Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo made history in 1952 when they opened South Africa’s first black law firm.
Image: AFP
In late 1952, Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo opened the doors of Mandela & Tambo in Chancellor House, Johannesburg, directly across from the Magistrate's Court. It was South Africa's first Black-owned law partnership, and its location was no accident.
Every day, the queue outside their small office told its own story about what apartheid law actually did to ordinary people's lives.
Pass laws, forced removals, restrictions on where Black South Africans could live, work or even walk without a permit- all of it fed a constant stream of criminal charges against people whose only offence was existing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Mandela later described the firm as the practice Africans turned to first and the one they turned to when nowhere else was left.
Most of their clients had little money. Mandela & Tambo offered legal defence at low or no cost, giving people who would otherwise have faced the courts alone a fighting chance. The daily exposure to that suffering, case after case, is widely credited with hardening both men's resolve toward the liberation struggle they would go on to lead.
The state shut the firm down in 1960 as apartheid repression intensified, but by then its work had already helped shape the two men who would define the fight against it.
*Our Madiba Archives celebrate Mandela Month. More than repeating the headlines everyone already knows. It means remembering the man, not just the myth: the runaway, the boxer, the lawyer, the prisoner, and the president, all captured in real time by the titles that were there to report it.