Maverick US attorney Ed Fagan and a team of South African lawyers have lodged a new class action that categorises women and children as specific complainants in a multibillion-rand lawsuit.

JOHANNESBURG- Maverick US attorney Ed Fagan and a team of South African lawyers have lodged a new class action that categorises women and children as specific complainants in a multibillion-rand lawsuit against companies thought to have benefited during the apartheid era.

South African attorney Kelibone Molema said that in a four-day meeting with Fagan it had been agreed that women would be looked at as a specific category since they were targeted by the apartheid system to pay for the political activities of their children and friends.

“The whole system was orchestrated against them. They were targeted as individuals, as opponents of the system and as a strategy to get to their activist boyfriends, husbands and children,” said Molema.

He said the litigations hotline had already received more than 2 000 calls from people who wanted to lodge claims against powerful multinational companies and banks that are said to have ignored international sanctions against the apartheid government in the 1980s.

Molema said the lawyers had approached people such as World Bank director Mamphela Ramphele and ANC Women’s League president Winnie Madikizela-Mandela to top up their clientele. So far, only Veronica Sobukwe, widow of the late Robert Sobukwe – founding president of the Pan-Africanist Congress – and Gabrielle Lubowski, the widow of assassinated anti-apartheid lawyer Anton Lubowski, have supported the new class action.

The suit, which is expected to take up to five years to conclude, will start in New York on August 9, which is ironically National Women’s Day in South Africa.

The South African lawyers will spend this month consulting potential plaintiffs and seeking detail from those who have approached the Apartheid Claims Taskforce, which is made up of attorneys from the US, South Africa and Switzerland, as well as others such as historians.

Molema said a number of women who were raped, maimed and humiliated by apartheid security agents were ready to go public.

Fagan, who flew into SA quietly on Tuesday, shot to fame in the 1990s for helping to push powerful Swiss Banks into a R12.5-billion settlement for victims of the Holocaust.

Sechaba Ka’Nkosi, Sunday Times, July 7, 2002