United Nations — Nicholas Haysom, a white anti-apartheid activist in South Africa, was exploited by a prisoner-turned-president Nelson Mandela To help draft the country’s new constitution enshrining equal rights for blacks, minorities and whites, he died at the age of 73.
Haysom went from high-level positions promoting human rights in his home country to a distinguished career as a diplomat at the United Nations, serving in hotspots from Afghanistan and Iraq to Somalia and South Sudan.
His daughter, Rebecca Haysom, told The Associated Press that he died Tuesday in New York “after a long, courageous battle with heart and lung complications.”
UN Secretary-General António Guterres said Haysom “has dedicated his life to justice, dialogue and reconciliation – from his central role in South Africa’s democratic transition where he served as President Nelson Mandela’s chief legal and constitutional advisor to years of leadership in UN positions in some of the world’s most complex and fragile environments.”
The UN Secretary-General said in a statement that his legacy “will live on in the peace processes he advanced, the institutions he strengthened, and the principles he helped revive around the world.”
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, A former anti-apartheid activist said the country mourns “a distinguished diplomat and pioneer of our democratic administration whose commitment to justice and peace made our country, our continent and the world a better place.”
“I remember him because he used his legal acumen, guidance, wisdom and integrity in developing our Constitution,” Ramaphosa said in a statement, urging South Africans to “honor his contribution to our nation and the international community by upholding fundamental rights and preserving the peace he so passionately and eloquently defended.”
Nicholas Rowland Leyburn “Fink” Haysom grew up in Durban in a liberal family who believed in racial equality, especially his mother, who was an anti-apartheid activist. At university, he said he also became a critic of apartheid and decided to attend law school at the Universities of Natal and Cape Town to address people’s living conditions.
He became president of the National Anti-Apartheid Union of South African Students, and said in a UN interview last year that he had been arrested or detained about half a dozen times, once spending six months in solitary confinement in about 1980. Ramaphosa said he also had a creative side: he was awarded South Africa’s best playwright in 1987.
No one at the time believed apartheid would end, Haysom said, and it was a “huge moment” when Mandela was released in 1990. At the time, Haysom was a member of a law firm very active in human rights.
The African National Congress, which Mandela led, asked Haysom to join its Constitutional Committee, and said he spent several years with a “very interesting group of intellectuals” envisioning a new South Africa, and negotiating with the National Party, which founded and implemented the apartheid system, about how to get there.
Once ostracized in much of the world, Haysom said the group wanted to find the ideal formula for a constitutional state that valued the need for equality among all its citizens and reshaped the social contract “which we wanted to be a lesson to the world.” He said it had not been easy, but “South Africa’s constitution is still viewed as perhaps one of the most progressive constitutions in the world.”
“And I think that’s what led to me being asked to be Mandela’s legal advisor… when he was president,” Haysom said, a position he held from 1994 to 1999.
Mandela wanted to set an example for the first post-apartheid government to respect the law, “and he was really at the forefront of creating a society built on respect for legal equality and human rights,” Haysom said.
He saw Mandela every morning and said he was “extremely generous.”
“But he was solid and strong in his conviction that he was on the right path, and he persevered,” Haysom said. “As I tell my kids, the lesson from Mandela is not just be a nice person, it’s perseverance in your principles that will change the world.”
Under Mandela, Haysom joined a team that helped end ethnic violence in Burundi between Hutus and Tutsis in the 1990s. He was then asked to try to find a formula to restore peace in Sudan between North and South, which eventually led to the secession of South Sudan and becoming an independent state in 2011.
Haysom then spent 2005 to 2007 in Iraq trying to find a formula for his communities — Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds — to live together, an issue he saw in all conflicts. From 2007 to 2012, he worked in the office of then-UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as Director of Political, Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Affairs. He then spent four years in Afghanistan from 2012 to 2016 in two positions at the United Nations.
He focused most of the remainder of his UN career on Sudan and South Sudan, where he has been head of the peacekeeping mission since 2021 except for a short period in Somalia. The Somali government ordered him to leave in 2019 after being questioned about the arrest of a former leader of the extremist Al-Shabaab movement.
Haysom is survived by his wife, Delphine, and their two sons, Charles and Hector, as well as his three older children, Rebecca, Simon and Julian, from his previous marriage to Mary Anne Cullinan.
Haysom said there was a time when he was “probably inappropriately proud” of his efforts, especially in Burundi, Sudan and South Africa, but after a few years all of those peace agreements were in trouble.
He said it was an acknowledgment that peace does not last forever and that democracy requires “continuous participation by people of good will.”
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Gerald Imray contributed to this report from Cape Town, South Africa