From presidents to paupers, Wim Trengove has defended them all

Today, he’s widely considered one of the country’s top silks but growing up, Wim Trengove wasn’t particularly enamoured with the idea of a career in law.

His father, John James Trengove, was himself a senior advocate and even served on the bench as a judge. But asked if this was where he drew his inspiration from, Trengove responds in the negative.

“I can’t really say so. Thinking back a bit, his practice was actually rather boring,” he says with a wry chuckle.

Watching him argue in court, it’s hard to imagine the indomitable Trengove doing anything else.

The last he remembers, though, he wanted to be an engineer.

“But then I went to the army and for reasons I can’t really recall, I changed my mind and decided to study law,” he says. Trengove describes his early life as “pretty regular ’60s Pretoria – very Afrikaans, very white”.

“But the one thing that was a little bit different was that my parents always had black friends,” he said, explaining they were liberal and belonged to a nonracial, religious organisation.

“So they had black friends and we often had black people over which, in the ’60s in white Pretoria, was very exceptional.”

He knew from an early age that apartheid was intrinsically wrong.

“It was always clear to me that the way in which black people were treated in our streets, in our shops and in our cities was obviously unfair,” he says.

He went to the Johannesburg Bar fresh out of university with the intention of focusing on commercial law. But once there, he started making a name for himself in “activist law” – particularly labour law and then, under the state of emergency in the ’80s, defending political detainees.

“And that ultimately opened up an exciting and frankly the most satisfying part of the law for me,” he says.

Trengove has represented everyone from presidents and ministers, to political detainees, farmers, the media to ordinary men and women in their times of need.

And his work on some of South Africa’s most significant human rights cases – such as S v Makwanyane, known as “the death penalty case”, in which he successfully argued for the abolishment of capital punishment – has helped shaped the law as we know it today.

S v Makwanyane was the first case to come before the newly formed Constitutional Court post-1994 and, says Trengove, having the opportunity to argue it was a privilege and one of his career highlights.

“It was unbelievably exciting,” he recalls.

Another highlight – and a case that all these years later still brings a sparkle to his eye when he talks about it – was Alexkor Ltd and Another v Richtersveld Community and Others, in which he represented a Northern Cape community in its claim for the return of land and mineral rights after it had been forcibly removed in the ’20s.

Trengove recalls how the case was first heard in a community centre in nearby Koeboes, where there were not even changing facilities.

As a result, they had to robe up at their accommodation – a local shopkeeper’s home – and then walk to the centre in full court garb.

On the first day of the case, Trengove said, he was moved to be met by throngs of schoolchildren lining the dusty streets, waving flags in the air.

“For me, that was one of the most satisfying cases I ever did,” he says.

“It was a very dicey case. In fact, we lost the first time around but then appealed first to the Supreme Court of Appeal and then to the Constitutional Court, and we ultimately won and they got their land back.

“For me, that was such a symbol of the fantastic potential of the new constitution to actually bring justice to these
long-forgotten people.”

When he’s not working, Trengove enjoys the simple things, like a meal with friends and family.

He met his wife, Estelle, on the job. A former journalist, she was covering a case in Pretoria in the ’80s.

His face lights up when he talks about her, remembering how the famed Sydney Kentridge, with whom he was working on the case, passed him a note during arguments, teasingly asking: “Is Ms Viljoen smiling at you or me?”

He has six children, who are clearly his pride and joy. He beams as he talks about their achievements and shows
off the many pictures of them that adorn his walls.

“They’re the most unbelievably wonderful kids,” he says.

He’s always tried to encourage his children to follow their hearts and not to chase money and is proud of the fact that they’ve all achieved their own success in their own way.

The secret to his own professional success? He says simply that he loves what he does.

– bernadettew@citizen.co.za