Sarah Christie | 23 July 1946 - 5 October 2025 

A Tribute

Emeritus Professor Evance Kalula

Sarah Christie sadly passed away on 5 October 2025 at the age of 79, the shock of her loss continues to consume her family and friends deeply. I should start with a disclaimer, what follows is not an obituary. Vanja Karth and Hugh Corder, mutual friends of Sarah, kindly encouraged me to write a short tribute. This is therefore a brief reflection of the Sarah Christie I was privileged to know, work with and came to love as a dear friend. It is a living memory, a testament not based on any documentary recollection, but an honest and sincere testimony, nevertheless. As such, some of the recollections might inadvertently be incorrect, kindly bear with me for such errors, it is intended to be a celebration of a remarkable life.

Sarah, a member of the Faculty of Law as part of the former Labour Law Unit, was a special person like no other. She was larger than life in her circles, a remarkable mother, grandmother, colleague and friend. As Clive Thompson, a long-time colleague and friend put it when he heard the sad news, Sarah’s passing was ”very sad and distressing indeed... [the] Wonderful irreverent, irrepressible, lovable Sarah” was no longer with us.

The essence of this was a sentiment that ran through all the many tributes to Sarah at her memorial, starting with the excellent  eulogy by her daughter Laura Lowry, followed by her friend Mary Louise Peires, her CCMA colleague Laurie Warwick, and many colleagues and friends who had shared written tributes that had been collated.

The tributes talked of some of Sarah’s many attributes, including a dynamic woman and a trailblazer. Others talked of Sarah as feisty, hilarious, difficult, her marvellous sense of humour, a candid  person who did not hesitate to tread on toes of holy cows to do the right thing. They also talked of Sarah’s commitment to fairness and justice, but not at the expense of high standards and integrity, and many other perceptive reflections.

All the above sentiments were definitely true of Sarah but for me there was more. I will always be indebted to Sarah. She welcomed and looked out for me, taught me the ropes, not least to think on my feet and improvise if need be. Incidentally, she  gave me my current walking stick, typical of her after dressing me down when she saw I was unsteady on my feet from my morning cocktail of my heart transplant medication and stumbling, as only Sarah could do. She then proceeded to give me a stick to support me in what she referred to as my impending feeble days of disability which she had already come to terms with herself. That was Sarah, considerate and generous to  family, colleagues and friends.

As a ‘backroom boy’ I often fumble in front of audiences. Although I come from a long line of my ancestor Bisa ‘Kings’ minders and shadows’, what Zaixiang (my Chinese name) denotes, I am only too aware of my limitations in the frontline. Sarah sought to pull me out of that zone and tried to teach me to rise up to whatever the occasion required of me, stammering and all. To this day, whenever I am stuck, I instinctively think of what Sarah would have done. She had special attributes, skills such as the ability to listen and mediate, and the ability to firmly push people towards a win-win engagement. Some of those skills  have stood me in good stead in a rather demanding role that I serve in the ILO supervisory system.

Sarah practiced this art herself when she left the Faculty's Labour Law Unit and later become the first Convening Senior CCMA Commissioner for the Western Cape. She was a fair arbitrator, and she was excellent at impacting common sense into opponents to get reasonable outcomes, persuading them to ‘find each other’.

After her CCMA days, her winning ways made her a successful arbitrator at various leading UN agencies, including the WTO, IMF and the World Bank, among others. Although the chores were amply rewarding financially, and quite rightly so given the heavy demands of the role, it is the sense fairness and justice that prompted Sarah more than anything else.

I first met Sarah when I joined the Labour Law Unit in 1992. Clive Thompson had set up the Unit in the Faculty of Law at a time when a lot seemed to be in flux of sorts, and at a time when what was later to be a ‘new labour law’ was struggling to be born. It was an uncertain time. It was a bold initiative, part of an imaginative dissent. In Sarah’s own words, Clive was one of those few angry young Turks, all white boys, who refused to continue being coopted into the injustice being perpetrated to non-white working people and broader society in their name.

I came down to Cape Town as a person in doldrums, in search of a new purpose of life, to find a way to help lighten the burden my wife Sebastiana as anchor of our family. I felt sorry for myself and angry, somewhat a casualty of the Zambian experience of what Rene Dumont called a “False Start in Africa”. Although I was not and have never be an exile, I was disillusioned even though my material fortunes and professional status would have been much better in Zambia then, things had wrong gone there. The changing South Africa seemed like a better bet, as later developments were to confirm in my personal fortunes, not least survival.

And so, I joined Sarah at the Labour Law Unit as her colleague, as a senior researcher. All I had were some pretentious academic credentials, my knowledge of South Africa labour relations basically consisted of the Wiehahn Commission reports. I have always suspected that I was probably one of a  few people who read all the Wiehahn Commission reports, my supervisor in Oxford had strongly advised that I read them, a chore that I resented at the time but came to appreciate later.

Despite this background and the fact that South African labour law had more Anglo-American bearings than Roman Dutch law, I had no clue of how it operated in practice. Sarah took me in hand and reached out to mentor me both professionally and personally. When I came to Cape Town, I was temporarily a single parent with three children. My wife Sebastiana only joined me and the children six months later, thanks to Clive Thompson and Professor Solly Benatar, then Head of Medicine, who for their kind consideration beyond the call of duty that made it possible to reunite us as a family. As a single mother herself, Sarah knew what it meant to be a single parent. She kindly reached out to me and became both my professional and moral tutor, so to speak.

Clive Thompson, to his great credit as our director, gave us space. Clive not only had the genius of remarkable insights and vision of what was evolving in South African labour law then, he also had the foresight to make space for the colleagues he managed. I will never forget my first working meeting with him, after I had more or less settled down and was ready to start work. I went to see him, to report that I was ready to be given work, he looked at me and said what work? He said something to the effect that I had been hired as a senior researcher with a clear job description and details of the Labour Law Unit’s projects.

With Sarah’s tutorship, I took advantage of that space, the rest is history, as they say. Sarah on the other hand, while loyal and well disposed to Clive as manager and delivering the high quality of work when she did, time management was not her forte. There were therefore a few moments of frustration, at least apparent from Clive’s side. Even Darcy du Toit, a legend as editor struggled to get Sarah to deliver her contribution to the first edition of the seminal magnus opus, The Labour Relations Act 1995. As always when Sarah delivered it passed muster.

And so, my close association began. David Woolfrey, another Labour Law Unit veteran. later joined Sarah in my schooling as it were. Sarah and David shared the talent of having good bright minds, they both had what it took intellectually to be good academics, to my mind they were the most literate lawyers I have been privileged to know, but they were rather impatient with what I suspected they considered ‘idle, petty and pretentious’ thinking of academic writing, they were instead drawn to things more practical and useful. Not for them the role of what these  days is referred to as ‘influencers’.

Sarah served the under several Deans in the Faculty, including Dirk van Zyl Smit, Danie Visser and Hugh Corder. She liked them all despite her reservations about what she regarded as mindless bureaucracy that their briefs entailed. She was rather well disposed to Hugh, to what she referred to as his ‘enthusiastic gentle ways’.  Her friend, PJ Schwikkard - who she admired as ‘very clever’ - only became Dean after she had left the Faculty.

Sarah also interacted with a number of colleagues during her time at the Faculty, most of them in the broader labour law fraternity elsewhere but there were a few within the Faculty, including the late Mike Blackman whom she admired for his intellectual depth. Others included Kate O’Regan, she marvelled at Kate’s incredible intellect and humility. In Christina Murray I suspect she sensed her own strong will and admired the way Christina could deploy it to devastating ferocity and impact against ‘feeble minds’ in a way that she could not. In Dennis Davis, Sarah admired but his ‘impish good mind’ and breadth of knowledge as she once put it; Paul Benjamin  she regarded  as a ‘serious' and 'thoughtful’ and of course Halton Cheadle. She had a particular liking for Halton, sarcastic as it appeared on the surface at times, referring to him as a ‘clever wild boy’, not ‘born to the manor’ like some of the young Turks. It was Sarah who coined the phrase that I have been known to use to refer to Halton at times, that ‘on a good day, he has no equals’.

When she left the Faculty, Sarah and I were firm friends and kept in regular touch, she introduced me to some interesting people,  some of whom became my friends as well. I can think of Isabel Manley and Jim Duke, an Anglo-Canadian couple who had taken to the Cape. Isabel, like Sarah was an arbitrator in the UK, while her partner, Jim was drawn to the Cape as volunteer, assisting a house  building charity. Their flat in Kenilworth became a regular meeting place whenever they came down several times a year, Sarah was always in her element during those gatherings.

Since 2018, I have been privileged to link up with Susan Hayter, her husband David Kucera and daughter Lily. Susan is a  leading ILO light on social dialogue in Geneva; Sarah was our mutual friend. We were both privileged to sit at Sarah’s feet, in the case of Susan during Sarah’s time at the CCMA. Susan had known Sarah since their IMSSA days and when the CCMA come into being with Sarah as Senior Convening Commissioner, Susan served as professional assistant, as ‘trouble shooter and restrainer’ of sorts. Whenever I am in Geneva, Susan and I meet to reminisce about our days with the Sarah we both loved dearly.

One or two comments in tribute to Sarah shared at the memorial referred to her as difficult at times. It is true that Sarah had a sharp tongue, she occasionally lashed out but she was not difficult to work with at all. As David once put it, her outbursts were ‘mere bluster’ of frustration, said with her characteristic candour, but without ‘malice aforethought’, she never bore any grudges. Sarah was essentially a ‘timid soul’, she did not like conflict, she preferred to solve conflict, and she was good at doing that.

In more recent years, David Woolfrey and I would had taken to regular brunches with Sarah at which we lamented our usual despair with the way things were transpiring in the world. Sarah was however increasingly more philosophical in her view of the world. She was unwell and as her health worsened, she was rather more drawn to her role as family matriarch.

Sarah loved her children, Sam and Laura, and her grandchildren. She had brought them up with her usual  ‘common sense’ approach, to prepare them for the realities of the current increasingly uncertain world, while maintaining values of common humanity and dignity.

She was very proud of them! She was proud of Sam, a widower who was bringing up three children after he sadly lost his beloved wife Zaida to cancer. She admired his strength to start all over again, in a strange environment in the UK. She was eagerly waiting to see Sam and her grandchildren for Christmas this year, sadly it was not meant to be.

As for Laura, she reflects a mix of both Sarah’s gentle and adventurous ways. She was a marvel in Sarah’s eyes, a caring person, Sarah was she was particularly impressed that Laura and her husband Scott not only had chosen to be dedicated teachers in the old tradition, but they also had a sense of adventure. They undertook to go motor trekking ‘into Africa’ before settling down to raise a family that Sarah approved of.

Sarah was at heart an adventurer, she at times referred to her father’s streak for adventure which she said he has inherited. Sarah was born in Spain when her father was in the British diplomatic service. As she told it, her father was bored stiff with diplomatic niceties, he left to join the French Foreign Legion and was never heard of again.

That sense of adventure was always lurking below the surface in Sarah. In Jan Raath, an old friend from their Rhodes days, Sarah found a kindred soul who  bonded with and appealed to her mischievous sense of fun and adventure. Jan was a leading   Zimbabwean journalist of note who, among other chronicles, served as a regular stringer for the London Times, he shared Sarah’s sense of adventure, reading and mischievous love of fun.

And so, this for me was the Sarah I knew, she is sadly gone. She has left a deep void not only for those of us who were privileged to know and love her, but for the broader labour law fraternity as well, we are poorer for her absence.

As I count my blessings, with  a new lease of life that enables me to pursue many ‘labours of love’, ‘in ‘search of  redemption’, I  feel blessed that Sarah’s and my paths crossed. I will forever be indebted to her; I mourn her deeply. SARAH: You left us too soon, but you will never walk alone, we miss you deeply, REST IN ETERNAL PEACE!