be true. Her response was shattering. She wrote back:
“Hi Welshman, I am afraid it is. Reggie left us yesterday, being held by his family, he left calmly and without pain. He enjoyed his 91st birthday last weekend with messages of love all over…….
“We were remembering your dancing (I am a horrible one leg dancer) last week amongst many lovely friends and memories.”
That was it. A life so full of love, kindness, intellectual rigour, nationalistic and patriotic zeal was gone.
Reg was a fine scholar. A rigorous intellectual. The best international law expert I have ever had the pleasure of working with.
An international civil servant who worked for the United Nations in some of the most difficult countries in the world.
One who mentored so many of us and who made it possible for many Zimbabweans to work for the United Nations. Luke Mhlaba. Sipho Malanga.
As I reflected on the news of his passing, I remembered his passion for international law and in particular his deep knowledge of the laws of war and the doctrine of self defence.
He so fervently believed in the restraints imposed on states by both international customary law and treaty laws.
He was a firm believer on the doctrine of a law based international order which is underpinned by international peace. Which outlaws wars of aggression and which protects fundamental human rights even during periods of armed conflict.
Having been blessed to have lived to be 91 years old I wondered what he made in his later year of the Trumpian world order.
What he made of the Israeli state and the genocide in Palestine, particularly Gaza.
I wondered too what he would say of the deafening international silence and inaction over that genocide.
I could imagine how perplexed he would have been at the total failure of international law and the duty to protect not just in Palestine but in Iran as well.
Everything he taught us about the importance of the International legal order has proven to be nothing but a paper tiger in the Trumpian world order. His favourite author was Professor Tunkin. As his students in international law we nicknamed him Professor Tunkin.
I still remember vividly his inaugural lecture as professor of law at the University of Zimbabwe. The hall was packed to capacity.
With all the humility which was his core DNA he took the podium and constructed a three-page first sentence defining the state all the way from the perspective of the natural law school through liberalism all the way to the Marxist school of thought. It was vintage Reg.
But Reg was far much more than the expert he was on international law. I bring him home, Zimbabwe.
As I pondered the passing of the man who taught me just about everything my father didn’t teach me about life, I wondered what he would think of today’s Zimbabwe situation particularly on the legal front. Reg was a legal historian. He once wrote in an article entitled “The law and the Individual”:
“While the jurists in Dehli were progressively expanding the boundaries of the Rule in January 1959, the Federal and Territorial governments here were regressing into the 17th century, indulging in large scale detentions of political opponents and generally strengthening the foundations of a repressive system which they continued to build upon into late 1979. The post-occupation partenalism of bitter colonial government was into a fascist bludgeon which included: The criminalisation of democratic political or security related crimes: the prescription of mandatory (including death) sentence, the introduction of communal punishment; the growth on a geometric scale, of increasingly arbitrary and summary judicial (and eventually non-judicial) trial procedures; the blanket and advance indemnification by executive fiat of official acts causing otherwise unlawful injury, death or destruction in the cause of “security” and the power of virtual perpetual detention without trial of real or imagined political opponents.”
And the punchline:
“…the Smith constitutions emasculated the courts and lawyers of Rhodesia, turning them, in relation to a vital part of the law- that relating to the political and civil rights of the individual – into little more that highly paid, elaborately be – wigged YES MEN…….”
If he so wrote as a legal historian I wondered how that ever so sharp mind of his would write about the Zimbabwean courts today.
Would he be as trenchant and would his pen be any mightier?
I wondered too whether the Reg who was always quick to put himself in harm’s way to help, to protect, to shield , to defend and to save others as he did when Shadreck Gutto was issued with a deportation order and the authorities were ready and itching to deport him to Daniel arap Moi’s Kenya and he had, in the middle of the night, to drive him from Harare to Plumtree border post to escape what would have been a brutal deportation to Kenya to face at best indefinite detention if not death, still remembered in his older self, one of his favourite passages from Judge Learned Hand:
“I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions upon laws and upon courts’. These are false hopes, believe me, they are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women, when it dies there is no constitution, no law, no court, which can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution no law, no court to save it”.
Those whom I had the privilege and pleasure of teaching constitutional law at UZ would remember just how tough it was to plough through the series of Madzimbamuto Judgments and make sense of the underlying jurisprudence.
The simplicity with which Reg taught some of us the political and legal science behind the most difficult legal questions was truly amazing.
He had such a fine brilliant and beautiful mind. He was also highly protective and practical.
The law school at UZ was not for the faint hearted. He inherited its leadership during a difficult transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe in 1981.
Before then the law school was a bastion of Rhodesianism with all its racist baggage.
Sometimes it was as toxic as Zimbabwe’s politics of today. He navigated all of it with skill and unparalleled capacity balancing the past, the present and the future.
During the most difficult times when our young selves as the post independence generation of lectures who included such luminaries as Justice Ben Hlatshwayo, of the Zimbabwean Constitutional Court, the late Shepherd Nzombe (may God bless his soul taken away so young with all his talent and brilliance) Luke Mhlaba, Emmanuel Magade, Mary Maboreke, of course, Kempton Makamure, Shadreck Gutto, Victor Nkiwane and many others, Reg would invite some of us to his home for fatherly advice over dinner prepared by his most gracious wife Olive, who became like a mother to us.
As the consummate Zapu nationalist he taught us in express terms the value of developing what he called a buffalo skin.
One of his very best teachings was: Never ever allow anyone to get under your skin and if you can’t help it and they do never let them see that they have.
Where do I stop? By the way before Jessie Majomes’ time at the Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission Reg was the first chairman of that so important a commission post the 2013 constitution after its adoption by the people at the preceding referendum.
His commitment to human rights and the rule of law was second to none.
I have worked with a lot of white folks in my six decades on mother earth and I can say without any equivocation that very few had transcended race in the manner in which Reg had done as a white Zimbabwean, who grew up in racist Bulawayo.
I remember one day in the late 80’s we were having coffee at an Avondale coffee shop together with Jeremy Brickhill and loe and behold this group of drunken Rhodies had a verbal go at us and Reg, ever the perennial gentleman sat there and asked us to simply be unmoved one way or the other.
That wisdom was so satisfying.
Then there were the heady days of Gukurahundi when ex-Zipra soldiers were abducted, held and tortured at Mashumbi Pools. When in the verge of death some would be dumped at the outskirts of Harare.
The late vice-president Phelekezela Mpoko, he was in the security establishment then, would alert Reg. I was then the chairman of Zapu at UZ. Reg would risk everything and drive to pick them up. Those were tough days Reg was tough.
I must really stop. The editor is on my back. I run way behind his deadline. But then let me end on a personal note. Reg desperately wanted me to teach law.
I didn’t, so I refused his entreaties to join the law faculties staff development programme. He would not give up.
He drove all the way to Bulawayo to ask my mother to intercede. She did. The rest is history.
My deepest sincerest condolences to Reg’s family, particularly his wife and daughters Josephine, Laura, and Bea. May Reg the father, the husband, the nationalist, the fine jurist, the professor rest in eternal peace in the knowledge that he made so so many of us and save so so many others during his life.
*Welshman Ncube is the former Industry and Commerce minister and a constitutional lawyer