His soft voice, silver moustache, and gentle demeanour gave George Bizos, the lawyer who famously defended Nelson Mandela and who has died aged 92, the appearance of a retired country doctor. And indeed, in person, he was famously courteous and deferential. No airs and graces – and no easy retirement – for a man who could easily have basked in his hard-earned reputation as a pivotal figure in South Africa’s long struggle against apartheid. But for most struggle stalwarts of his generation, a life of service meant just that – a life. And George Bizos remained active and outspoken into his tenth decade. The air of quiet politeness that accompanied him to the end was not false.

But it masked a fierce and uncompromising devotion to justice and human rights, and a belief that the law was a weapon which, used correctly, had at least as much power as guns and speeches.I met him many times in the last two decades of his life, to interview him about stolen elections in Zimbabwe – his simple maxim that an election is pointless unless both sides accept the result, stuck with me – about his mediating role in the difficult family battles over Mandela’s will, and about his determination to fight for justice for the families of those shot by police in the Marikana killings of 2012.