Title: The Passionate Advocate: An Autobiography, by Anthony Gifford, QC

Published by: Arawak, 2007, 292 pages

Reviewed by: Barbara Blake-Hannah

Most Jamaicans know of Anthony Gifford, the English lawyer who has defended many important and noteworthy cases in Jamaican courts. The fact that he is an English Lord has made him even better known than many Englishmen living in Jamaica. Some Jamaicans will also know of Lord Gifford as an advocate for slavery reparations, a fact that has made him even better known in Jamaica and abroad.

His autobiography The Passionate Advocate reveals a life and career on which the above descriptions are merely the tip of the iceberg of an existence dedicated to fighting the effects of European imperialism, colonialism and injustice not just in England and Jamaica, but in Africa and, surprisingly, Ireland.

Telling his story with humility, Gifford nevertheless has pride in his achievements, especially as he has been successful in defending clients whose cases were thought impossible to win. He has represented innocent blacks in Britain accused of police brutality before judges who were ready to convict them on the racist assumption that black violence against the police was always without provocation and therefore true. He has taken controversial convictions to appeal and won, enabling the freedom of men on death row, and conducted inquiries into such famous cases as the Broadwater Farm riot and the Liverpool 8, which led to recommendations that brought changes in the relationship between the police and racial communities.

He has sent black lawyers from his Wellington Street Chambers who knew they were considered ‘subversives’ by many in the judiciary to act as defence counsel for black and mixed-race citizens, but were not deterred from their committed advocacy, eventually publishing a Declaration of Principles, which his chambers used in addressing recommendations for improving race relations in Britain.

The book answers the question of what led Gifford to be the passionate advocate he is. Born in England to “conventionally privileged” parents, Lord Gifford’s father inherited the title from a distant uncle and brought up his son in the tradition of “people who believe that privilege entails responsibilities to those worse off than you”. He had an equally privileged education, studying law at Kings College, Cambridge, emerging as a barrister and inheriting his father’s title as a young man in 1961, and not too happy with his expected future as a keeper of colonial values in Britain and the world.

Gifford’s activist life began in his first years practising as a barrister, when he shared a room with Anthony Lester, one of the pioneers of the Human Rights Act in Britain. His admiration for Lester (now Lord Lester of Herne Hill) led him to join the Campaign Against Racism Discrimination (CARD), the first national organisation set up in Britain to fight racism. CARD members organised experiments in which two people – one black and one white – would apply for a job and then report on the discrimination the qualified black person would find, as opposed to the acceptance of the white applicant. He founded the first legal aid clinic that served poor black immigrants, mostly youth, who came up against the law in racist incidents and his chambers became well known for serving poor clients, mostly black, in need of good legal representatives unafraid of confronting the British legal system.

In another of his more remarkable cases – Ireland’s ‘Bloody Sunday’ Inquiry, he was relentless in digging out the truth of that day’s massacre of protesting Irish Catholics, and later in presenting a written statement accusing then-Prime Minister Edward Heath of giving the order that encouraged the callousness of the attack on the unarmed protestors by English soldiers that became a landmark incident in the struggle of Irish Catholics against British Protestant rule.

Gifford’s commitment to exposing racism takes the reader to Amnesty International, a group of concerned people around the world who write letters of protest on behalf of prisoners who have been unjustly imprisoned because of their non-violent opposition to their country’s regime. His second mission was to Portugal, then ruled by the repressive dictator Antonio Salazar, who was not only responsible for the repression of his own people, but of the Africans in the Portugese colonies of Mozambique and Angola, where forced African labour was widespread and dissent was brutally crushed.

When in 1956 Agostinho Neto founded the famous liberation movement MPLA (Movement for the Liberation of Angola), Gifford’s earlier work in Portugal led him to participate in the British activist support in protests and demonstrations in support of Mozambican leader Eduardo Mondlane and, after Mondlane was killed, the work of Samora Machel, who succeeded him as Mozambique’s revolutionary leader of the rebel group FRELIMO. The anti-Apartheld movement in South Africa had links with Mozambique through Tanzania and Angola and the liberation forces of all three countries were linked by their shared desire to be free of the colonial yokes of Portugal, England and white Apartheid.

Gifford entered Africa for the first time as a guest of Machel and FRELIMO, spending two weeks in secret visiting the rebel outposts, fighters and villages. We see what the on-the-ground experience was of the revolutionary army and its efforts to overthrow Portugese rule. He calls the experience “mind-blowing”, and says it gave him “an enduring love for Africa and a total acceptance that a relationship of equality and mutual respect was possible between Africans and Europeans”. His account of the history of the Southern African states’ struggles for liberation is a fascinating section, giving an insight into the details about which we know only the outline of history.

Gifford’s Caribbean story begins in Grenada after the coup by the New Jewel Movement (NJM) led by Maurice Bishop, when he was invited to act as counsel for Bernard Coard and other prisoners detained after the death of Maurice Bishop who were accused of his death and organising the coup itself. This interesting piece of Caribbean history –which is linked with Jamaica through connections with such prominent Jamaican political personalities as Trevor Munroe – gives another insight into untold history.

Already married to Jamaican Elean Thomas (his second wife), Gifford eventually settled in Jamaica and began the practice we know today. His stories of famous Jamaican legal cases are a meaty segment of this interesting book. His opposition to the death penalty in favour of what he calls “the capacity of the individual for redemption and rehabilitation” inspires him to go to great lengths, even the Privy Council, to secure changed sentences for those so convicted. He cites how starved of resources the Jamaican justice system is, the capacity of witnesses to lie, and the poverty and illiteracy of most persons charged with murder as inspirations for his insistence that the death penalty removes all hope of a miscarriage of justice being corrected.

However, it is Gifford’s participation in the campaign for slavery relations that draws the most interest. Using his membership as a peer of the British House of Lords, Gifford mounted a debate on reparations, which is a historic response of the most elevated British gathering and one which should be read by all those who hope that Britain will accept and compensate the victims of its 300 years of African enslavement.

Gifford learned of reparations while in Britain from his friend, black MP Bernie Grant who founded the African Reparations Movement. Now living in Jamaica by this time, he met Dudley Thompson, a lawyer who was already famous as a proud Pan-Africanist for having been the chief advocate for Kenya’s Mau Mau leader Jomo Kenyatta. Through Thompson, he met Nigerian millionaire businessman Chief Abiola, chairman of the Group of Eminent Persons on Reparations to Africa and the African Diaspora, and, along with other like-minded international personalities, attended the Pan-African Congress organised by Chief Abiola in Abuja, Nigeria. The Abuja Document drafted by that conference became the groundwork paper on reparations that later led to the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism, at which reparations was discussed in detail and at the end of which a far-reaching document of Terms of Reparations produced.

Gifford still maintains his involvement with the Jamaican and international campaign for reparations, while continuing his work as an advocate in Jamaica, Britain and the Caribbean. Now a British-Jamaican citizen with a Jamaican-born daughter, Gifford has told his story well and produced a book that is a valuable contribution to both Jamaican and British history of an unusual man of our times.