What comes after liberation?
In this wide-ranging conversation, the freedom fighter and former Constitutional Court justice Albie Sachs reflects on law, liberation, and the unfinished work of building a just South Africa.
Joseph Nkatlo, Albie Sachs and Mary Butcher giving the closed fists with upraised thumb salute at a Defiance Campaign meeting at the Drill Hall in Cape Town on 12 April 1952. Photo: National Library of South Africa. All images courtesy of Albie Sachs.
- Interview by
- Riason Naidoo
Born on January 30, 1935, in Johannesburg to Solomon Sachs and Rachel Ginsberg, Albert “Albie” Sachs turned 90 in January. Albie moved to Cape Town with his mother and his younger brother when he was three years old. Advanced for his age at school, he skipped two grades and as a result enrolled for his first year of university when he was only 15. His parents were deeply involved in the Garment Workers Union of South Africa, and at a young age he was determined to follow his own path, wherever it led. The rest, as they say, is history.
Graduating with a law degree from UCT, he started practicing as a lawyer at the age of 21. Sachs was in attendance with 2,000 others in 1955 at the Congress of the People in Kliptown, Johannesburg, when the Freedom Charter was adopted. He was arrested in 1963 in Cape Town under the 90-day Detention Without Trial law, and after 90 days, on the pretext of being released, and after being given his clothes and belongings, was rearrested for a further 78 days, thus serving a continuous 168 days in solitary confinement without trial. He wrote about this experience in The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (1966). He was arrested again three years later in 1966, when he was subjected to sleep deprivation torture. South African Security Branch officers had received training in interrogation techniques in foreign countries, including in France, which was known for having used torture extensively during the Algerian War of Independence. Following this, he was allowed to leave South Africa on the condition that he could never return.
Sachs was reunited in England with Stephanie Kemp—a South African anti-apartheid activist who had been arrested and imprisoned at Pretoria Central Prison for blowing up pylons—and whom he married in 1966. They raised two sons, Alan and Michael and divorced in 1980. He obtained a doctorate in law from the University of Sussex in 1970 and lectured at the University of Southampton from 1970 to 1977. Sachs moved to Mozambique in 1977 following the country’s independence from Portugal in 1975. He learnt Portuguese, taking up a post as law professor at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo and later as Director of Research in the Ministry of Justice. Sachs became deeply involved in the art and culture of the country. He maintained strong connections with Mozambique’s leading artists Malangatana Valente Ngwenya and Alberto Mabungulane Chissano and acquired art by numerous local artists during his 11 years in the Southern African country. Sachs donated his Mozambican art collection to the University of Western Cape – Robben Island Mayibuye Archives.
African National Congress (ANC) leader Oliver Tambo called on Sachs to draft the organization’s code of conduct—particularly denouncing torture and advocating just procedures within the organisation—which was adopted by the party in Kabwe, Zambia, in 1985. Victim of a targeted car bomb attack in Maputo in 1988 by the South African Security Forces, Sachs lost his right arm and the sight of his left eye. A passerby was killed in the assassination attempt. Sachs was transferred to London to recover.
In 1989 he wrote a paper entitled “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom” presented at the ANC conference in Lusaka, which created a huge debate in South Africa among artists and cultural workers. Following Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 and the unbanning of the ANC and other parties, Sachs returned home to South Africa and was elected on the ANC’s National Executive Committee. He was very involved in the negotiations towards a new political solution and continued working on a draft of the new constitution. In 1994 President Nelson Mandela appointed him a judge at the Constitutional Court.
The former judge is the author of numerous landmark judgments and several non-fiction books. He is the recipient of several international honorary awards, including from the countries of South Africa, France, Portugal, and Brazil, to mention a few. He holds 27 honorary doctorates from many prestigious universities, among them Princeton, Columbia, Cambridge, Dundee, Aberdeen, London, Sussex, Southampton, and locally from the universities of Cape Town, the Western Cape, the Witwatersrand and the Free State.
Riason Naidoo interviewed Albie Sachs in his home in Cape Town.
You are quoted as saying that you were surrounded by art and culture as a child. What was it like growing up in your home?
My mom, Ray Sachs then—she was Ray Ginsberg before and became Ray Edwards later—separated from my dad in Johannesburg, and she brought my little brother and I to Cape Town. She was Moses Kotane’s typist. I grew up hearing my mom saying, “Tidy up, tidy up. Uncle Moses is coming.” Uncle Moses being the general secretary of the South African Communist Party. She met Cissie Gool, who invited us to come and stay with them; Gool was living with Sam Kahn in a bungalow in Glen Beach. My childhood was spent in Clifton, where houses there, in those days, were a little grander than shacks, flimsier than houses.
The Communist Party attracted a number of cultural figures. It was big on culture with a capital C. Gregoire Boonzaier, the painter, was a close friend of my mom. The little hanging space we had in the house would have a Boonzaier painting. The image I had of an artist was of a robust, fun-loving person, full of laughter. He was full of stories. Boonzaier had a blue Chevrolet car with a dicky seat at the back, which could open up, and my brother and I would sit in that seat while he was driving around. That was also where he would put his paintings when he was traveling through the Karoo. He became a commercial traveler of his own paintings. He would say, “A house without a painting is a house without a soul.”
The other figure of influence from my early childhood was Uys Krige, the Afrikaans poet. He lived in Clifton 4 and was married to actress Lydia Lindeque. I remember being told he was a poet. I didn’t understand what a poet was back then. Like Boonzaier, he was also an Afrikaner rebel who had been to Spain, which in those days was a battleground between fascism and democracy.
Some years later I’m at the University of Cape Town. I’m not politically active. I’m making my own way. The theme of modern art puzzled me, and I became fascinated by contemporary art. In my first year of university I would hitchhike from campus down into town to the Groote Kerk Gebou. They had an Afrikaans-owned bookshop called ID Booksellers with beautiful art books. I would sit down and work my way through these art books. Totally astonished at first—the odd colors, the meaningless shapes, the terms and movements slowly started making sense. Very focused on France, it was always in a context of conflict. The avant-garde artists were fighting the galleries. They were fighting the formal artists. There was a sense of rebellion in modern art, which appealed to the rebel in me. I was ready for rebellion.
In my second year at university my mother told me that Uys Krige would give a lecture and that maybe I would be interested in attending. He spoke about Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet, being executed by firing squad at 5 p.m. Then he read the Pablo Neruda poem “At Five in the Afternoon,” and he walked up and down the stage reciting at five in the afternoon. He spoke for about two hours non-stop. The poem reached right into me. It did something very important. It connected the dreaminess, the longing, the soulfulness with public events, with action, with the world. The interior and exterior, the drama and emotion, of internal dreams and imagination, and the passions of struggles and fights for freedom got connected through that lecture. A few weeks later I was volunteering for the 1952 Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign.
You write in The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (1966) that while in solitary confinement in 1963 you whistled many pieces of music and resistance songs—Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, “La Marseillaise,” “We Will Follow Luthuli,” “The Red Flag,” “Let’s Twist Again,” “Goin’ Home” from Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony, Miriam Makeba songs, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong tunes, “Goodnight, Irene”—to pass the time and keep you sane. Could you reflect on how the memories of songs impacted on you in those times?
Prison is filled with sound, ugly sound. Doors slamming, commands being issued, drunks screaming and banging. A kind of a tattoo that would go on. I’m singing these songs to myself. I’m working my way through the alphabet. This I remember. [Albie sings.]
Always…I’ll be loving you, always.
I’ll be living here always,
Year after year always,
In this little cell that I know well,
I’ll be living swell always, always.
I’m amused that Irving Berlin’s love song to his wife is keeping the heart of a would-be revolutionary in a Cape Town prison alive. [He continues.]
I’ll be staying in always,
Keeping up my chin always,
Not for but an hour,
Not for but a week,
Not for 90 days, but always.
I sing that song quite often when I’m touring, especially if there are judges in the audience. I don’t think they’ve ever heard a judge make a presentation singing. The whistling was fantastic because suddenly there was somebody whistling back. The person didn’t recognize the ANC songs. The person didn’t recognize “The Red Flag.” The first melody that we had in common was the “Goin’ Home” theme. After being released some months later, I met Dorothy Adams, and she belonged to another political group led by Neville Alexander. So there we were. Different political cultures, both involved in anti-apartheid resistance, both detained without trial, both having the hardest experience of our lives. My whistling of the “Goin’ Home” theme has come back into my life. It now appears on the landing page of a website on my life and work being developed in Cape Town. Its landing page carries the “Goin’ Home” music whistled in prison. It also contains the figure of an award given annually, called The Albie, by George and Amal Clooney [née Alamuddin]. The figure is based on a drawing by George Clooney.
While incarcerated you were later given access to literature. You write, “There is no doubt about what kind of books I want. I want to read novels, books alive with people, people who talk, mingle with each other and undergo all the normal emotions of life. I want to escape, but escape into the world of reality.” What is the power of fiction for you, and what does it tell us about life in general? Is there a connection?
I’ve always loved reading since I was very young. There were some memorable books by a left-wing writer called Geoffrey Trease: one called Bows Against the Barons; another, Call to Arms, was set in Latin America—of revolutionaries fighting against a despotic government. These were books geared to the imagination of someone living in an atypical home in South Africa. Some of my mother’s close friends were Cissie Gool and Pauline Podbury. Gool was a fiery speaker and city councilor, daughter of the famous Abdullah Abdurahman political family. Podbury was married to H. A. Naidoo from Durban, and they were both in the trade-union movement. My mother had many strong women friends. I didn’t have a chance. I became a feminist, if not from birth, from early childhood. That was my milieu.
I discovered French literature, Balzac, Guy de Maupassant. My imagination was stirred by French and then Russian literature, especially Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Tolstoy’s War and Peace was an obligatory read during a gap year in London when I was 20. At a later stage, Italian literature. German writer Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain was influential too. I read three or four novels by the Spanish writer Pérez Galdós.
I enjoyed Vanity Fair by William Thackeray. It had something extra. I liked reading about the world in a town called X, Russian names, French names. It was part and parcel of transporting me to another world. The idea of reading South African fiction did not appeal to me. A big transition moment for me was reading The Lying Days by Nadine Gordimer. It had that quality of transporting me into another universe. I have to thank Nadine for opening me up to South African imagination and literature.
Another big breakthrough was Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. I read most of his novels. I met Micere Mugo in Nairobi, and later when she was in exile, who was a professor of English literature and part of that generation of rebels. Alex La Guma was a huge hero for me as a writer. We worked in the resistance in Cape Town together. The book of his I like the most is The Stone Country, about the Roeland Street Prison, where he was locked up, and I where was locked up too.
A big cultural influence in my early years was film. I belonged to the film society in Cape Town. I saw lots of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Italian post-WWII Neo Realism and Surrealist works.
Some of the authors you refer to in your jail diary are Durrell, Henry James, Proust, George Eliot, Racine, Melville, Moss Hart, Mary Renault, Jan Rabie, Venter, C. P. Snow and Lampedusa. Who are some of your current favorite authors?
During my time in jail the court ordered that I have books. Later on that was rescinded again by the top court in the country banning literature for prisoners. After my release I was so worried about being caught without reading matter that when I traveled I would take a whole lot of books with me. I thought I must not be caught without a book again. The books I read now are thrillers. I judge my holidays by the number of thrillers I read by the likes of Jo Nesbo, et al., and especially those set in Nordic countries, France, Italy or Japan.
You made a book, Images of a Revolution (1983), of mural art in Mozambique (and a documentary too). What did you appreciate about that project?
I picked up a huge amount of information in 11 years in England. I had marvelous friends and immersed myself in all sorts of cultural activities in the UK. I saw the whole Ring Cycle by Wagner, and read Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past but I learnt far more in Mozambique. I was 11 years in Mozambique too, and it was intensely experiential. It is an African country that emerged from armed struggle, revolution, transformation, and civil war. I had intense personal emotions of love, revolution, war, death, and near death. It was a different kind of experience for me from years living before and after in South Africa and in exile. When it came to culture, it was part and parcel of the revolutionary struggle. All leaders of Frelimo wrote poetry, even Samora Machel. A lot of it very beautiful poetry. The poets were asking the questions, not just the great political writers. Jorge Rebelo wrote a poem in Portuguese, “When Bullets Begin to Flower” (1972), and one of the stanzas opens with:
It is not enough that our cause is pure and just,
purity and justice must exist inside of ourselves.
It is 1976. I had been teaching in Dar es Salaam during the long summer break. The plane descends to Maputo. I see it written in Portuguese, “Liberated Zone of Humanity.” There are murals everywhere; the revolution was on the walls. Exiles from Chile, including an architect, were working with the Mozambican artist Malangatana. It was very beautiful landscaped art. The documentary I made is called The Deeper Image.
In The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter (1990), you write, “I used to argue that culture was an instrument of the struggle, that the artists should be committed, et cetera, but now I see culture as something much deeper, more profound, an expression of what we are and what we are becoming, and the artist as someone naturally engaged with life, including struggle…” Did your years in Mozambique articulate a more nuanced notion of culture, a need for beauty, contradictions, ambiguity?
I’m in New York, and I’m invited to speak at the House of Culture in Stockholm. Eventually I’ve flown all across the Atlantic, and finally I’m only given five minutes to speak. Speakers before me were all saying the same thing, “Art is a weapon of the struggle.” So, I thought, I’ve got five minutes; I am going to make two points. The first thing I say is, “We don’t want your solidarity criticism. We want real criticism.” There is stunned silence. Even though I don’t believe in censorship, I said, “I believe we should ban the statement ‘Art is a Weapon of the Struggle’ for five years.” Conservatives thought, Albie has seen the light at last. What I meant is that art is much more profound. We need to see the good in the bad, the bad in the good. As revolutionaries do we never make love? At night when you go to bed do you discuss the role of the white working class?
This leads to your paper “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom,” presented at the ANC conference in 1989, in which you argued for a move away from the slogan “Culture is a Weapon of the Struggle.”
The big advantage of being blown up and surviving is that, okay, so I’m going to be called bourgeois, so what! It removed the fear of criticism for me, of being seen to be out of line. Who cares? I can say it now. Barbara Masekela was there, and she was the head of the ANC’s Department of Culture, and she said, “Albie, we are having a conference in Lusaka, and you must be there to say these things.” I had great fun writing it. I couldn’t go, but I gave my paper to Gillian Slovo. A few months later I was in New York, and I went to the ANC offices there, and somebody told me that my paper tore the conference apart. I was absolutely thrilled to bits. That’s what Barbara wanted, and she sent excerpts of “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom” to The Weekly Mail, as it was called back then. It was very much in the spirit of the debates we had in Mozambique. For example, when one of the leaders asked Comrade Sergio, “What do you think of the slogan ‘Black is beautiful’?” His response was, “Black is beautiful, brown is beautiful, white is beautiful.”
You have noted that at even the tiniest meeting in Maputo there would be a cloth on the table and a jam tin with a pot-plant, not to speak of songs. Mozambique left a deep impression on you in terms of culture and beauty.
Beauty for me came before and after. In my younger days, when I looked down from Table Mountain and saw Cape Town, I hated beauty. Part of coming back home and helping with writing the constitution meant being involved in transformation and change, and that meant that I could start loving beauty again.
In Soft Vengeance, you write of your dream of being a part-time lawyer while making films and organizing cultural festivals: “a giant carnival through the streets of Cape Town, a jazz jamboree in Ellis Park.” Did you ever get the opportunity to fulfill that dream?
It was March 1994, and elections were coming. I did two things that are significant. I shared a platform electioneering with Allan Boesak, and he was an amazing speaker, while I hated saying, “We are the best, vote for us.” Second, I repeated my run done after my release from prison in 1963, from the Cape Town Police Station to Clifton Beach. I was given an espresso by Giovanni’s deli en route, and when I got to Clifton, Basil “Manenberg” Coetzee played his saxophone as I jumped into the sea. I needed that, the music, the run. I needed that personal signifier rather than canvassing. I felt uneasy with the electioneering. We were going to have elections, with Mandela as president. And we were wondering who was going to be Minister of Justice? I thought, I’ve spent my life fighting for freedom, not now waiting for the phone to ring. This was undermining me. It was spoiling everything. I decided that I’m stepping out of politics. I resigned from the ANC. Not because I was dissatisfied but because it was mission accomplished! I decided that I am also getting out of law. The only project in law that could interest me was being on the Constitutional Court. Stepping away from partisan politics turned out to be a hugely good step. I’m not anti-political. I believe we need political parties. We need leadership, but politics was not for me. Refraining from accepting political office retained for me a sense of the purity of my life’s endeavor. Being on the court and protecting the values of our wonderful constitution meant that I could continue my life’s journey of fighting for protecting values without the compromises, the pressures, the temptations you get when you’re leading the political life.
Quitting politics also kept me available for artistic endeavor in a new field entirely, architecture. We were going to get a new court building. My architect friend from the struggle days, Jack Barnett, suggested a competition, which was eventually won by two young architects from Durban and a town planner from Johannesburg, completely reconfiguring the Palace of Justice into being a warm, friendly, open building and filling it with art. I encouraged the court to have a choir, based on my experience in Mozambique, where every institution had a choir. I started the Constitutional Court Art Collection (CCAC) with the princely sum of R10,000 given to us. These all came spontaneously. I had fifteen years of fantastically creative law surrounded by fantastically creative art.
Were you involved in the design of the Constitutional Hill Court?
I was on the jury that selected the design, and I was very involved in the brief and the composition of the jury. It included Isaac Mogase, the mayor of Johannesburg, Geoffrey Bawa from Sri Lanka, and Charles Correa from India and MIT. We wanted something of a Global South sense of space and place and community. Thenjiwe Mtintso, Chair of the Commission for Gender Equality, became the most important figure on our jury. She said, “My mother is terrified of modern buildings.” She pointed and said, “That is the one I want, a building that is smiling and saying, Welcome, Mama!” and that is the one that won the competition for the new court building.
