Felicia Geffen
| Felicia Kentridge | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Felicia Nahoma Geffen 7 August 1930 Johannesburg, South Africa |
| Died | 7 June 2015 (aged 84) London, United Kingdom |
| Alma mater |
University of Cape Town University of the Witwatersrand |
| Occupation | Lawyer, anti-apartheid activist and artist |
| Spouse(s) | Sydney Kentridge (m. 1952–2015, her death) |
| Children | 4 |
Felicia Kentridge (née Geffen; 7 August 1930 – 7 June 2015) was a South African lawyer and anti-apartheid activist who co-founded the South African Legal Resources Centre (LRC) in 1979. The LRC represented black South Africans against the apartheid state and successfully overturned numerous discriminatory laws; Kentridge was herself involved in some of the Centre's landmark legal cases. Kentridge and her husband, the prominent lawyer Sydney Kentridge, remained involved with the LRC after the end of apartheid, though they moved permanently to England in the 1980s. In her later years, Kentridge took up painting, and her son William Kentridge became a famous artist.
Felicia Kentridge was born Felicia Nahoma Geffen in Johannesburg in 1930, the younger daughter of a Jewish legal family; her mother was South Africa's first female advocate. Felicia studied law at the University of Cape Town and later the University of the Witwatersrand, obtaining her LLB from the latter in 1953. In 1952, while still studying, she married Sydney Kentridge, a lawyer who went on to defend Nelson Mandela and other leading anti-apartheid figures in the Treason Trial of 1956.
Felicia and Sydney Kentridge were both staunch opponents of apartheid, and Felicia sought to overturn the legal basis for segregation and discrimination in South Africa. In the early 1970s, she visited the United States to study the work of public-interest legal centres, and was inspired to found a similar legal clinic for impoverished South Africans in 1973. In 1979, she and a group of other prominent anti-apartheid lawyers, including her husband Sydney and Arthur Chaskalson, set up the Legal Resources Centre to campaign for human rights and judicial fairness for black South Africans. Kentridge travelled abroad to gather support for the LRC, and managed to win funding from institutions such as the Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. She ran the LRC's administrative affairs and also contributed to some of its most important legal victories, helping to overturn discriminatory laws such as the system of mandatory passes for black South Africans.
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