Pretoria: Priscilla Jana, a human rights lawyer and who acknowledged crossing a line in her native South Africa between the law courts and the clandestine war to end white minority rule — died on Oct 10 at a care home in Pretoria. She was 76. Ismael Momoniat, a senior government official and family friend, did not specify the cause but said her death was not related to the Covid pandemic. Priscilla occupied an ambiguous space in the regimented society imposed by the South African government’s policies of racial separation, which became ever more pervasive after the whites-only National Party took power in 1948, when she was 4 years old.
Priscilla was descended from a family of middle-class Indian immigrants, and her status was defined by laws that consigned many people of Asian heritage to segregated neighborhoods, schools and amenities — apart from the white minority and the Black majority alike. In her early years, she said, she felt unsure about her identity.
That changed when she was 28 and heard a speech by the activist leader Steve Biko. “I listened to his definitions and was amazed,” she wrote in “Fighting for Mandela,” a memoir published in 2016. “I realized that you didn’t have to be African to call yourself Black. Until now I had been aware of the vacuum in me, not belonging to Black or white, just being ‘different,’” she continued. “Now I could be part of a group. I had found solidarity, and I felt uplifted.”
Priscilla spoke of the emotional turmoil inspired by her friendships with Nelson Mandela and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela as the couple were torn apart in the early years of South Africa’s emergence from apartheid. She had gotten to know them as their lawyer when Mandela was serving his 27-year imprisonment.
