Albie

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Scientists sent a machine called Beagle 2 to Mars to look for signs of life. But the machine went missing and was found broken in pieces 11 years later. What had been so interesting was going around asking other students who would join us. And some of the big, proud speakers, oh, they would make a fantastic speech about justice and so on. “Albie, I’d love to join the Defiance Campaign, but I’m going to a wedding,” or “I’m going to be with my parents in Johannesburg.” They all found little excuses. And some people whom I regarded as very modest and quiet said, “Yeah. Sure. Fine. Just tell me the date.” It was interesting to see a discrepancy between some of the passionate declaimers, on the one hand, and the quiet people who were more dependable, on the other. While you were in Mozambique, you began to prepare for eventual freedom in South Africa. You began drafting human rights guarantees as a model code for a democratic South Africa, didn’t you?

This anniversary definitely called for a celebration so we were asked to be part of a special blog tour about ten years of Albie, with each stop starring a different book and the chance to win a copy! We have to find ways of linking with the rest of Africa, so we don’t become — I’m sorry to say it — what some people call “the Yankees of Africa,” in that sense of being seen to be domineering and we know everything. But at the same time to be proud of our democracy. Our biggest export, our biggest contribution is not going to be railways and cell phones and IT technology and so on. It’s going to be a sense of human rights, and not because we take it somewhere else, but because it works here. It solves our problems. It enables people to come together while maintaining their diversity. So when I leave the court, I’m going to have more than enough to do, just to carry on, maybe telling something of our journey to people who didn’t go through that. And also reflecting on our successes on the court, which have been enormous, but also accepting the criticisms of our failures. Albie wakes in the night to go to the bathroom. But when he gets there, he finds that the bathroom fixtures have been removed.And I think it was about midday or early afternoon, I indicate that I’m going to say something. And they get the paper and I say, “I’m making this statement under duress, after being kept awake right through the night into the morning, water being poured on me.”

And I started having some out-of-body experiences then. Very strange. I’m lying on my little cot, and I would feel Albie is lifting out, looking down on me. And I’m not a person given to a spiritual view of the world in that sense. I’m a great believer in the human personality and spirituality in that sense, but not an out-of-body experience. But I had them. They were quite, quite strong. I’m a little bit worried, but I carry on, I do my exercises, I run around the yard, I do my press-ups.Albie Sachs: Religion was, in the sense of being a very contested area. Ray and Solly fought their parents over what they regarded as the imposition of a religion on them. They were Jews. I’m a Jew. I was born into a Jewish family. It’s part of a culture, a history, a being, a personality if you’d like. But religion didn’t play a role in that, and it was very complicated for me. I was at a school where half the kids were Jews, half were Christians. I was a Jew by birth, association, culture, history, being, existence. But when it came to Jewish holidays, Christian holidays — some of them were public holidays like Christmas and so on — Jewish holidays, I didn’t feel it within me that I ought to take those holidays, because I didn’t belong to the cultural, religious side of things. Most of the planets we know about would not make great homes for humans. They are too hot, too cold or have no air to breathe. Because most planets are very VERY far away, it’s hard to find out whether there are any other kinds of living creatures there.

Albie Sachs: I was how old? I was born in 1935, so now we’re 1939, so I was four and a bit. It was everywhere, on the news, people were speaking about it. I can’t say I remember where I exactly was when the first radio broadcast came of the Nazi invasion of Poland. It dominated by childhood. War, war, war. We read about it, we heard about it. It was far away. It was a big abstraction out there, the terrible enemy. I had some uncles who joined the army, and in South Africa they called it “going up north.” You went from South Africa to fight up north. The war ends, and courage is kind of in the air, not quite in that same intense way. And then the smart, attractive boy, and that’s seen as who will get the girls. Okay, it’s good if he’s good at sports and he’s robust and strong. It’s a continuation of the natural thing. But it was good to be clever, to be smart, to be brainy. That counted for quite a lot. And for years that continued, sometimes with the kind of war between the macho, hunky men — brave on the one hand — and the smart, clever guy who could be seen as a bit of a nerd on the other. I enjoyed school, I enjoyed the kids, I enjoyed listening to their stories after the school break. They would boast about their sexual conquests. I was two years younger than all the other boys in my class, because when the war broke out a lot of male teachers went to fight up north, as it was called, and they had to use the women teachers. There weren’t enough of them, so they pushed the kids up and made the classes bigger, and I ended up leaving school. I was only 15 when I went to university. I was still just turning 16.

Space Oddity

There was a writer called Geoffrey Trease who wrote stories about young boys who were involved in very historical episodes — Bows Against the Barons — fighting with Robin Hood. So you could identify with the poor, with the rebels, with the people fighting for a better life, and getting their sense of achievement and worth not through making money or scoring in football games, but through being associated with people fighting injustice. So all of these. But reading and reading. Jules Verne, and going to the moon, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, that sort of fantasy, the precursors of modern science fiction. By the way, I don’t enjoy contemporary science fiction, but as a kid I liked reading those books. Albie and his brothers are watching a documentary about life on other worlds. When the picture vanishes, Albie thinks it's the weather, while Reg and Spike think it's aliens. It turns out to be elephants stealing the aerial. Albie falls down a mysterious hole in the garden one morning and lands in the basement under the house. While preparing a sandwich in the kitchen one morning, Albie discovers a hungry elephant in the cupboard.

Albie Sachs: There weren’t near as many children’s books then as there are now, but I would have read a few. A little bit older are the books that I remember. And yet, extremely important to me, there was one book that was fables. You were involved in one of the first major protests against apartheid, the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign. How did your participation come about? When did you start? I felt that they wouldn’t go for me. I was clearly a law professor. I wasn’t working in the underground resistance. I was very friendly with many diplomats, including the United States. I would take visitors around, and I felt they wouldn’t go for me. I was so obviously a soft target and there would be a reaction against it. I was wrong. I never set out to be a judge. I never imagined I would be a judge, but I became a judge almost by an accident of history. I’ve loved it. I love meeting judges in other countries. I had a glorious lunch at the U.S. Supreme Court. I met judges from the top court of the United Kingdom. I met judges in Kampala from all over East Africa and in different parts of Africa. We used to say, “Workers of the world unite.” Now I say, “Judges of the world unite.” I had met Stephanie Kemp who’d been, as it turned out, in the same prison cells I’d been in, and I was asked by an attorney to defend her. She was being charged with sabotage. And I said, “Please, I can’t. I identify so much.”“Just go and speak to her, give her some courage. When it comes to the trial we’ll get someone else.” Well they did get someone else to be the senior lawyer. Meanwhile I’ve fallen in love with her. We didn’t mention anything. We didn’t touch. We just spoke about the case and a bit about her past and sense of betrayal. But we were in love across the table, and she was sentenced to some years imprisonment, released. She came out to warn me that they’re coming for me again, that was my second detention. I still remember her saying, “And I was in that prison cell, and I got so angry with you because they all told me, ‘Why can’t you behave like advocate Sachs?’ And that pompous stuff you wrote up above the cell door, ‘I, Albert Louis Sachs, am detained here without trial under the 90-Day Law for standing for justice for all.’ Couldn’t you say it in less legal language?” And of course, even when I was writing that, I was careful not to say anything that could be used in evidence against me. I also wrote “Jail is for the birds” on top of the cell.Albie Sachs: Nelson Mandela I’ve seen less of in recent years. As he said, he’s retired from his retirement. But his legacy, his memory, his personality is just so strongly with all of us, in so many ways. But he represented a generation, a culture, and many, many other people of that generation. I feel I must be one of the most privileged people on earth, because I was born into white privilege. It just came whether I wanted it or not. I could dream if I wanted to go to the moon. Having read Jules Verne, I could imagine I could do that. If I wanted to become a lawyer, I could imagine I could do that, or whatever it might be. But then I had the privilege of belonging to a freedom struggle. A wonderful, wonderful experience. You break through barriers, you work with others, you develop a sense of common humanity you could never do otherwise. Now, the privilege of working on the court that defends fundamental rights of the people, and the happiness that comes from having what I call L-L-L. Everybody knows www. L-L-L — “light, life, love,” and working in a beautiful court building that will be a legacy that will go on, with the marvelous art collection, and having a gorgeous little child, Oliver, born to Vanessa and myself. Lots of happiness at this period of my life.