Edwin Cameron: Still Fighting, Still Hopeful

Robert Calderisi has been writing profiles of twenty outstanding Africans and has kindly given the Trust permission to publish the profile of Edwin Cameron (South Africa-at-Large & Keble 1976). See also Edwin's interview for the Trust's Oral History project, which was one of the sources Robert drew on for this profile. 

When Nelson Mandela named him a judge in 1994 – the year South Africa finally became a democracy – he called Edwin Cameron one of the country’s “new heroes”. Five years later, Cameron announced publicly that he was living with HIV, the first and still-only senior government official in all of Africa to do so. When he first decided to take that plunge, he pulled his car over to the side of the road, leaned his head on the steering wheel, and sobbed uncontrollably. He feared the exposure and thought his career was doomed. Instead, he went on to serve on the Constitutional Court, the country’s highest legal body, and to be recognized as one of the leading legal minds of his generation. More importantly, as a result of his openness, he challenged the AIDS denialism of his government, fought the stigma keeping so many people from being tested and treated, and helped lead an international effort to slash the cost of anti-retroviral drugs, thereby saving millions of lives.  

Born in Pretoria on 15 February 1953, of an English-speaking father and Afrikaner mother, Cameron has spent his entire life fighting stigma. But the first shame he faced was not being gay. It was being poor. For much of his life, he hid the fact that he and his two sisters had spent nearly five years in an orphanage, because their alcoholic father was jailed for car theft and their mother could not afford to raise them on her own. Then, a year after being sent away, one of his sisters was killed in a cycling collision.

Sixty years later, those events are still raw in his mind.  “It was a hard start but I think what is important is how you deal with such anguish as an adult. Do you incorporate it productively and sensitively into your work and emotions and relationships with other people? Or do you let it become some sort of lingering injury or resentment? I have found that the poverty and fractured family I grew up in made me see the world more acutely, more painfully, and I hope more richly.”

The course of his life was changed entirely when he won a scholarship to attend Pretoria Boys High – an elite state school – where he did so well that he went on to Stellenbosch University on an Anglo-American scholarship and then to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Those opportunities, he reflected later, were all- whites only. Although Rhodes himself insisted that no one should be disqualified on the basis of race or religion, no black South African had won a Rhodes Scholarship in almost 75 years. “I was intensely conscious of race and how my way out of poverty had been defined by the privileged position granted to me because of it, and that left me with an intense sense of responsibility.”

At Oxford, he was, by his own description, a “swot” [British for nerd or bookworm]. “I was preoccupied with my reading and tutorials and essays and exams.”  He started studying Classics (Latin and Greek), but switched to Law at the end of his first term.  “I wanted to bury my head in literature and poetry but realized that I needed to be something different. In September of that year [1977], the South African security police beat Steve Biko to death and, a few months after that, on an icy Oxford night, I met Loyiso Nongxa, the first black South African to be elected as a Rhodes Scholar. Getting to know him was such a joy, and he was my first intimate black friend. I had never met a black South African before except in a hierarchical relationship. Both events changed my life and brought me to a richer and fuller and more humble political consciousness”.

His Oxford tutor, Jim Harris, was also a major influence, shaping his legal thinking for the rest of his career. “His teaching was austere but exhilarating and dedicated to clear productive thought. He was blind, which made him all the more rigorous and systematic, and he taught us in that way. Everything had to be ordered, because he had to hold it all in his head.” Cameron completed his law degree in five terms rather than nine, while earning First Class honours and the University Jurisprudence Prize. Later, when he returned for a year to read for a Bachelor of Civil Law, he headed his class and won the Vinerian Scholarship, the most prestigious award of its kind at Oxford.

Back in South Africa, he joined the Johannesburg Bar and, later, the University of Witwatersrand’s Centre for Applied Legal Studies, combining teaching with mostly human rights work, defending mineworkers and others against the abuses and arbitrariness of apartheid, promoting LGBTQ equality, opposing discrimination against people living with AIDS, and defending young white South Africans against military conscription. Although an outspoken critic of apartheid, he was never detained like some of his colleagues, perhaps because of his distinguished academic record and the fact that he had been a Rhodes Scholar.

A case in point was an article he published in the South African Law Journal in 1982, at the age of 29, accusing a renowned former Chief Justice of trying to “purify” the country’s system of Roman-Dutch law by excluding long-accepted English decisions and manipulating race and security laws, and even logic, to achieve the pro-apartheid results he wanted. Most readers saw the article as an act of lèse-majesté bordering on contempt of court, but surprisingly Cameron wasn’t punished. One possible reason was that the target of the article had died six years before. Another was that the article was so brilliant and meticulous that prosecuting him could have been seen as an attack on scholarship itself and put the entire legal system on trial, as well.

Two years later, Cameron criticized the death sentences imposed on the Sharpeville Six (charged with killing the deputy mayor of the town during a protest that turned violent) and helped whip up an international uproar on their behalf. The Chief Justice asked the Johannesburg Bar to discipline Cameron, but they declined to do so. Thereafter, the government gave up trying to silence critics of the judiciary, to the benefit of scholarship, a free press, and democracy. Later, as a judge himself, Cameron encouraged others to challenge judicial decisions, where necessary, plainly and even “ferociously”.

As a young lawyer, there were many calls on his talents and time. But his personal life was also coming to the fore. By the age of 14, he knew he was gay but kept it a secret until his second spell at Oxford, studying for a graduate degree. “Never, ever, ever again,” he decided, “would I apologise for something so intrinsic to myself and my humanhood.” In Johannesburg, on 13 October 1990, he was one of only a hundred people attending the first Pride March on African soil and, during the next two years, he was instrumental in ensuring that the new South African Constitution would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, the first in the entire world to do so. In 1994, he co-edited a book called Defiant Desire, a celebration of homosexuality on a continent still trying to believe that the entire idea was a Western invention. Some thought the book should have left out drag queens and other images certain to rattle a conservative society; but Cameron batted away the objection. “We will not do what society has already done to us and deny anyone a voice. Where others disparage our being different, we will flaunt our diversity and also what we have in common, however buttoned-down some of us may appear on the surface.” 

But there was one thing he was not prepared to reveal just yet.  At the end of 1986, he learned that he had contracted HIV. “Affirming that one is proudly queer or Black is one thing,” he recalled later. “Affirming that one has HIV is quite another. Then, eleven years later, in late October 1997, at the High Court in Johannesburg he had trouble climbing the stairs from the judges’ common room to his chambers just two floors above. For nearly three years, after morning tea, he had made a point of walking the two flights, four landings, and forty stairs. But, suddenly, he couldn’t. “Each step seemed an insuperable effort. My energy seemed to have drained from my legs. I was perspiring grey exhaustion. My lungs felt waterlogged. My mouth rough and dry. No pain. Just overwhelming weariness. And fear.” He suspected – and his doctor confirmed – that he now had AIDS.

The year before, at the annual HIV/AIDS conference in Vancouver, it was announced that a new combination of “antiretroviral” drugs had been shown to stop and even reverse HIV activity in the body. The drugs were expensive – they would absorb a third of Cameron’s salary when he started taking them – and hence would be beyond the reach of most Africans. But they were remarkably effective. Within a week of beginning the treatment, he felt “something incontrovertibly extraordinary” happening in his body. Instead of being tired, he felt new energy and he recovered his appetite. As he heard evidence in court, he sensed a different kind of evidence in his body “in the way blood coursed through my veins, the way I heard myself breathe, the way my muscles felt. The feeling was exhilarating. For the first time in more than a decade I was no longer – no longer felt – contaminated. From the world, I now had little to hide, and less to fear.” Just two months after his exhaustion on the staircase of the High Court, he was able to complete his annual pre-Christmas climb with family members up Table Mountain in Cape Town

As he grew stronger, so did the feeling that he needed to share his experience with those too frightened to be tested for HIV, let alone seek treatment. He also knew that a major effort would be needed to bring those life-saving medicines within reach of the millions of Africans who needed them. “Here I was, blessed with renewed vigour and life and health and energy and joy. I mean it’s an extraordinary experience. I think some cancer survivors also experience it. Here I had my life given back to me. How could I keep quiet?”

He made the announcement in Cape Town in 1999 in a very public forum, the Judicial Service Commission, where he was being interviewed for a promotion. He admitted later that he was terrified about being rejected and ostracized, not just by the public but also by former sexual partners who did not know his status (even though he had always been careful to practice safe sex). “None of that happened,” he recalls. “I was greeted by a giant warm energetic positive wave of affirmation and acceptance and encouragement. I got messages from people all over Africa, saying that I had done the right thing, that it was about testing, stigma, access to treatment.”

After flying home that afternoon, he saw the main item on all the evening newscasts (“Judge with AIDS”) but the next morning at the High Court there were flowers waiting for him in his office and conservative colleagues popped in to wish him well. It was like coming out of “a second closet”, he remembered, and one of the most empowering things he had done in his life. “It also demonstrated,” he added, “that the risk of doing the right thing is often rewarded.” Having hidden his own HIV status for thirteen years, he understands the reluctance of others to be open about it but argues that the “epidemic of silence” prolongs the larger epidemic itself. His courage also blew open the door to campaigning actively to make HIV/AIDS treatment available to everyone.

The organization that spearheaded the fight was the Treatment Action Campaign, founded by Zackie Achmat, who had worked for Cameron as a paralegal in the early 1990s. When he showed up for work the first day in jeans and a T-shirt, Cameron asked him when he was starting the job. “This is a legal firm,” he said, rather stiffly. His mood lightened when Achmat returned in a tie decorated with condoms. Cameron plays down his own role in the campaign, but it was decisive all the same. “I was very much in the second or third row. I was there as a figure talking about his own HIV which had significance. But the lead role and the court cases were undertaken by Achmat and his fellow activists, and that’s where Mandela’s voice and stature were unimaginably significant.”

The Treatment Action Campaign took to the streets, sought out social partners, enlisted the help of the Clinton and Gates Foundations, and shamed the drug companies into reducing their prices, while taking the South African government to court. “This was possible,” Cameron explains, “because we now had a democratic constitution and a bill of rights, leading to an historic judgment requiring the government to make AIDS drugs available.” It had been a long road. “I don’t blame Mandela for not emphasizing HIV/AIDS early on,” Cameron explains. “He had 199 subjects to worry about when he became president. We did all we could to have him speak out and eventually he did at Davos in February 1997. But he stepped down in 1999 just as his successor [Thabo Mbeki] committed the government to the calamitous policy of AIDS denialism.” (A conservative estimate is that Mbeki’s indifference led to 365,000 unnecessary deaths.)

In private, Mandela told his family that they needed to ask whether his own son had died of AIDS. Then, he invited Cameron to his home and asked what he could do without undermining the ruling party and President Mbeki personally. “You can support the use of anti-retroviral drugs and making them generally available,” Cameron said. And he did just that. “He was pivotal,” Cameron recalls. “He put on an HIV-positive T-shirt and he and Desmond Tutu provided the moral leadership necessary to force the government, along with the legal ruling, to make drugs available.” In parallel, Cameron denounced the government’s denialism at every opportunity. At the 2000 HIV/AIDS Conference in Durban, despite his judicial position, he accused President Mbeki of “irresponsibility bordering on criminality”. 

None of this activism interfered with Cameron’s career. After five years on the High Court (1995-2000) he was appointed to the all-white, all-male Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA), which was trying to preserve its 94-year  primacy, at least on matters of common law, in the face of  the creation of a more powerful Constitutional Court. There, Cameron was considered a “hothead outlier” as he tried to entrench the principles of the new Constitution in the cases he considered. He was under no illusion that those principles could be self-fulfilling. “We have no grounds for being complacent,” he argued. “Proclaiming our good intentions is the easy part; the hard part is doing the work to make them stick.”

His professionalism and sense of purpose were widely admired. He was praised for his “shrewd blackletter lawyering and creative moral suasion”. His choice of words was surgical but also playful at times. (“Our model is derived from the British constitutional system, a heritage filled with acute angles and stuffy corners.”) He combined “an exquisite sensitivity to others” with a “sharp tongue capable of demolishing a critic’s argument, even as he defends that critic’s right to speak out.” An example was his response to a lawyer’s brief questioning whether he had “the pith and substance” to be promoted to the Constitutional Court and whether a white man should replace a black one there when he would have other opportunities once he had achieved “the requisite standard for elevation”. Cameron cut to the heart of the matter. “I think the first 15 pages are a coded way of raising the racial issue while denying it. What he’s really saying is that ‘there are two white vacancies available next year. Why don’t you wait till then?’”

In due course, the Judicial Service Commission recommended Cameron’s appointment to the highest court, which he took up in January 2009. He was no stranger to the place, as he had already served there in an acting capacity ten years before. That year, he had been nominated for a seat on the Court (despite being only 46 and having only four years of experience as a judge) but his appointment was rejected by the Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, who felt that the next appointee should be black. To Cameron, that decision was “obviously correct”.

Now, he became one of the most powerful and effective exponents of the Constitution, raising hackles in some circles. In November 2004, while still at the Supreme Court of Appeal, he had argued that a lesbian couple should be allowed to marry even though there was no law providing for it. Some colleagues wanted to refer the matter to Parliament but Cameron argued successfully that the court should not sidestep the issue. Instead, they should uphold the prohibition in the Bill of Rights against unfair discrimination and force common law (in this case, the definition of civil marriage) to adapt accordingly. Now, in another highly political case – a challenge to the transfer of a de-fanged anti-corruption unit into the South African police force, where it would have been controlled by the country’s corrupt president – Cameron stretched legal reasoning to its limits, arguing that the Constitution required not just that such a unit exist but also that it be effective. Fellow judges thought this reasoning too intrusive on the prerogatives of the executive branch but Cameron narrowly won the day.

As new appointments made the Constitutional Court more conservative, he found himself heading its small progressive wing and occasionally championing positions that may have surprised some of his liberal followers. For example, he supported the right of a white resident to challenge the renaming of streets in Pretoria on the grounds of inadequate public consultation, even though the man’s real reason for doing so (i.e., a racist attachment to old Boer names) was admittedly “noxious”. To this day, he also regrets siding with his fellow justices, for tactical reasons, against an outstandingly qualified white woman who had been denied employment by the police on the grounds that hiring her would not make the force more diverse. When they found no other competent candidate for the job, they abolished it even though it had been described as essential. He lost some battles, too. In 2015, he argued that Parliament was obliged to require the disclosure of private funding to political parties; but the majority ruled against him on procedural rather than substantive grounds.

When he stepped down from the Constitutional Court in August 2019 at the age of 66, he could have settled into a comfortable retirement delivering lectures to friendly audiences around the world. But, instead, he accepted a job that most people would have run away from, as Inspector-Judge of the South African prison system. He knew something about the subject because, when Mandela appointed him to the bench in 1994, Africa’s most famous ex-prisoner had urged him to visit “correction” centres at least once a year.

On one of those visits, his law clerk, Lwando Xaso, stuck close to him to shield herself from possible danger but admired how Cameron engaged with all the inmates “without fear and, most importantly, without judgement”. She realized that what the inmates wanted was reasonable: access to books, newspapers, telephones, and medication. “Then,” she recalls, “we were told that two inmates had prepared lunch for us. I asked about their crime and began to panic at the idea of being served by two rapists. I even tried thinking of excuses to decline the meal. The plates were brought to us in a private dining room and I watched as Cameron ate the food enthusiastically. Then, I turned towards the kitchen and saw the two chefs looking back at us with nervous, expectant, childlike faces. I imagined the anxiety they felt preparing a meal for a Constitutional Court judge. They were looking for approval from the outside world they had been banished from. When I realized what a difference enjoying their meal could make to their rehabilitation and redemption, I followed Cameron’s example. Thanks to him, I left the prison that day a little freer from my own inhumanity.”

Like many in the world, the South African prison system is under severe financial and moral stress. Cameron has walked a delicate line, arguing for more resources while appreciating his country’s economic difficulties and promoting prison reform in the face of understandable fear of high crime rates.  He has taken particular aim at minimum sentencing laws, introduced following majority rule. In 1994, there were 450 people serving life sentences; in 2025, more than 18,000. “I do not suggest that criminals, especially those who are violent against women, do not deserve harsh punishments,” he has written. “But the minimum sentencing regime has been an extravagant mistake, offering a false promise while clogging up the prison system.” The sole deterrent to crime, he argues, is the likelihood of being caught and punished. “The length of the sentence plays no role at all.” He has recommended that minimum sentences be scrapped for petty crimes (like drug possession) and that others – like those equating drug trafficking and murder – should be revised or abolished. He also supports releasing most people over the age of 50, because as a rule they are non-violent and do not become repeat offenders.

“Let me be blunt,” he wrote in an article about prison reform. “Our new democratic elite, including me as a retired Judge and almost everyone who is likely to read this, cares too little about race and class [as most prisoners are poor and black]. Our lack of caring means that we fail to see the urgent need for constructive thought and action. Prisoners should be treated with human dignity. It is a myth that prisons are impermeable. Prisoners are part of our society and, conversely, society seeps into prison. What we do to prisoners comes back to haunt us when they return to society.”

While Cameron’s career and caring have attracted almost universal acclaim, not everyone likes a moral crusader.  Sometimes, they are an irritating reminder of how far the rest of us fall short. Or they become a target for malcontents and the jealous. And even saints become cranky at times, as workloads, high standards, and impatience with persistent injustice get the better of them. Cameron has long outgrown his Calvinist upbringing and regards religion as both a product and producer of fear, but his rectitude can seem rigid at times, his firmness of purpose, evangelical, and his opinions – an occupational hazard, perhaps – too judgmental. In January 2009, when he was appointed to the Constitutional Court, the New York Times called Cameron an “unlikely rebel”. “He is a courtly, judicious man who serves tea with impeccable gentility.” Just as oddly, the article quoted Zackie Achmat’s “affectionate” description of Cameron as “a tetchy old spinster”.

Although he abhors self-righteousness, he has sometimes been accused of overlooking his own ability to do wrong. The most prominent example was his failure to recuse himself from a case involving his alma mater Stellenbosch University when he was being considered for the job of Chancellor. Cameron actually turned down the position at the time and offered the parties full disclosure of all pertinent correspondence. His offer was not taken up until the case was decided unanimously and the losing party filed a complaint. It was dismissed by the Judicial Service Commission as lacking substance and Cameron accepted the Chancellorship when it was offered to him again in 2020. 

His zeal can also prompt him to adopt causes that even Don Quixote might have ducked. In 2021, he strained longstanding relationships by trying to persuade friends to join him in accusing the newly appointed president of Magdalen College, Oxford of failing in her duty to protect all her students by representing the government of the Cayman Islands in opposing same-sex marriage. “It is appalling,” Cameron wrote, “that, 125 years after Oscar Wilde’s prosecution, trial and imprisonment, the President of his college can ally herself with those who seek to persecute LGBTIQ persons in the Caribbean.” The target of Cameron’s criticism, Dinah Rose KC, herself a human rights lawyer and former UK Barrister of the Year, pointed out that, far from persecuting anybody, the Cayman Islands were actually “one of the most progressive countries for LGBTQ+ rights in the Caribbean” and allowed for civil partnerships. The issue was whether same-sex marriage should be imposed by the courts or remain the prerogative of Parliament.

But some criticism of Cameron is simply bizarre. Although highly respected legal scholars have described his reasoning in Constitutional Court judgments as “always exhilarating, and sometimes breathtaking”, a few on the Left have questioned whether he was “transformative” enough in the nearly 9,000 cases he considered over twenty-five years. Most of all, they regret that he respected the boundary between law and politics assiduously. To outsiders, it will seem ironic that someone who grew up in a deeply oppressive state should be accused by fellow lawyers of respecting the rule of law too much. But even critics can be admirers, too. In the words of one, “Cameron has few peers and no betters in all of South Africa. In the end, what he is not is less remarkable than what he has found a way to be. When I think of finding a way to flourish within the law, equally as a lawyer and as oneself, I think of Edwin Cameron.”

One thing no one has accused him of is taking himself too seriously. According to one colleague, “Edwin has always acted with generosity, humility, high intelligence, and a refined and sometimes wicked sense of humour, accompanied by his self-deprecating giggle.” A (Black) colleague on the Constitutional Court said of him, “We were nurtured under racial and other backward oppression. We were meant to be different, stunted, unimaginative and compliant. We turned out quite different, restless and recalcitrant. Each of us mounted a rebellion against his upbringing, albeit each in a different manner.”

The law clerk who joined him on the prison visit says that the most important thing she has learned from him is the limits of the law and the importance of being an active citizen. Despite his reverence for the law, Cameron had told her that “it cannot ensure that men (and they are mostly men) will not subordinate the instruments of government for evil, nor can it guarantee that they will not use them for illicit wealth accumulation. It cannot stop corruption. It cannot engender human trust and affection and reliance. That is a function of something else, not the law. It is the function of our humanity.”

For that reason, Cameron remains a tireless campaigner on many fronts.  “Who are the most marginalized and stigmatized groups in the world?” he asks. “Female sex workers. A male sex worker can get away with a lot that a woman or a transgender woman can’t get away with. It is irrational, it is outrageous. How dare we tell other human beings how to engage willingly with others in privacy? That is why I condemn laws that marginalize and put sex workers at risk. It is about access to HIV medications, healthcare, safety. Why is there no shame about bankers or international consultants or arms merchants?  Why are we so preoccupied with sexual interactions?”

As a vegetarian – and perhaps, more pertinently, as a humanitarian – he was the driving force behind a Constitutional Court decision that created a global precedent: recognizing the intrinsic value of animals as individuals capable of feeling pain and their right, like other sentient beings, to freedom (including “bodily integrity”). In 2021, citing evolving South African law, he filed a “friend of the court” brief in support of the Nonhuman Rights Project’s lawsuit to grant legal personhood and bodily liberty to Happy, an elephant held at the Bronx Zoo.

And he continues to set high standards for himself and others. Addressing the South African Rhodes Scholars class in September 2020, he said, “We are all soiled by moral compromise. Our hands, every one of us, are grubby from our indecisiveness, from our greed, from our yearning for comfort, from our overweening egos, from our lack of purposeful commitment. We are all complicit in the conditions of our time, where there is no moral purity but only the compromising complexity of ordinary life.”

Is he hopeful about the future? “There is nothing in the world that we cannot fix with thoughtful determined human action. I had a conflict with a colleague recently who wrote that we had reached the end of the road for the rule of law in South Africa. I was furious. I asked him, ‘What would you have said to a German in 1946? Would you have said that there was no hope and that it was not worth rebuilding? Or to a Vietnamese in 1975 when that last American helicopter took off, or to a Cambodian at the end of the genocide less than a decade later? No, you start every day knowing that there are a lot of joyful, committed activists in civil society, the corporate world, and the political sphere. There is so much to do and never enough reason to give up hope.”