Growing up during Apartheid in a “coloured township” some 15 kilometers from Cape Town, Penny Andrews did not dream. Long before television came to South Africa, with few books in her home, she knew only what she saw around her: a community defined by poverty and racial oppression.
Most black and “coloured” adults took the bus into Cape Town for blue-collar jobs as brick layers, plumbers, laborers; a smaller number, the only professionals, to jobs as teachers and nurses. Her mother, who would die from an asthma attack when Penny Andrews was 13, made dresses on the weekends to supplement what she earned at a grocery store.
“My mother was not an educated woman, nor was my father. I think what I did as a child, before I even went to school, was create my own stories from what I saw around me, ” she said, in an interview before she returned to South Africa, on a crisp fall day at New York Law School, where she had served as associate dean for academic affairs and professor of law. “The stories were both joyful and, now in retrospect, very troubling. It is just what was. These were events that I suppose helped me create a narrative of a life where I was.”
As a girl Andrews had seen violence, both in her house and on the streets. One of her earliest memories is of watching as a young woman ran, blood dripping down her legs, from a gang of men, who were laughing.
There was nothing in the landscape at that time that could begin to explain, let alone inspire, the incredible path Andrews’ life would one day take. That would come many years later.
“I did not have an imagination about what could be, because I wasn’t exposed to it. The panorama was a very limited one,” said Andrews, “I did not see successful professional black people. I didn’t see successful anything. The community, though, was a strong and supportive one.”
Late last year, Andrews, the only one in her family to graduate from high school, returned to South Africa to serve as Dean of Faculty of Law at the University of Cape Town, widely viewed as the top educational institution on the African continent. In so doing, Andrews—an international human rights advocate and constitutional legal scholar, once a finalist for a seat on the highest court in South Africa, the Constitutional Court of South Africa, and who has lived and taught law on five continents—will become the university’s first dean of color in the university’s 186-year-old history.
“Where I have come from and where I am, my mother could never have imagined this, this life I am living. I never could have imagined it. I say that, not because I am special. I think I’ve been very, very fortunate and lucky to have so many opportunities,” she said.
Most black and “coloured” adults took the bus into Cape Town for blue-collar jobs as brick layers, plumbers, laborers; a smaller number, the only professionals, to jobs as teachers and nurses. Her mother, who would die from an asthma attack when Penny Andrews was 13, made dresses on the weekends to supplement what she earned at a grocery store.
“My mother was not an educated woman, nor was my father. I think what I did as a child, before I even went to school, was create my own stories from what I saw around me, ” she said, in an interview before she returned to South Africa, on a crisp fall day at New York Law School, where she had served as associate dean for academic affairs and professor of law. “The stories were both joyful and, now in retrospect, very troubling. It is just what was. These were events that I suppose helped me create a narrative of a life where I was.”
As a girl Andrews had seen violence, both in her house and on the streets. One of her earliest memories is of watching as a young woman ran, blood dripping down her legs, from a gang of men, who were laughing.
There was nothing in the landscape at that time that could begin to explain, let alone inspire, the incredible path Andrews’ life would one day take. That would come many years later.
“I did not have an imagination about what could be, because I wasn’t exposed to it. The panorama was a very limited one,” said Andrews, “I did not see successful professional black people. I didn’t see successful anything. The community, though, was a strong and supportive one.”
Late last year, Andrews, the only one in her family to graduate from high school, returned to South Africa to serve as Dean of Faculty of Law at the University of Cape Town, widely viewed as the top educational institution on the African continent. In so doing, Andrews—an international human rights advocate and constitutional legal scholar, once a finalist for a seat on the highest court in South Africa, the Constitutional Court of South Africa, and who has lived and taught law on five continents—will become the university’s first dean of color in the university’s 186-year-old history.
“Where I have come from and where I am, my mother could never have imagined this, this life I am living. I never could have imagined it. I say that, not because I am special. I think I’ve been very, very fortunate and lucky to have so many opportunities,” she said.
Andrews grew up in both Kensington, an old established “coloured” area, and in the township of Bonteheuwel, in a series of semi-detached houses—each move marking changes in her family’s circumstances. For several years, they lived in a rudimentary, small house with an inside toilet. But family life was volatile. “My earliest memories of my father were of him inflicting physical harm, hitting my mother,” she said.
After years of enduring beatings, her mother left her father, and they moved to live with a divorced aunt and her children. Two families, two rooms in a two-bedroom row house, the toilet outside. Her aunt and her three children in one bedroom; in the other, Penny and her two sisters shared a bed, while her mother shared the second bed with her brother.
Mixed in with the dark were moments of light. As she recalled an early joyful family story, her eyes filled with warmth. “My mother’s youngest sister, my aunt, was crazy about Elvis Presley. It was Elvis Presley everything. She and her cousins, my aunts, would put on Elvis records, and I would dance. They thought I was the cutest thing when I was dancing. I must have been about 3 years old. It was a lovely story.”
She belonged to the Church Girls Brigade at her Anglican Church, akin to a Girl Guide group, she said, exposing her to music and worship. “It was a very strong influence early on, on how I viewed the world.”
School became an absorbing interest. She wanted to do well, and excelled. “There must have been an innate sense of wanting to explore beyond. Where I was although it was - I wouldn’t really say it was comforting, it was just the way things were.”
She did so well that her mother was able to secure a spot for her at a Catholic girls’ high school, run by the Irish Dominican Sisters. To get there, she took a bus, then a train, to cover the 20 miles. “I experienced high school not as a place of excitement and growth but as a place of stability and growth, and a very narrow sense of growth in that, you know, we weren’t allowed to explore and create. It was very authoritarian with the nuns as the source of authority and learning, a very formal way of learning, rote learning, book learning.” Andrews spoke thoughtfully, sometimes pausing, as if choosing the exact right word, then letting certain words expand with a pause of silence.
As a girl, then adolescent, she became obsessed with skin color. “This is how I experienced race then - not white versus black, but, within my community, an obsession with who was light-skinned, who was dark-skinned, who had straight hair, who had curly hair,” she said. “I was considered dark-skinned and I have curly hair. I have a sister who has straight hair and is light-skinned, so she could pass as white, from time to time, and I have an aunt who did pass. Skin color was very important in the community.”
At the end of Andrews’ first year in high school, her mother died of an asthma attack, at age 33. Through a series of events – finishing high school and working as a book-keeper in a law firm, marrying a young man from Durban and obtaining employment at the University of Natal - she was able to finish high school, and gain a scholarship to attend the University of Natal at Durban.
“That’s when think when my imagination took flight. The best thing was becoming involved in the black consciousness movement, seeing myself as a university student, and now I am exposed to the possibilities of the world. I discovered the American civil rights movement. I have a big afro. I want to look like Angela Davis. You know Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, you know, Huey Newton, all these people are radicals that are changing the world, the Black Panthers, all of that.”
After years of enduring beatings, her mother left her father, and they moved to live with a divorced aunt and her children. Two families, two rooms in a two-bedroom row house, the toilet outside. Her aunt and her three children in one bedroom; in the other, Penny and her two sisters shared a bed, while her mother shared the second bed with her brother.
Mixed in with the dark were moments of light. As she recalled an early joyful family story, her eyes filled with warmth. “My mother’s youngest sister, my aunt, was crazy about Elvis Presley. It was Elvis Presley everything. She and her cousins, my aunts, would put on Elvis records, and I would dance. They thought I was the cutest thing when I was dancing. I must have been about 3 years old. It was a lovely story.”
She belonged to the Church Girls Brigade at her Anglican Church, akin to a Girl Guide group, she said, exposing her to music and worship. “It was a very strong influence early on, on how I viewed the world.”
School became an absorbing interest. She wanted to do well, and excelled. “There must have been an innate sense of wanting to explore beyond. Where I was although it was - I wouldn’t really say it was comforting, it was just the way things were.”
She did so well that her mother was able to secure a spot for her at a Catholic girls’ high school, run by the Irish Dominican Sisters. To get there, she took a bus, then a train, to cover the 20 miles. “I experienced high school not as a place of excitement and growth but as a place of stability and growth, and a very narrow sense of growth in that, you know, we weren’t allowed to explore and create. It was very authoritarian with the nuns as the source of authority and learning, a very formal way of learning, rote learning, book learning.” Andrews spoke thoughtfully, sometimes pausing, as if choosing the exact right word, then letting certain words expand with a pause of silence.
As a girl, then adolescent, she became obsessed with skin color. “This is how I experienced race then - not white versus black, but, within my community, an obsession with who was light-skinned, who was dark-skinned, who had straight hair, who had curly hair,” she said. “I was considered dark-skinned and I have curly hair. I have a sister who has straight hair and is light-skinned, so she could pass as white, from time to time, and I have an aunt who did pass. Skin color was very important in the community.”
At the end of Andrews’ first year in high school, her mother died of an asthma attack, at age 33. Through a series of events – finishing high school and working as a book-keeper in a law firm, marrying a young man from Durban and obtaining employment at the University of Natal - she was able to finish high school, and gain a scholarship to attend the University of Natal at Durban.
“That’s when think when my imagination took flight. The best thing was becoming involved in the black consciousness movement, seeing myself as a university student, and now I am exposed to the possibilities of the world. I discovered the American civil rights movement. I have a big afro. I want to look like Angela Davis. You know Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, you know, Huey Newton, all these people are radicals that are changing the world, the Black Panthers, all of that.”
As she describes the impact of her university education, her speaking pace quickens, eyes filled with spirit. Just a few weeks into her freshman year, anti-apartheid activist and black consciousness leader Steven Biko died in police custody, after being arrested weeks earlier at a police roadblock and detained. He had been banned by the government in 1973, which prohibited him from speaking publicly, leaving his home town or being in the company of more than one person at a time. His death in custody, the twentieth in the previous 18 months, further exacerbated the growing tension over racial oppression. By November, the United Nations imposed an arms embargo against South Africa, but a whites-only general election gave a landslide victory to the National Party, the original architect of Apartheid in 1948.
With her country erupting, Andrews began to read voraciously, including several books that had been banned by the South African government, which she was able to get through the underground library: Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice,” Angela Davis’s autobiography, books on Marxism and Leninism.
“Those stories made me. I wanted to be a radical. I wanted to change the world. I wanted to confront the Apartheid state and, of course, there was that possibility, too, because the country was awash in student activism.”
Throughout college, Andrews also worked at the University’s Legal Aid Clinic as a coordinator. Her country’s system of Apartheid maintained its oppression of the black majority population through a series of laws that stripped black and coloured people of citizenship, restricted their freedom of movement, job opportunities, housing and education and prohibited interracial marriage.
For the first time, Andrews began to think, if not dream, of becoming a lawyer. “It was not a matter of desire. It was what was in front of me,” she said.
“Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo, uzokufa,’” is a South African phrase Andrews has cited in her scholarship. “Now you have touched the women you have struck a rock, you have dislodged a boulder, you will be crushed.” The phrase entered the political vocabulary in the mid-1950s when more than 10,000 women, newly politicized and organized, marched on Pretoria. They marched to to the Prime Minister the application of the “pass laws,” which made it illegal for blacks to remain in a prescribed White area for longer than 72 hours, to African women.
For the first time in her life, at university, Andrews experienced race with a capital “R,” race in the wider society. She lived in a predominantly African (Zulu) city and was inspired by the American Civil Rights movement, a year after police fired into and attacked a mass high school student protest in Soweto, killing at least 176, injuring many more. The students had been protesting a new decree forcing black schools to use Afrikaans, a language associated with Apartheid, for at least 50% of teaching. She worked at the legal aid clinic, helping with cases that focused on divorce, labor rights, especially the migrant labor system, and other “poverty law” matters. Each month brought more student protests and increasing political activity. All strands came together to strike the rock.
“There’s evolution and revolution. Things were slowly beginning to unravel and fall apart,” she said.
Andrews attended law school in the United States, at Columbia University, where she was also very politically active, and, for the first time, lived in a house with a television. For these years, 1983 to 1986, South Africa was in turmoil: occasional bomb explosions, police raids, protest marches throughout the country to call for the release of African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, and, in the imposition of a state of emergency that would last eight months. Against this violent backdrop, the majority government took incremental steps that loosened the hold of Apartheid, the adoption of a white, coloured and Indian Tricameral Parliament, ending the ban against interracial marriage, and outlining steps to restore blacks and coloured citizens to South African citizenship.
A mentor at Columbia Law advised her to pursue a teaching position in a Commonwealth country and she obtained her first law teaching position in Melbourne, Australia. In 1989 she returned to South Africa to work for a year at the Legal Resource Center in Johannesburg, South Africa’s preeminent public interest law firm. She has written extensively on constitutional and human rights issues in the South African, Australian and global contexts, with particular emphasis on the rights of women and people of color.
Andrews’ path as a lawyer—first conceived as an undergraduate working in her university’s legal aid clinic—has spanned continents. In her lifetime, she has experienced seismic changes. Born in an authoritarian country where blacks were forced to live separate from whites and were denied the right to vote, she is in her second academic year as the Dean of Law for one of Africa’s top educational institutions. A little over two decades have passed since the end of Apartheid in 1994, and the election of Nelson Mandela as the country’s first democratic president. Andrews has written and spoken frequently on South Africa’s new constitution, adopted in 1994 and its expansive Bill of Rights.
She has focused on international human rights law, comparative constitutional law, and justice for women and people of color, including Australia’s indigenous population, black and mixed-race citizens in South Africa, and disenfranchised women in Queens, NY. In her latest book, she analyzed and compared the constitutional underpinnings of the different treatment of women in South Africa and Afghanistan.
Until summer 2015, Andrews served as President and Dean of Albany Law School, as its first woman president and dean since it opened in 1851. Andrews has taught law in Australia, Scotland, Canada, Italy and the United States, has hosted several law conferences in South Africa, consulted for the United Nations Development Fund for Women. She has authored, or co-edited, four books, including “From Cape Town to Kabul – Rethinking Strategies for Pursuing Women’s Human Rights” in 2012, and more than 50 articles or book chapters. She has received several awards for her human rights work, including a scholarship in her honor to benefit disadvantaged black South Africans at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the 2015 National Bar Association’s Ronald Brown International Award.
In Cape Town, challenge awaited her. In spring 2015, following student protests, the University removed the statue at the heart of the campus of the British imperialist who donated land to the University. Student opposition to the statute, which had been pelted with excrement during a protest, was just the focal point of a wider protest over the relatively low percentages of black students and faculty members at the University, and the pace of change in post-Apartheid South Africa, a period given an almost literary label, Transformation.
In an interview at the City University of New York School of Law School before her return, Andrews’ body moved with excitement at the opportunity to contribute as the University of Cape Town’s dean of law. She was eager to apply some of what she has learned interacting with universities and the legal profession in several countries.
Returning to her home country, Andrews immersed herself in books on Africa and South Africa—the work of Jonny Steinberg and Mark Gevisser, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck, Ferial Hafejee’s, What if There were No Whites in South Africa, Justice Malala’s We Have Now Begun Our Descent, and Eusibius McKaiser’s, Run Racist Run—newspapers, and listens regularly to radio programs, including the daily call-in show of Redi Tlhab.
“I guess my first priority was really to try and center the student experience,” she said in a recent Skype interview. “By centering their experience, we really can provide a place where they as people who were denied places at the university feel like they can excel. I’m at a university that used to be a whites only institution, now it’s an open university, so there are all sorts of questions around belonging and inclusion.”
With her country erupting, Andrews began to read voraciously, including several books that had been banned by the South African government, which she was able to get through the underground library: Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice,” Angela Davis’s autobiography, books on Marxism and Leninism.
“Those stories made me. I wanted to be a radical. I wanted to change the world. I wanted to confront the Apartheid state and, of course, there was that possibility, too, because the country was awash in student activism.”
Throughout college, Andrews also worked at the University’s Legal Aid Clinic as a coordinator. Her country’s system of Apartheid maintained its oppression of the black majority population through a series of laws that stripped black and coloured people of citizenship, restricted their freedom of movement, job opportunities, housing and education and prohibited interracial marriage.
For the first time, Andrews began to think, if not dream, of becoming a lawyer. “It was not a matter of desire. It was what was in front of me,” she said.
“Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo, uzokufa,’” is a South African phrase Andrews has cited in her scholarship. “Now you have touched the women you have struck a rock, you have dislodged a boulder, you will be crushed.” The phrase entered the political vocabulary in the mid-1950s when more than 10,000 women, newly politicized and organized, marched on Pretoria. They marched to to the Prime Minister the application of the “pass laws,” which made it illegal for blacks to remain in a prescribed White area for longer than 72 hours, to African women.
For the first time in her life, at university, Andrews experienced race with a capital “R,” race in the wider society. She lived in a predominantly African (Zulu) city and was inspired by the American Civil Rights movement, a year after police fired into and attacked a mass high school student protest in Soweto, killing at least 176, injuring many more. The students had been protesting a new decree forcing black schools to use Afrikaans, a language associated with Apartheid, for at least 50% of teaching. She worked at the legal aid clinic, helping with cases that focused on divorce, labor rights, especially the migrant labor system, and other “poverty law” matters. Each month brought more student protests and increasing political activity. All strands came together to strike the rock.
“There’s evolution and revolution. Things were slowly beginning to unravel and fall apart,” she said.
Andrews attended law school in the United States, at Columbia University, where she was also very politically active, and, for the first time, lived in a house with a television. For these years, 1983 to 1986, South Africa was in turmoil: occasional bomb explosions, police raids, protest marches throughout the country to call for the release of African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, and, in the imposition of a state of emergency that would last eight months. Against this violent backdrop, the majority government took incremental steps that loosened the hold of Apartheid, the adoption of a white, coloured and Indian Tricameral Parliament, ending the ban against interracial marriage, and outlining steps to restore blacks and coloured citizens to South African citizenship.
A mentor at Columbia Law advised her to pursue a teaching position in a Commonwealth country and she obtained her first law teaching position in Melbourne, Australia. In 1989 she returned to South Africa to work for a year at the Legal Resource Center in Johannesburg, South Africa’s preeminent public interest law firm. She has written extensively on constitutional and human rights issues in the South African, Australian and global contexts, with particular emphasis on the rights of women and people of color.
Andrews’ path as a lawyer—first conceived as an undergraduate working in her university’s legal aid clinic—has spanned continents. In her lifetime, she has experienced seismic changes. Born in an authoritarian country where blacks were forced to live separate from whites and were denied the right to vote, she is in her second academic year as the Dean of Law for one of Africa’s top educational institutions. A little over two decades have passed since the end of Apartheid in 1994, and the election of Nelson Mandela as the country’s first democratic president. Andrews has written and spoken frequently on South Africa’s new constitution, adopted in 1994 and its expansive Bill of Rights.
She has focused on international human rights law, comparative constitutional law, and justice for women and people of color, including Australia’s indigenous population, black and mixed-race citizens in South Africa, and disenfranchised women in Queens, NY. In her latest book, she analyzed and compared the constitutional underpinnings of the different treatment of women in South Africa and Afghanistan.
Until summer 2015, Andrews served as President and Dean of Albany Law School, as its first woman president and dean since it opened in 1851. Andrews has taught law in Australia, Scotland, Canada, Italy and the United States, has hosted several law conferences in South Africa, consulted for the United Nations Development Fund for Women. She has authored, or co-edited, four books, including “From Cape Town to Kabul – Rethinking Strategies for Pursuing Women’s Human Rights” in 2012, and more than 50 articles or book chapters. She has received several awards for her human rights work, including a scholarship in her honor to benefit disadvantaged black South Africans at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the 2015 National Bar Association’s Ronald Brown International Award.
In Cape Town, challenge awaited her. In spring 2015, following student protests, the University removed the statue at the heart of the campus of the British imperialist who donated land to the University. Student opposition to the statute, which had been pelted with excrement during a protest, was just the focal point of a wider protest over the relatively low percentages of black students and faculty members at the University, and the pace of change in post-Apartheid South Africa, a period given an almost literary label, Transformation.
In an interview at the City University of New York School of Law School before her return, Andrews’ body moved with excitement at the opportunity to contribute as the University of Cape Town’s dean of law. She was eager to apply some of what she has learned interacting with universities and the legal profession in several countries.
Returning to her home country, Andrews immersed herself in books on Africa and South Africa—the work of Jonny Steinberg and Mark Gevisser, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck, Ferial Hafejee’s, What if There were No Whites in South Africa, Justice Malala’s We Have Now Begun Our Descent, and Eusibius McKaiser’s, Run Racist Run—newspapers, and listens regularly to radio programs, including the daily call-in show of Redi Tlhab.
“I guess my first priority was really to try and center the student experience,” she said in a recent Skype interview. “By centering their experience, we really can provide a place where they as people who were denied places at the university feel like they can excel. I’m at a university that used to be a whites only institution, now it’s an open university, so there are all sorts of questions around belonging and inclusion.”
Historically, Andrews said, universities have been incredibly hierarchical and law schools were very much in the old British system. While university culture has changed, the culture hadn’t changed to the same extent of the more participatory culture of many American law schools.
“So that’s one of the things I’ve been trying to center, not just in relationships they have with teachers and with each other, but also to really emphasize the compact, the contract we administrators and faculty take responsibility for their learning, and that they take responsibility for their learning,” she said.
As dean, Andrews instituted an institutional engagement with students: regularly meeting with the law student council for breakfast, emphasizing an open door policy to engage with students, and holding an assembly for the entire law school community every term, at which they were encouraged to talk about their concerns and issues facing the community and profession. Andrews is also working with faculty to develop more opportunities for graduates to use their legal training in a range of careers, outside of the traditional large law firms.
This week the University reached an agreement with two of the student protest groups involved in the protests, offering clemency to students suspended following the February protests and establishing a commission to investigate past student protests and recommend improvements to the university.
“I want to open lines of communication to get them to see that we can solve problems together,” she said. “Basically we’re engaged with the same goals.”
“So that’s one of the things I’ve been trying to center, not just in relationships they have with teachers and with each other, but also to really emphasize the compact, the contract we administrators and faculty take responsibility for their learning, and that they take responsibility for their learning,” she said.
As dean, Andrews instituted an institutional engagement with students: regularly meeting with the law student council for breakfast, emphasizing an open door policy to engage with students, and holding an assembly for the entire law school community every term, at which they were encouraged to talk about their concerns and issues facing the community and profession. Andrews is also working with faculty to develop more opportunities for graduates to use their legal training in a range of careers, outside of the traditional large law firms.
This week the University reached an agreement with two of the student protest groups involved in the protests, offering clemency to students suspended following the February protests and establishing a commission to investigate past student protests and recommend improvements to the university.
“I want to open lines of communication to get them to see that we can solve problems together,” she said. “Basically we’re engaged with the same goals.”
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