Roots of my activism are very connected to Wits

5 June 2023 - Ufrieda Ho

The co-founder behind a unique London-based club, Paul van Zyl, shares his vision of reimagining a better world.

Paul van Zyl (BA 1992, LLB 1997) isn’t afraid to face up to a world with problems and talk about taboos like money, power, privilege and politics – not if the conversations can be channelled towards impact and solution.

Paul is the co-founder of The Conduit Club, the Covent Gardens-based member’s club that came into being in 2018. It reopened in its current location in 2021 and is an ethical hospitality venture of dining and meeting spaces housed in a six-storey building on Langley Street.

At its heart though the club is a platform to bring together a community of people who understand the potential of social entrepreneurship and the value in pooling skills, experience, capital and resources to reframe the world’s challenges and to innovate for better solutions. Ultimately it’s a gathering of people who share an understanding that a more just, equitable and resilient world is a better one for everybody.  

Witsie roots

For Paul, the antidote to facing social crises is to take action, to get stuck in and find the people who are willing to take the leap with you. It’s been a personal ethic that was firmed up during his student days at Wits in the late 1980s. He enrolled as a law student in 1988 recognising that “law was an avenue to address the enormous injustice of apartheid,” he says.

South African in the 1980s was still under apartheid rule and the state’s dark machinery in upholding minority white rule was as brutal as ever. Paul became involved in student politics and joined NUSAS (National Union of South African Students), a student-led movement advancing liberal and anti-apartheid politics. He would also help run the Defiance Campaign and joined the “Save the Patriots” campaign working to represent struggle activists who were arrested and faced the death penalty if convicted.

“The roots of my activism and my early career were very connected to Wits and shaped by Wits. My first job was at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) [that started as a project at Wits],” he says.

Paul’s activism would see him go on to help establish the Khulumani Support Group to fight for the rights of survivors and families of political conflict in South Africa.

“It became clear under Nelson Mandela’s presidency that we were going to have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). And from that point I got to work with Dullah Omar (who would be appointed as justice minister by Nelson Mandela in 1994) on the legal framework for the Commission and I was appointed executive secretary for the TRC,” he says. Paul was 25 years old at the time.

When the TRC wrapped up its work in 1998 Paul took up a scholarship at NYU. In the preceding years he had completed his law degree at Wits in 1996 and the year after that an LLM in international law from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.

At NYU he earned an LLM in corporate law in 1999. It was in his time in the United States that allowed him to fully appreciate the monumental impact of the TRC and its potential as a base model for transitional justice across the world. It would give rise to him establishing, alongside Dr Alex Boraine, who was deputy chairperson of the TRC and Priscilla Hayner, the International Center for Transitional Justice in 2001, based in New York.  

A space for conversations

Fast forward to the present day and Paul has now lived outside of Johannesburg and South Africa for over 20 years. He is chief creative officer at The Conduit but he says his identity as a South African “courses through his veins”. It informs his deep understanding of inequality, of divisions and injustice and that humanity must run through solutions for a world that faces multiple crises.

At the club he helps create the programmes and events for its 3 000 members that are centred on pillars that include climate action, gender equality, combating racism, health and wellbeing and arts and culture. 

Across the six floors of the building there are two restaurants, a broadcast studio and a bookshop. The events diary is diverse, from comedy nights and yoga classes to rooftop parties and functions of wine pairing with seasonal tasting dishes. Paul is a self-confessed foodie and can happily turn out chicken escalope with his seven-herb green sauce or a beautiful bowl of ramen or his speciality tacos.

The Conduit Club, through its sister initiative Conduit Connect, has raised over £10m capital for impact enterprises. One of these is its project to secure permanent housing stock for refugees but working out a model that doesn’t rely solely on philanthropy. The club also hosts presentations and workshops the likes of which include tackling child hunger in London; navigating intersectional identities in the workplace; and discussions to deepen awareness and context about politics and turmoil in Pakistan in an election year. The club’s recent climate action conference held in partnership with The New York Times was a particularly impactful event, Paul notes.

“More than 1000 people attended this event that was about climate solutions and the broadcast went out to 10 million people on their digital subscriber base. There was a panel on African carbon markets and African solutions for which there was great interest.

“We remain largely focused on the Global South and look at impact investing in the Global South,” he says. He has not lost sight of the gaps that still needs to be closed in a divided world. And he’s critical too of how South Africa’s post-apartheid politics and economics, now at 29 years after democracy, have fallen short in delivering a better life to more black South Africans in particular.

He’s in London, not South Africa though, but this too is deliberate. London is where global power, influence and money clot. He says: “When we were thinking about locations for the club, a place like London has huge communities of people who care about impact; it’s also a great centre of power. If you can succeed in a location like this, then you can succeed in other places.”

Success for Paul’s though would be more people moving in the same direction for change – from people in power to the most vulnerable person on earth. It’s would be recognising everyone’s contribution and the strength of collective effort. It’s would be finding more connecting points to reimagine and remake a world that is better tomorrow than it was yesterday.