S. Africa Names First Nonwhite to Judicial Post

An Indian lawyer who was once banned from South African politics for his anti-apartheid activities has been appointed an acting judge on the Natal provincial Supreme Court, the nation’s first nonwhite to hold such a judicial position.

Hassan E. Mall, 64, was named to the post by Justice John A. Milne, president of the Natal provincial court, and confirmed by Hendrik J. Coetsee, the minister of justice, amid speculation that Mall would be given a permanent appointment when a vacancy occurred.

But Mall, a highly respected lawyer in Durban, said Sunday: “There is no commitment on the part of authorities to offer me a permanent position, and there is no commitment on my part to accept it. Sometimes an appointment as an acting justice leads to a permanent post, and sometimes it doesn’t.”

Forefront of Activism

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Mall was in the forefront of Indian opposition to apartheid, the South African system of racial segregation and minority white rule. He was joint secretary of the South African Indian Congress until it was effectively driven underground by the government.

In 1961, Mall was barred from politics for five years under the country’s Suppression of Communism Act and forbidden to leave Durban or talk with similarly banned persons, among other restrictions.

He was able to get a passport only in 1976, and then just for six months; he eventually was permitted to travel abroad freely in 1982.

“My politics have not really changed, but I am no longer active in the way that I was when I was younger,” Mall said Sunday by telephone from his home in Durban. Anti-apartheid militants nevertheless regard him today as “more than a founder . . . actually a patron of the struggle,” as a younger activist put it.

Nonwhite Lawyers

Although hundreds of black, Indian and Colored (mixed-race) lawyers are in private practice and a few are employed by the government as magistrates or prosecutors, none has been appointed before as even a temporary judge in one of the country’s provincial supreme courts, according to veteran lawyers.

After Indian and Colored minorities joined Parliament in 1984 with their own legislative chambers, President Pieter W. Botha appointed the country’s first nonwhite Cabinet members and later added two others as deputy ministers.

Last year, an Indian law professor was sent to the Brussels headquarters of the European Communities as South Africa’s first nonwhite ambassador, and a Colored politician has just taken up his post as ambassador to the Netherlands. Indians and Coloreds are also getting posts in the armed forces that were previously closed to nonwhites.

Born in a small town in India, Mall came to South Africa as a boy with his immigrant parents and graduated from the University of Fort Hare, the country’s leading black college at the time, and from the University of Cape Town law faculty.