Former Cape Town director of the Legal Resources Centre (LRC), Kobus Pienaar, was posthumously named the Cape attorney of the year at the Cape Law Society’s Annual General Meeting held in Port Alfred recently.

Kobus, who died in tragic circumstances on 4 February 2011, had dedicated his life and his work to the promotion of social justice in South Africa.  Born Jacobus Willem Pienaar on 28 May in 1957, he matriculated from Jan van Riebeeck High School in Cape Town and received a BA LLB from the University of Stellenbosch and an MA from the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.

As a young attorney in Knysna, Kobus was confronted by the injustices that occurred in the townships of the Southern Cape, an experience that altered the course of his professional career entirely. He turned his attention to helping the dispossessed and other victims of the apartheid government. His commitment to his clients at such an early age was unquestionable.

One of Kobus’ most notable victories was helping the Lawaaikamp, a neglected black residential area on the outskirts of George, to successfully resist the apartheid government’s removal plans. He assisted the community in a landmark Supreme Court of Appeals judgment that ordered the local municipality to upgrade the living conditions of an elderly woman by rebuilding her shack. Consequently, instead of removing community, the government was compelled to spend millions in order to upgrade the entire community.

Another major contribution to the Eastern Cape and land rights in South Africa came via the Mfengu of Keiskammahoek in their struggle to regain the land at Tsitsikamma from which they had been forcefully removed three decades earlier. This was the first land restoration in South Africa involving valuable private owned land.

He sought interdicts to protect inhabitants of small rural towns in the Eastern Cape from arrests and assaults by “kitskonstabels”. During the state of emergency, he worked tirelessly for the release of detainees, many held at the notorious ST Alban’s prison in Port Elizabeth.

Kobus contributed to academia through a number of articles, publications and manuals. He convened and taught the course on law and land rights as part of a MPhil degree in land and agrarian studies at the University of the Western Cape. He played a key role in the creation of legislation and programmes in the country’s new constitution aimed at restitution of land and reform, as well as security of tenure for marginalized communities.

Charlene May, an attorney at the LRC in Cape Town described Kobus as a “gentle giant who stood large and firm in his beliefs, while proving an extraordinary passionate fighter for socio-economic justice, who genuinely served South Africa well”.

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The LRC is an independent, non-profit, public interest law clinic, which uses law as an instrument of justice to provide legal services for the vulnerable.