There is something deeply disturbing about South Africa's supposed democracy, with the statement by the South African Communist Party that the late and highly respected Judge Arthur Chaskalson - former Chief Justice, and the first President of the Constitutional Court, who died last week - had "represented the SACP at the CODESA negotiations in the early 1990's."
It was one thing for then Advocate Arthur Chaskalson to have been "a member of the underground SACP in the difficult years of the 1960's", as the SACP also states.
The SACP, like the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress, was then an illegal political party under intense persecution by the apartheid state. Public acknowledgement of one's own Communist Party membership at that time, except in extreme circumstances - such as in a statement from the dock after conviction in court, as in my own case in 1965 - was out of the question, given the party's illegal status.
By the time of the CODESA negotiations on South Africa's constitutional future in the early 1990s, however, the SACP was a fully legal party.
How appropriate and how honest was it then for the SACP to be "represented" in these negotiations by...a hidden hand?
How does this hidden political relationship with the SACP square with the reputation for independence and judicial integrity with which Advocate (later Judge) Chaskalson has been associated since 1990, when the SACP was unbanned, along with the ANC, the PAC and other political groupings?