Had I been a poet like the people’s poet, the late Ingoapele Madingoane, who wrote and recited the famous work, “Africa my beginning, Africa my ending”, during our struggle years as the Soweto 1976 students; youth who fought and dismantled the then apartheid Bantu education system which the white government sought to feed us with aplomb, I would pen a poem in honour of my dearly departed elder brother, the “boytjie” from Durban, Nicholas “Fink” Haysom, who sadly went yonder to his maker last Tuesday in New York, USA.
Fink and I called each other “boytjie”. He was “boytjie from Durban” and I was a “boytjie from Soweto”. I must confess I wasn’t comfortable with us calling each other boytjie because Fink was in all respects, and by far much, more senior to me. Granted, he was an attorney, and me, an advocate, but that didn’t mean that we were equal in stature.
Fink was much older and qualified much earlier than me in the legal profession.
Since Fink’s demise, much has been said or written about the sterling work he did in the UN, especially in the Republic of South Sudan, where Fink and I met after not having seen each other for years after he joined the UN.
Coincidentally, the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appointed Fink to head the global organisation’s mission in South Sudan in 2021 and President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa appointed yours truly as the ambassador to the Republic of South Sudan, where we met at the capital city, Juba. Our meeting in Juba when I paid Fink a courtesy visit in his UN mission office became a reunion of two boytjies who had been lost from each other for years. Courtesy visits are meant to be brief in nature but ours went beyond an hour.
What is less said about Fink is the role he played in the struggle along us (black people broadly) back then in South Africa when we dismantled the apartheid government. As a privileged white attorney in South Africa, I was surprised at how he chose to represent us against the white apartheid regime, which was hellbent on denying us black people the opportunity to live freely and democratically.
The firm of attorneys he co-founded, Cheadle Thompson & Haysom, by and large represented the majority of us black people who fought fiercely against the apartheid government, such that at intervals, the apartheid security apparatus kept on detaining and locking him up in prison simply for representing us. Our fight was in no way criminal. We simply wanted to live in an equal just constitutional South Africa, where the rule of law ranked equally supreme for all of us citizens, irrespective of colour, creed and any other consideration.
I was not surprised when the father of our nation, Nelson Mandela, appointed Fink as his special adviser when we attained our democratic freedom in South Africa. Nor was I surprised when the UN secretary-general appointed Fink as the special representative of the UNSG to South Sudan.
Fink was among the legal minds who drafted our first democratic constitution. His tenure in South Sudan was equally about his quest of wanting to see the country achieving her democracy and holding a national general election due on December 22, 2026.
I have no doubt that were Fink to be interred in Africa, Ramaphosa would most probably consider offering him some form of government official funeral service.
Nicholas Fink Haysom, the boytjie from Durban. The holy book in 2 Timothy 4:7 says: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith.” You did just that my dear elder brother. Rest in eternal peace.
- Muofhe is ambassador to the Republic of South Sudan
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