Henry Eric Isaacs

ISAACS HENRY ERIC ISAACS On September 12, 2009, in Johannesburg, South Africa, after a long illness. Remembered as a South African freedom fighter, lawyer, and intellectual. Affectionately known by family and friends as "H.E." or "Louw", he was a family man, and will be sorely missed by his four children, Silja, Lionel, Ifedi and Henry Thabo ''Bo'' Isaacs, grandson Henrik, niece Noedine, and family and friends in South Africa, the United States and around the world. His marriage to Gayla Cook ended in divorce - they lived in New York, Washington, Harare, and Johannesburg. Born in 1949 and raised in his beloved Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal, the son of Norman and Hester Isaacs. He was a student and activist at the University of the Western Cape-Bellville, and with the South African Students'' Organization and Black Consciousness Movement, before being banned without trial in 1973. Under house arrest, he skipped the country to Swaziland and then New Zealand. In exile he joined the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) which he served as Director of Education (Tanzania ''78-''79) and Director of Foreign Affairs / Representative to the United Nations (New York, ''79-''82), traveling extensively throughout Africa, Asia, Europe and the U.S. After retiring from active politics he returned to SA in 1990 after Nelson Mandela was released from prison and devoted his life to scholarship concerned with giving meaning to the hard-fought principles of justice enshrined in the constitution. Having earned degrees from Universities of Western Cape (B.A. Law, 1972), Victoria in Wellington New Zealand, (LL.B, 1978), Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (M.A. Sociology 2003), he overcame the Apartheid-era interruptions to his legal studies and was working towards a Ph.D at the University of Johannesburg when he passed on. Services were held in South Africa.