But the recently promulgated Consumer Protection Act and the revised Companies Act now also allow individuals to bring class actions against corporations for product liability.

Earlier this year a constitutional court judgment on the case of a now- deceased mineworker, Thembekile Mankayi, who contracted silicosis on an AngloGold Ashanti mine, paved the way for further litigation.

Richard Spoor, a well- known human rights lawyer who acted for Mankayi, confirms he is putting together a class action on behalf of thousands of former mineworkers infected with the same lung disease.

Charles Abrahams of Cape-based attorneys Abrahams Kiewits is working with Spoor on this case. Abrahams has already set the wheels in motion for a separate class action on behalf of over 1m Western Cape consumers prejudiced by a price-fixing bread cartel.

Another well-known human rights lawyer, Richard Meeran of UK-based Leigh Day & Co, is embroiled in another silicosis action in the SA courts on behalf of 18 mineworkers employed at the President Steyn gold mine. However, he is suing Anglo American as the responsible holding company, not the gold subsidiary that operated the mine.

Meeran, who also represented sufferers of mercury poisoning against Thor Chemicals and 7500 asbestosis victims against Cape Plc, says technically the President Steyn claim is not a class action but a series of test cases.

“We believe this case will lay down the principles of liability for a larger group of cases. If it succeeds it could result in a settlement scheme to compensate those individuals.”

Abrahams, who is also the local attorney of record in the Khulumani class action in the US against multinationals which were complicit in apartheid, says there are no rules to guide court procedure on class actions in SA. They need to be developed, he says.

The Ngxuza case referred to a report dated 1998 by the SA Law Commission on class actions, but that was never passed into law. So in the bread cartel case, Abrahams decided to start by applying to the courts in November for certification to act. This was refused, and an application for leave to appeal has been lodged.

Class actions are extremely expensive to prepare, requiring substantial amounts of research time and expert evidence. They are often waged against multinational corporations with vast legal resources.

For impoverished claimants, the only way to fund the action is through lawyers’ taking a contingency fee. This means the lawyers take a percentage of the settlement if they win. Abrahams says it is impossible to agree a fee with thousands of individual clients so it would be necessary to apply to the courts to sanction an amount.

But are class actions really brought for the benefit of victims or to enrich lawyers?