Researcher, analyst and former political prisoner Professor Raymond Suttner will graduate with his Master of Laws (LLM) degree this December, 49 years after submitting his thesis to the University of Cape Town (UCT).

Suttner had submitted his thesis, Legal Pluralism in South Africa, at the age of 23 and had extensively quoted banned listed communist Jack Simons, which, under the apartheid law, was illegal. Simons was also a mentor to Suttner.

Suttner’s supervisor at the time, Donald Molteno, had informed him that he could not allow the work to be submitted in a form that broke the law.

“I was myself a liberal at the time and was not breaking the law for directly political reasons but because I did not want to use Simons’s work, without acknowledgement. His ideas had influenced me a great deal and I did not want to claim credit for what were not my own ideas. I told Molteno that I would then have to withdraw the thesis, which shocked and upset him because he and I were fairly close,” said Suttner.

Almost 50 years later, UCT Public Law Professor Dee Smythe approached Suttner to resubmit his thesis after reading about his story in his book Inside Apartheid’s Prison.

“In the book are a few lines referring to his registration at some point for an LLM in the UCT Law Faculty. I started digging and found a CV that listed a 1969 thesis on Legal Pluralism in South Africa, with a note that it had not been submitted for examination. Talking to Prof Suttner about this, I learnt the details of why his LLM dissertation had not been submitted. It seemed to me, for a whole range of reasons, that this was an injustice that we – as a faculty and university – should recognise and remedy,” said Smythe.

It took Suttner about five months to find his thesis, which was hand-typed and was eventually delivered to UCT earlier this year, with only three original pages missing.

Smythe had read the dissertation with UCT acting Dean of Law Hugh Corder and both were impressed with the work, which they said would stand up to the scrutiny of examination. Smythe added that the work had remarkable contemporary resonance.

The thesis analyses the administration of customary law under white administrations, beginning from the colonial period. It highlights the distortions that were introduced into the law, as well as the impact it had on the status of women. 

Suttner states that customary law was patriarchal but that its character was heightened by white administrations and often diminished the rights of women below what these had been in precolonial societies.

He said customary law was also treated as static and unchanging. Suttner’s approach, following Simons, was to treat it as a dynamic set of practices, what is nowadays called ‘living custom’.

Suttner said he was indebted to Smythe and Corder, as well as former Dean of the Faculty of Law Penny Andrews.

“[They] supported this process and saw it through.  It was not my idea, in the sense that I had written it off,” he said.

Meanwhile, UCT said in a statement that it acknowledged where it had participated in unfairness and it sought to remedy this. 

Suttner said it was good that UCT has remedied this situation, where apartheid laws impacted on academic processes.

Raymond Suttner is regular Polity columnist.