Justice Navi Pillay. Photo: Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Judge Navi Pillay’s Nobel Peace Prize award on October 9 was a rare bit of very good news. “If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump,” she said, laughing, alongside Nuremberg Forum members in Germany, upon hearing the news. She was attending a commemoration of the Nazi war-crimes prosecution that ended in October 1946. Pillay’s willingness to attack broader socio-political conditions reflects a long history of fusing ideological radicalization and practical reforms.

Yet at the very same time, a xenophobic movement – ‘March and March’  – was rioting and burning cars both in Pillay’s native Durban and in Johannesburg next to South Africa’s Constitutional Court. The vigilantes were both trying to influence the November 4 municipal elections (and will do so again and again in the next few weeks), and specifically protesting the state’s new implementation of a ConCourt ruling that empowered immigrants through a more generous interpretation of asylum regulations.

And the same day, their own Zulu nationalist leader, 84-year old Jacob Zuma – who was SA President from 2009-18 – was reported to be on his last legs at a KwaZulu-Natal hospital. If he passes on, that could inflame matters further this week, requiring a more extensive army deployment to the province.

These local crisis conditions mean Pillay’s sudden high profile could help society figure out what to do next, to shift momentum back to progress. But her global role is vital, too. The lead organizer of South Africa’s Boycott Divestment Sanctions campaign, Roshan Dadoo, explained:

South Africa is the largest exporter of coal to Israel, fuelling genocide, ethnic cleansing, illegal settlements and the military-industrial complex. Scandalously, just last month, the South African government granted an Israeli oil company, Navitas Petroleum, offshore oil and gas exploration rights in the Orange Basin, off our west coast. We urge our government, in honour of Nobel Prize laureate Navi Pillay, to immediately implement policies of academic, cultural and sporting boycott, to impose an embargo on sales of South African coal to Israel and a ban on all trade that benefits the economy of genocidal Israel, including the rejection of Navitas Petroleum.

Since August 2025, Glencore and African Rainbow Minerals – the latter owned by Patrice Motsepe, who is President Cyril Ramaphosa’s brother-in-law and potential replacement – have been supplying close to 100% of the coal that the Israeli genocidaires need to run around a fifth of their own grid. The two firms’ export contracts with Israel are more than two decades old, including a period before 2014 when coal-mining tycoon Ramaphosa himself was in league with Glencore to sell to South Africa’s electricity parastatal, Eskom.

Not all the great leaders of the anti-apartheid movement – like Ramaphosa, who was the founding president of the National Union of Mineworkers and then African National Congress (ANC) General Secretary before losing an internal battle to succeed Nelson Mandela, to Thabo Mbeki – have such fast-disappearing ethics. Pillay is among the most principled.

Increasingly respectable radicalism

An active 85-year old judge, Navi Pillay witnessed apartheid’s racial, class and gender oppressions at a young age, one of eight children in a low-income Indian ghetto of Durban. Her grandparents cut sugar as indentured laborers, and her father drove a municipal bus.

Pillay began her social justice career as a working-class student cadre of the quasi-revolutionary Non-European Unity Movement in Durban during the early 1960s, in spite of most nationalist anti-apartheid leaders of Indian origin refusing to........

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