I think it would be remiss of many of us who had the privilege of studying law during the late 1960s up to the middle 1970s at the Department of Law in the then University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland [UCRN] and later University of Rhodesia [UR] not to acknowledge the immense contribution that was made by Professor Andrew James Grey Lang SC who passed away on November 3, 2025 in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown), South Africa at the age of 94.
In paying an appropriate tribute to the late Prof Lang, I can do no better than to set out below abridged excerpts from the address that was delivered in his honour on November 24, 2025 by Advocate Torquil John Macleod Paterson SC at a special sitting of the Eastern Cape Division of the High Court of South Africa.
Prof Lang became a member of the Eastern Cape Society of Advocates on December 1, 1984 at quite a mature age of 54.
He took silk on September 22, 1993.
By the time he retired in 2001 aged 70, he had become one of the most esteemed members of the Bar in the Eastern Cape.
He lived his life against the backdrop of a broad sweep of history.
His maternal grandfather was Sir John Fraser, the Speaker of the Legislative Council in Bloemfontein prior to the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War.
Visits to the South African Appeal Court in Bloemfontein were always something of a pilgrimage for Prof Lang during his formative years.
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His father was an immigrant Scot and classics master who taught at Pretoria Boys’ High School prior to becoming the headmaster of Grey High School which was founded in 1856 in Gqeberha (formerly Port Elizabeth) in the Eastern Cape. A
Prof Lang attended Grey High School which was and is still renowned for its competitiveness and excellence in academic, sporting and cultural activities as well as its ability to consistently produce leaders.
The Sharpeville Massacre which occurred on March 21, 1960 was a watershed not only for the whole of South Africa, but also for Prof Lang.
The South African police opened fire on a crowd of people who had assembled outside a police station in Sharpeville Township in Johannesburg to protest against the ‘pass laws’.
Ninety people were killed and 238 were brutally injured. In the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre, Prof Lang’s brothers, John and Colin, were detained for three months under the Emergency Regulations.
John Lang, a practising attorney in Johannesburg, was acting for the families of those who had been injured in the tragedy.
Colin Lang, a medical doctor in Pretoria, treated, amongst others, Inkosi Albert John Luthuli, who preceded Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela as president of the African National Congress [ANC] in South Africa from December 1952 to July 1967.
John and Colin Lang were both leading members of the Liberal Party in South Africa.
Prof Lang used to recall taking his mother to visit his brothers, John and Colin, at Pretoria Central Prison where they had been detained.
When Prof Lang joined the Bar in the Eastern Cape, he infused a wealth of experience as he had studied law at Cambridge University, the University of Witwatersrand and Rhodes University; served as a judge’s clerk in Pretoria; practised as an advocate in the Pretoria Bar; practised as an attorney in Johannesburg; dabbled in farming in England, Eastern Cape and Nyabira which is located under 40 kms north west of Salisbury (now Harare).
In this latter regard, Prof Lang used to commute daily from Nyabira to give us lectures in Roman Law and the Law of Delict at the UR Law School.
My contemporaries and tennis mates, Ian Anthony Donovan and Peter Carnegie Lloyd, and I had the privilege and pleasure of engaging in memorable battles on the tennis court virtually every Wednesday afternoons against Prof Lang and Christopher Lance Mercer, one of our law lecturers.
Andrew Lang somehow managed, for quite a while, to balance the demands of legal teaching with his farming.
A measure of the esteem in which Prof Lang was held in our country is that, after leaving UR and returning to the Eastern Cape in South Africa, he was given the arduous task of chairing a National Commission of Inquiry into the Marriage Laws, with particular reference to the grounds for divorce; the age of consent to marry and some proprietary consequences of marriage.
Prof Lang is remembered chiefly for his oratory.
The litigation process in most legal systems is still oral although the written word lies behind everything that we lawyers do.
The cutting edge is oral as evidenced in the leading and cross-examination of witnesses and the presentation of argument.
It was in this oral element of practice that Prof Lang excelled.
He had the advantage over many lesser mortals by virtue of his imposing physical presence.
His shock of white hair marked him with natural dignity and distinction.
From his storehouse of education came his impeccable choice of words, especially when he was spontaneous and departing from prepared notes or heads of argument.
Prof Lang had tremendous confidence, which never came anywhere near arrogance.
His demeanour arose not from his belief in the correctness of his opinions but from his confidence that he could effectively and properly communicate those opinions and thus his client’s cause.
This confidence must have come from something even deeper than the mastery of the processes of litigation.
From the influence of his classicist headmaster father; from his passion for Roman Law and the Law of Delict; from his personal experience of family and good citizenship and from his own natural inclination, Prof Lang had come to embody the virtues of the Roman ideal of the good citizen as expressed in the enduring notion of the good paterfamilias.
His oratory became the public expression of the internal debates by which the bonus paterfamilias balances the competing demands of each instance and thus determines the proper course of conduct.
Our heartfelt condolences go to Prof Lang’s widow, Julie, as well as all their loved ones.
*Muchadeyi Ashton Masunda is a senior legal practitioner, international commercial and sports arbitrator. Masunda is also former mayor of Harare [1 July 2008 - 30 June 2013] and a protégé of the late Professor Andrew James Grey Lang SC.
