Judge Dennis Davis
Justice Albie Sachs in Conversation with Judge Dennis Davis: The Life Dedicated to the Pursuit of Freedom
Summary
Albie Sachs, an anti-apartheid activist and former judge, reflects on his life dedicated to freedom, detailing his activism, legal career, exile, and contributions to South Africa’s constitution. The conversation explores Sachs’s experiences with Oliver Tambo, the challenges within the ANC, and addresses criticism of the constitution by some young black students.
Judge Dennis Davis
Dennis Davis is a judge of the High Court of South Africa and judge president of the Competition Appeals Court of South Africa. He has held professorial appointments at the University of Cape Town and University of the Witwatersrand, as well as numerous visiting appointments at Cambridge, Harvard, New York University, and others. He has authored eleven books, including Lawfare: Judging Politics in South Africa.
Justice Albie Sachs
Albie Sachs began his career in human rights activism at the age of seventeen when as a second-year law student at the University of Cape Town, he took part in the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign. Three years later he attended the Congress of the People at Kliptown, where the Freedom Charter was adopted. He started practice as an advocate at the Cape Bar aged 21. The bulk of his work involved defending people charged under racist statutes and repressive security laws. Many faced the death sentence. He was raided by the security police, subjected to ban orders restricting his movement, and eventually placed in solitary confinement without trial for two prolonged spells of detention. In 1966 he went into exile. After spending eleven years studying and teaching law in England, he worked for a further eleven years in Mozambique as a law professor and legal researcher. In 1988 he was blown up by a bomb placed in his car in Maputo by South African security agents, losing an arm and the sight of an eye. During the 1980s working closely with Oliver Tambo, leader of the ANC in exile, he helped draft the organization’s code of conduct, as well as its statutes. After the first democratic election in 1994, he was appointed by President Nelson Mandela to serve on the newly established Constitutional Court.
I felt they were actually pathetic. I know a lot of my Jewish comrades felt a rage against them. Rage was giving them a sense of importance. They were kind of hopeless, it was like they were sucking up to those in power thinking it’s somehow good for the Jewish community.
Certainly when I was in the Communist party in South Africa, 19 in the underground, 1953 to 1963, I thought the world was going red. Afterwards I wasn’t strong enough to carry on revolutionary struggle underground in South Africa. And I went into exile and I found I could get everything I wanted from the ANC. And communists were often the greatest defenders of what we call liberal values, which many liberals never defended when it came to the push. But communists fought for the Bill of Rights, for constitutionalism in ways, and Joe became a convert, took him a long while, but a very enthusiastic convert to constitutionalism thereafter.