Felicia Kentridge was born Felicia Nahoma Geffen in Johannesburg in 1930, the younger daughter of a Jewish legal family; her mother was South Africa's first female advocate. Felicia studied law at the University of Cape Town and later the University of the Witwatersrand, obtaining her LLB from the latter in 1953. In 1952, while still studying, she married Sydney Kentridge, a lawyer who went on to defend Nelson Mandela and other leading anti-apartheid figures in the Treason Trial of 1956.
Anti-apartheid activism
Felicia and Sydney Kentridge were both staunch opponents of apartheid, and Felicia sought to overturn the legal basis for segregation and discrimination in South Africa. In the early 1970s, she visited the United States to study the work of public-interest legal centres, and was inspired to found a similar legal clinic for impoverished South Africans in 1973. In 1979, she and a group of other prominent anti-apartheid lawyers, including her husband Sydney and Arthur Chaskalson, set up the Legal Resources Centre to campaign for human rights and judicial fairness for black South Africans. Kentridge travelled abroad to gather support for the LRC, and managed to win funding from institutions such as the Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. She ran the LRC's administrative affairs and also contributed to some of its most important legal victories, helping to overturn discriminatory laws such as the system of mandatory passes for black South Africans. In the early 1980s, Kentridge and her husband moved to London, though she continued to travel to South Africa regularly to assist the LRC. She furthermore worked as the chairperson of the Legal Resources Trust, and helped to set up the Southern Africa Legal Services and Legal Education Project and the British Legal Assistance Trust, which later became part of the Canon Collins Education and Legal Assistance Trust. After the end of apartheid in 1994, Kentridge remained involved with the LRC, which continues to conduct public-interest legal work to the present day. The South African General Bar Council awards an annual prize named in Kentridge's honour, the Sydney and Felicia Kentridge Award, for excellence in public-interest law.
In 1952 Geffen married Sydney Kentridge, a South African lawyer and one-time Constitutional Court judge, who survived her. At the time of her death in 2015, she had four children, nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Her eldest son, William, is a South African artist, public speaker and filmmaker.
