Judge Dennis Davis
Justice Albie Sachs in Conversation with Judge Dennis Davis: The Life Dedicated to the Pursuit of Freedom

Justice Albie Sachs and Judge Dennis Davis in Conversation - The Life Dedicated to the Pursuit of Freedom

- I’d like to say a very special welcome to our guest today, Albie Sachs. Albie, welcome to our lockdown university family. We are so looking forward to your presentation. Before I hand over the floor to you and Dennis, our very own Dennis Davis, I’d just like to give a short introduction about you. On turning six during World War II, Albie Sachs received a card from his father expressing the wish that he would grow up to be a soldier in the fight for liberation. His career in human rights activism started at the age of 17, when as a second year law student at the University of Cape Town, he took part in the Defiance for Unjust Laws campaign. Three years later, he attended the Congress of the people at Kliptown where the Freedom Charter was adopted. He started practise as an advocate at the K Bar age 21. The bulk of his work involved defending people charged under racist statutes and repressive security laws. Many faced the death sentence. He himself was raided by the security police, subjected to banning 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 11 years studying and teaching law in England, he worked for a further 11 years in Mozambique as law professor and legal researcher. In 1988, he was blown up by a bomb placed in his car in Maputu 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 draught the organization’s code of conduct as well as its statutes. After recovering from the bomb, he devoted himself full-time to preparations for new democratic constitution for South Africa. In 1990, he returned home and as a member of the Constitutional Committee and the National Executive of the ANC, took an active part in the negotiations, which led to South Africa’s becoming a constitutional democracy. After the first Democratic election in 1994, he was appointed by President Nelson Mandela to serve on the newly established constitutional court. In addition to his work on the court, he has travelled to many countries sharing South Africa’s experience in healing divided societies. He has also been engaged in this sphere of art and architecture and played an active role in the development of the Constitutional Court building and its art collection on the site of the old Fort Prison in Johannesburg. Welcome, Albie. It’s a great, great pleasure to have you with us.

You are an icon and actually needed no introduction for us fellow South Africans. We all know and respect you and respect the amazing work that you’ve done. I certainly lived my youth through the apartheid era. And I’d just like to add before handing over to Dennis, that while I did have the pleasure of meeting Nelson Mandela several times, I never had the pleasure of meeting Oliver Tambo. And I would like to hear from you about this man, because for some unknown reason, I have a great rapport with him and he’s deeply embedded in my heart. Somehow I just have this real, real connection with a man that I never ever met. So thank you for joining us today and I’m going to hand you over to our incredible Dennis Davis, who will be in conversation with you. Thank you.

• I’ll be happy to arrange the shidduch with Oliver Tambo.

• Oh my stupidity, thanks very much. I was going to ask Albie about the first lion of ECV and I will, but I have to make a comment that I made to him. Albie now has complied with my rule, or let me say, confirmed my rule. The rule is that truly outstanding people have very short CVs and people are not so what some are very long CVs. Now he’s is very short and hardly covers an extraordinary career, but it does open up with a line, Albie, that I can’t help but ask you ‘cause I mean, to interview you in an hour is an extraordinary, difficult thing because there’s so much one could speak about, and I’m not entirely sure as an interviewer that one captures it all. But I did want to start with that line, which is in your resume that your father, Solly Sachs, who of course was a very famous trade unionist, wrote you at six years old and said you hoped you’d be a fighter for freedom. Which of course, needless to say, you’ve done him more than proud. But I suppose the question I wanted to ask that was to what extent was Solly an influence on your life, as this very famous, iconic trade unionist?

• A very powerful influence, obviously, and I think it’s pretty heavy, you know, six year old kid getting that, but it was during World War II and we all dreamt of flying in Spitfires, shooting down Messerschmidt’s and so on. So that was like the language of the time. And Solly was a distant dad. My parents separated when I was very young. He was in the news a lot. I think I got a lot from my mom who was quiet and sort of deprecating and gave me a lot of resilience that saw me through things. When Solly died in London, he’d been a refugee as a child from Lithuania, then a refugee from apartheid one of the first people to be banned, helped set up the anti-apartheid movement. And I was teaching at University of Daarusalaam, so I could go to the crematorium in Golders Green and I’m thinking this is like a Jewish months that I’m in now, crematorium in Golders Green. So many Jews who’d fled from Hitler, Mussolini and so on, were cremated there, many of them secular. And Solly was cremated there. And Sam Khan, a very brilliant Cape Town attorney, who really gave me a marvellous grounding in law, got everybody to laugh. You’re not supposed to laugh at a crematorium, but he said, “I’m sure if God exists, Solly is arguing with him right now.”

So my dad, then a powerful figure, a strong sense of humour, organiser of the Garment Workers Union. He’d come on the boat with his poles, we’d become factory owners and we’re now running the garment factories. And he would call the workers out on strike, but then he would play poker with them at night and people would say, “Solly, how can you play poker with the bosses?” And he’d say, “Class struggle is class struggle, poker is poker.” And that’s ironical sense, which is actually very important for more than survival. Its penetrating life and coming to terms with life that can be very rumbustious and complicated. I think I got a lot of that from my dad. And then a more self quieter kind of irony from my mom and acquired a more subtle sense of humour from my mom. Right.

• Ask you about, I mean you talk about Jewish month and in fact this is the second I know event you and I have shared together essentially in what you call Jewish month. And fair enough it’s Pesach and that. One of the things I wanted to ask you is a whole host, I mean yourself, you’re a extraordinary example of this, and you know, your father of course was of his generation, but a whole lot of you from your generation happened to be Jewish, you know, Joe Slovo, Harold Wolpe, I can keep on, and of course we all know that all of the Rivonia trialist’s who were white were Jewish. Is there, I mean, none of you were religious, I don’t think, you guys weren’t sort of Shul goers as it were. Was there something in the tradition that did inspire you, even if it was subliminally?

• Can I say experience rather than tradition?

• Yes.

• Not textural. You know, I listened to your rather amazing presentation, it was all new to me, absolutely everything, your point of departure. And yet I could arrive at very similar conclusions. And I’m thinking about there’s something we have in common that I end up where you end up with your totally different route, not a rabbinical reasoning kind of a route, but historical experience kind of a route. And that sense of unjust oppression for being who you are was so imposed upon, you know, my grandparents and my parents and then my parents even taking part of that tradition to fight their parents in terms of orthodoxy, religion, compliance with rules, but keeping what I would think would be a quintessence of an idealism, if you like, almost an intellectual idealism and naive idealism. But a very intense, very intense thing. Your ideas are part of who you are.

Ideas aren’t things that come into your head and go out of your head. Ideas are part of being, I think something of this comes from experience and it might be that if you are in a little shekel, and the only book you’ve got is the Bible and the only schooling you’ve got is in the Haida, for the boys at any rate, the ideas were all that you had, there was no other literature there was nothing else but ideas then became extremely important, very, very central to life. I think some to that came through to me. And clearly…

• Yeah, sorry. Sorry.

• Clearly the extermination, I mean we only discovered this after the war, the Shoah, the extent of it.

• Somebody should mute themselves, carry on, Albie.

• Yes. So that kind of overwhelming experience, and I’m growing up as a kid during World War II and then I’m hearing about the extermination afterwards. Clearly these things had an enormous impact on my generation. And so that explains why so many of the whites who resisted apartheid were Jews, but as I said when we launched the book, “Looking backwards on the Jews in the struggle,” it was Richard Goldstone who said, “I launched this book with pride and with shame, pride that so many of the whites who took part the struggle were Jews, but shame that so few Jews took part in the struggle. So it was very, I thought beautifully equilibrated kind of a thing. And, you know, Joe was famous in the struggle for his writing, thinking and so on, but also for his humour. People say as Joe Slovo used to say, you know, the joke and somehow we don’t think of revolution and humour going together, but that is one of those multiple ingredients. It was really extraordinary movement that we belong to. And Joe was associated with that. And I’ve got one or two, depending on your questions that I might come out with as well in the course of, I’m sure it’s going to be…

• I’m delighted for you to do that. I must say just, and Joe, who I obviously only met when he came back to South Africa after 1990, told some of the best Jewish jokes I’d ever heard. And they were quite remarkable. But what I wanted to ask was, I mean, you go to law school at UCT and you were at the Freedom trial. You were at the Congress of the people at Kliptown. You must have been probably 21, 22 at the time, I guess.

• I was 20.

• You were 20. So you must have been one of the younger people then. Now just gimme a sense 'cause we forget these things. When you were there, did you have a real sense talking about freedom, that it was a long haul or that given this remarkable event of which you were part of, actually it was going to happen and happen in your lifetime? I mean, was it…

• You know, Dennis, our slogan was freedom in our lifetime, but we all wanted to live quite a long time. So it seems like, you know, Africa countries hadn’t become independent yet in 54, Ghana was I think 55 or a little bit afterwards and white domination seemed so huge and powerful and irresistible in South Africa. It was cheeky, but we were very cheeky, we were irreverent and we thought history was on our side, justice was on our side. And that sense of rightness I think was extremely important. And we had the majority on our side and the UN was coming into being and the idea of a universalism, the anti Hitler, anti-racist kind of feelings, also quite strong in the country. So we were very confident then. And the fifties were a very balanced, very abundant decade. Drum magazine came out, King Kong, the musical came out. There was a kind of irreverence and a vitality. The sixties, a terrible decade of repression, people dying, being tortured to death, you know, totally different decades. So this was right in the middle of that decade, police raids, we didn’t care about that, thrown into jail, we didn’t care about that because it wasn’t so brutal in the fifties, even in a act on the second day of declaring the Freedom Charter, we all sitting on the ground and makeshift little wooden structure as a platform and suddenly we see we’re surrounded by must have been scores and scores of police on horseback.

And then a group came in with what they call sten guns. And if one stone had been thrown, we wouldn’t be speaking about Chartville, we’d be speaking about Kliptown and we stood up and we sang and the power of music, that power of people standing together in a disciplined way, the beauty of the music, it was just overwhelming. So that sense of rightness, of justice, of breaking through all the taboo’s of South Africa, overwhelmingly black, many people of Indian descent from the Coloured community, a handful of whites. It was very, very strong, very, very affirming. And that fitted in with the charter we proclaimed and the charter came from little pieces of paper people wrote in, it wasn’t a lawyers document. I don’t think any lawyers were involved in the actual, even in the drafting of the text primarily. There’d be a piece of brown paper, the only paper bag, remember paper bags, they’re coming back in now and the big handwriting of the one person in the village who could write, saying, "We don’t want to carry passes or we want to have education,” whatever it might be. And out of that emerged the Freedom Charter.

• And the thing about the Freedom Charter that I wanted to ask you, Albie, we are going to come to contemporary South Africa soon because I’m sure people are listening here, would love to hear your views on that. And I’d like them to do that. But I suppose one of the questions that in the light of what you’re saying, I mean the possibility of a sort of non-racial society then seemed quite to me, seemed as if it was possible that people like you and others were embraced as part, I mean, even I know that from working in the union movement in the eighties, but at that time it seemed everything was possible or am I wrong? Am I being too idealistic?

• It was partly that, partly the defeat of Hitler, Hitlerism in the world, the sense of colonial scheme of things wasn’t going to exist anymore. But people thought we were crazy, white in South Africa, the whites in control, so much in control, black majority, many, many illiterate. That’s the way it was put. You don’t stand a chance. You’re wasting your time. And even people I was at UCT with, you know, would say pat me on the back for being brave and idealistic, but it seemed absolutely hopeless. But we had that sense of history on our side, there’s no idea is as strong as an idea whose moment has arrived. We felt our moment was arriving and that embrace was fantastic. I remember when I was forced to go up onto the platform on the Grand Parade, we used to have meetings on a Saturday afternoon, maybe 50 people, maybe 500, sometimes 5,000. I mean, Albie, you’ve got to speak. I said, “I can’t speak to the people, I haven’t lived their lives, they won’t respect me.” No, come on, Albie, we speak about non-racialism, but it sounds very abstract. You go up and speak, let them feel your heart. So I went up and I still remember actually quite amusingly, and we were very worried about nuclear warfare at that stage.

And I said, you know, we’ve got a campaign against nuclear warfare and the armaments manufacturers and we were against nuclear war and Archie Sebeka was translating and he goes, “Oh no, no, no, no,” everybody laughs. I said, “Why is everybody laughing?” He said, “Comrade Albie, the people want war. They think that this war will overthrow the whites.” So what I had to tell them was, if the Russians send an atomic bomb to blow up Dr. Malan, it’ll blow you up as well. That was his way. It was a good education for me, you know, in how to not speak in abstract terms and the singing was just so beautiful. The singing soprano would start and races would come in and new songs and it was very emotional. So for me it was, I’m learning law at UCT and to write exams and I’m learning a passion for justice from people who were oppressed. And it divided me as a lawyer. My professors knew me, we professors, they believed in the rule of law. They believed in justice. The people I would give lectures to have studied classes within a Shanty Town at night. You just see the teeth, the eyes, a candle. They hated the law. The law was the police, the law threw them into jail. The law demanded their pass, that they give their lives for justice.

The cops wouldn’t give their lives for justice. And I’m Albie, now it wasn’t just a pipe day it was clearly wicked and long. I’m torn as a lawyer between justice on the one hand and law for the poor on the other. And Dennis, it was only when he came to write the Constitution, I was able to connect up the verities of the ages that people had fought for in continents over the ages, these rule of law, principles of equity, justice, Dennis, and so on, met up with the passion and the poor. And I believe our constitution achieved that and helping to heal South Africa healed Albie, the psychically divided lawyer, Albie, torn this way and that because of that diversion.

• That’s what I did want to ask you is, I mean, I understand that schizoid existence between justice and law, particularly in South Africa, unlike people like me who kind of grew into a political consciousness somewhat later than you did, to be perfectly frank, in our lives, you clearly had an acute awareness of this kind of schizoid existence as a student. And I’m curious, did you think that as you did become an advocate and a member of the Cape Town Bar and in fact there’s a very famous case as Sax Lewis is the Minister of Justice, where we could talk about if we had time and I know that I’ve taught insurance law, where you were junior to I think Harry Snitcher or somebody, so you had this practise and I was interested, like how schizoid was that? I mean, did you think that actually you were going to stick it out there in South Africa as a lawyer and that there were scope for people like you at that time? Or did you inevitably think at that time, well at some point I’m going to have to move on to something else because the law will run its course given the nature of apartheid.

• Well, I certainly started my political career at a much early age than you did.

• Yeah.

• At the age of zero, my name Albert, I was named after Albert Mzula, who was a trade unionist, a communist. He died shortly before I was born. And my mother then later on used to say to me, my little brother, tidy up, tidy up, Uncle Moses is coming. But it wasn’t Moses Cohen or Moses Levine, it was Moses Qatani. He was the general secretary of the Communist Party. And he used to joke, Ray taught me to read and write, now I’m her boss. But what was important for me then was just seeing the respect she had for him, the affection she had for him. So that was a normal world for me and the world outside of racism, which was abnormal. I never had to come to consciousness, but I hated my parents assuming I’m going to follow in their footsteps. So right until my second year at UCT, I was what would be called apolitical, mountain climbing, playing cricket, poetry, I love poetry, but boy, when I started I was ready. But I had to meet the young crowd, modern Youth society people like Ben Juroff and Dennis Goldberg, you know, if you could judge a youth movement by the number of years which people spent in jail, members, we were spectacularly successful. We all went to jail, but very idealistic. And it wasn’t just politics. We argued about if God exists, can God create a stone too heavy for God to lift? It’s a weird kind of question. I remember it to this day, would the world be better if we had one language for everybody, abolish all the other languages? These are kind of philosophical questions and a lot of fun, a lot of vitality, a lot of humour, terrific energy, which appealed to me very much. And then the politics became part and parcel of breaking through lots of other kind of conformist forms of conformance behaviour.

• But I suppose what I’m really asking is, did you, I mean, let me try to put it in. I mean we always look at these things from a personal point. At some point in my life, probably as I came towards the end of my university studies, I started having serious existential doubt as to whether the root of law in South Africa, one, could do any good because the National Party was overriding it ruthlessly in every single way. And to be perfectly frank, the vast majority of judges were supporting that, except for some very courageous ones and one should never forget them. But what I suppose in the sixties, the real question is being at the bar, was it seen, were you somebody like yourself who was immensely immersed in politics, did you see law as a route that was actually going to push a transformative agenda then?

• I didn’t see it like that. I saw it as what before the terrain of struggle. And a very important one, a very important one. I was glad Joseph Goldstein was on the bench. John Bitcart afterwards on the bench.

• Yes. Absolutely.

• When that debate started, it’s a very theoretical, abstract debate, those of us in the trenches, we wanted those judges. My dad worshipped Ramsbottom, a judge in Johannesburg. He said that’s the judge who refused to cancel Nelson Mandela’s certificate to act as an attorney. Although he had defied the law in the unjust laws campaign, he had broken the law and Ramsbottom said he’s not immoral, he’s fighting for his people. So in that sense I felt it was an area where we could struggle. And even in my own case, I probably wouldn’t be speaking to you if it hadn’t been for a couple of judges in the Cape who allowed me reading that and writing material. That’s another Sachs case that went on appeal. Maybe the worst decision ever given by a South African court where they had the freedom to go the other way. But I love putting on my gown, I loved the cut and thrust, I loved the arguments, I loved appeals, I loved cross-examining. In that sense there was a lot in me, argumentative, if you like, the flirtatious, on my toes that I enjoyed very much. The parts I hated in the courts was the racism there all the time.

Simple things all the time, there’d be a white woman giving evidence and the judge would say, “Now tell us, Mrs. Van Tonder,” and then an African woman, older, “Now Mary, what did you see?” And I can’t call her Mary, she’s older than my mother, but if I call her Mrs. Shabalala, after the judges called her Mary, I’m making a point, my client’s going to suffer. You had to do these gymnastics like all the time. And that part I hated. But you had to be smart and we had to fight them, you know, in the trenches, on the beaches, through the bylaws, right through the fifties we won all our cases. The sixties, we were losing all our cases. Then if you could save someone from death, if we could expose torture, that was very important. We would be the only people, human beings, these people would speak to, would be their lawyers after they’ve been tortured, electric shock treatment, sleep deprivation, wet bags over their heads, treated like dirt and the lawyer comes to speak to them like a human being. So that role was very, very important.

• Well, you yourself said, you just said two minutes ago, it’s almost as if you’ve read my questions because you said, you know, if you were to judge by success, you all went to jail. And indeed you did. As a result of which the extraordinary book, “The Jail Diaries of Albie Sachs,” came out, which most of us read as criminology students, I might add and as well repaying, I dunno if it’s still available, but if it is, people should read it. But I mean that experience, when did you decide to write this book, which really kind of documented what it was like to be in detention without trial? Was it at the time?

• I decided when I was in jail that I’m going to, I’d always wanted to write and now I want to write even more because I see you’ve written 11 books and I’m a great competitor. I’ve only written 10.

• Oh come on.

• Anyway, I wanted to write, I edited our school magazine at Sacs and I loved the idea of being a writer one day, but I was too busy at the bar to write. And now I thought, okay, I’m having a terrible experience. I’d read books about jail, prison diaries. None of them helped me deal with solitary confinement in practise. But then I thought, okay, I’m going to convert this negativity into positivity. And that’s become one of the themes of my life actually to take that horrible energy, that destructive health energy and find words, language, expression, and share it with others, sharing with others. Then it takes it out of that reverberation, the inner chamber of yourself can be terrifying, you never escape.

You get it out and you find the language and you can even sometimes find a beauty in the ugliness because you’ve captured it. You know, people would say afterwards, writing it was very cathartic, it wasn’t cathartic, cathartic is to let out something that’s repressed. It was very what called, it helped to organise the chaos in your existence through you give a sense of understanding of an experience through getting the words together and finding a way of communicating it to someone else, someone else being someone like you is curious about the world. Imagining an Albie out there, not me, an Albie out there, wants to know what is it like.

• Albie, now I might be wrong about this, but our dear friend Benny Rabinowitz, once told me a story that they were playing music when you were detained and was it Trini Lopez or some song that was actually quite revolutionary on the one hand and you thought you were hallucinating, am I right that something like that happened?

• What did happen.

• Yeah.

• Was I’m locked up in Mason Police Station, completely on my own and I would sing da da da da, Beethoven, your great hero, my great hero, just to hear my voice and I would sing, go through the alphabet always because Charmaine and so on. And then one day I think I’m hearing whistling now, every judge should go to jail just even if it’s for 48 hours.

• I agree.

• You know, the sounds, the sounds are banging, it’s feel, it’s people crying and screaming. There’s no natural sounds, there’s no animal, bird sounds, there no lovely sounds. It’s just command, power, domination, shrieking, self-pity, awful sounds. And I think I’m hearing whistling and when I whistle back and I whistle the red flag, there’s no answer. I whistle Nkhosi Sikelel’, there’s no answer. I’m trying to find out who else. It must be another political prisoner. And eventually I discover the going home theme from the Dvorak ninth Symphony gets picked up by that other person. I’m going home and I get a response and it’s fantastic. I didn’t know who it was and I still remember once I’m doing my exercises, 34, 35, I’ve got to go up to 50 and the whistling starts and I can’t interrupt my exercises and I want to say Whistler whistle whistle, I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m coming. And I’d get up and and whistle back. And it turned out to be Dorothy Adams who belonged to a group headed by Neville Alexander, different political group who we met afterwards and that was very emotional. She actually became my assistant in London afterwards and came back to South Africa, ‘cause she was from Livingstone, so that’s the only musical thing. Other than that I invented myself.

• Okay. But I need to move on because I’m never going to finish otherwise 'cause I’m only at 1960 odd. I want to move. I’m sorry there’s so much to talk about, but I’d like to because I want to get to today, just ask you many years later when you were in exile and then you landed up in Mozambique as Wendy said, and I’m just interested what an influence your years in Mozambique at the university had. We’ll come to the bombing and that in a moment 'cause there’s something quite remarkable but I’d rather do that at the end. But just the actual experience of teaching and being in Mozambique in a fairly revolutionary time.

• It was very revolutionary. And we sang the songs and I marched in the streets and I thought, “Wow, it’s true. People power works, it brings together the poor in the cities, the poor in the rural areas, revolutionary intellectuals, we’re going to unite the country.” And it was very uplifting and the non-racism and the freedom for women and all these issues were there but it wasn’t sustainable. And the irony, if you like of experience is I discovered pluralism because of its absence. There was one party for Limo and if there’s no space for opposition, it goes underground. It gets picked up internationally, part of the Cold War. Dennis, that country was torn apart by civil war. I lost my arm. There are thousands of people without their legs because of landmines. There were child soldiers. The country was being destroyed. So that was one huge impact on me when I came back in 1990, people were saying, “Albie, what’s happening? We waiting for the revolution and you speaking about negotiations,” and I was happy and it’s taken longer in South Africa. We could have gone on fighting another 20 years, we would’ve won, but we would’ve had a raised country.

There wouldn’t have been nothing to inherit then. So that was one important theme. The other was they had a theme, what they called Mozambiqueneity, Mozambiqueness, to Mozambiqueinise, not to Africanize the country, to Mozambiquenise the country. And that meant overwhelmingly black people were the majority in Mozambique. Somebody asked one of their leaders, “What do you think about the phrase Black is beautiful?” He said, “Black is beautiful, brown is beautiful, white is beautiful.” White has made itself ugly by claiming supremacy over the others. But that was very powerful in Mozambique and I brought that back with me. The feeling for culture, for painting murals, for the role of culture as part of public life, not an instrument of the struggle, part of who you are, especially of who you are. Much more powerful than an instrument of struggle. Again, you pick up and put down, I brought that back with me from Mozambique.

• Now some years later you become influential in the drafting of what became the beginnings of our constitution. And I’m curious, I’ve always been curious that I can’t date it because my memory’s just gone on this point. But I know that we were at the old building in the law school and Anton Richmond, Michael Richmond, who was the most exceptional attorney’s son, came to me with a photocopied photo cycle document, 200 300 pages and said, “Want you to read this.” And it turned out that it was a manuscript from you arguing for the Bill of Rights for South Africa. And let me be frank, it was the first time that I’d ever heard within the ANC since the Freedom Charter time, that actually some legal instrumentality was really, you know, on the cards. So I’m curious as to how that happened. And then because Wendy asked, and I was going to ask anyway, the role of Oliver Tambo in that and you are working with him on that.

• Yeah, I’m so, so glad you asked me that. I often get the praise and I often get condemned for being the person who introduced the Bill of Rights into the ANC. The other one around completely. I was a sceptic, Bill of Rights, judges, too much power. You fight for power in the streets, you fight for power in parliament. You can’t entrust it to the judges. And it was actually, Pelo Jordan wrote a paper in 1985. Tambo was saying, look, I’m terrified one day we’ll have a chance to talk, we won’t be ready, we have to be ready. And he asked Pelo to do some research. What do we say when the whites say they’re a minority, they’re going to be swamped, they want to constitution. Everybody can have the vote but they must be protected. And Pelo came up with the idea of the Bill of Rights.

The ANC had a Bill of Rights in 1923, 1944 in Africa claims after the Atlantic Charter had a Bill of Rights, so people talk about the Bill of Rights. So he said, we will have protection for whites, not because they’re whites or a minority, but because they’re human beings for everybody equally. So a majority rule and a Bill of Rights went together. And we want those protections not only to protect the whites, protection against ourselves. When people get into power, they abuse the power. We’ve seen that in our own organisation. We’ve seen that in other African countries. So from being a rights sceptic, I became a rights convert. And the paper you saw now I’m saying why at the University of Natal, Black students have set up an anti Bill of Rights committee.

• Yes.

• Somebody called it a bill of whites. So we’re going to get majority rule, we get the vote, but there’ll be a Bill of Rights that will protect the property, the power privileges of the whites. And I said, “No, that can’t be right. You must set up an anti anti Bill of Rights committee and why should a Bill of Rights be conservative, negative, only for those in power? Surely a Bill of Rights is needed. Most people are most marginalised. It doesn’t stop at your front door, it doesn’t stop at the factory gate. It doesn’t stop at the entrance to the mine. A Bill of Rights for workers, for women, for children, for vulnerable groups. A Bill of Rights that’ll stop a new government from chucking you out of your home or demanding that you carry a pass. So I became a great enthusiast for a Bill of Rights and I published that paper to try and persuade our movement that a Bill of Rights can be emancipatory, it can include social economic rights.

In fact, I was the one who introduced the three generations of human rights, which at that time was very, very revolutionary. Afterwards, criticised for saying as though the first generation’s, the important one and the second only comes second and third only gets a bronze medal. When in fact it was introducing social economic rights and environmental rights into the debate. And I must say people took it very well. You know, people fighting for their freedom. Very alert, that black consciousness generation joining the ANC, a fabulous generation, there were crooks amongst them and violent people and some ugly people amongst, but overwhelmingly the sibiko generation, if you like. Very idealistic, very passionate, be interested in ideas and very responsive to the idea of a Bill of Rights.

• And what was Tambo’s role in all of this? Mean he was a very extraordinary man.

• Quite crucial, you know, Tambo was a constitutionalist. He rewrote the AMC constitution in 1958. I worked with him on the statutes, there’s even one phrase I’m reading now in the press a lot, the ANC is a voluntary organisation. I think I might have put that in on the basis of you’re not conscripted into the ANC. So once you join, you submit yourself to the power of it. You join it voluntarily but you voluntarily accept the discipline. Quite a few things that we were dealing with there and Tambo was very corrective language, very, very strict. You know, even the letters his children sent him, he’d send it back with corrections in red ink. That Dali sent him, you know, words, language meant a lot to him. You had to get it exactly right. But basically, basically he was a freedom fighter from from top to toe. Really believing in these ideas. So when we said if you’re fighting for justice, justice must exist in your ranks. He believed in that. He believed in that. In his case it came from religion. He was a very devout Anglican.

In my case it didn’t come from religion, but we got on so beautifully, when he went to speak to a world conference on religion, he said, "Comrade Albie, will you help me write my speech?” He didn’t go to the ANC desk, they would say, we know this Catholic and knew that Methodist, he wanted somebody responding at you according that spiritual level, if you think comes, you know, from a tradition that somehow another part and parcel of who I am and a huge influence on my life. Partly 'cause he was so different from me in every way, in every way, from his background, the importance of the church, to his thinking, rural. And yet I was thrilled when I had spars after the bum and the ANC representative I remember in Ottawa said, “Comrade Albie, use the language, the boers have Africanized you, have given you scars like Tambo, I feel fantastic. I feel fantastic, hey, I’m being Africanized at last.

• But Albie, I mean, you know, widely credited Tambo was for holding the a ANC together in very difficult times in exile. I mean since you knew him so well, what do you think he’d think today?

• I’m just holding back a little bit as the form…

• You can hold back as much as you like, Albie, I’m…

• No, no, I can’t.

• I’m just curious because, and I’ll tell you why whilst you’re thinking about it, it’s because I only met him twice and that was when we went to meet the ANC lawyers, of which you were one and you may recall it did get and then I met him twice after that in London. So I didn’t know him very well. But he was a very different sort of personality to Mandela. I mean, he didn’t fill a room in the way Mandela did, but there was a quiet authority about him, which you could not miss. And you’re right, my sense was he was a constitutionalist and an incredibly principled person. So I just wonder, you know, we had these giants like Tambo at a particular point in time. What would they say now when they see the squabbling that we see and the levels of corruption that we’ve seen?

• You know, he saw squabbling inside his own organisation. He offered to resign at Matagoro. There was a near mutiny, Chris Hani. So it’s not that these things were absent, he saw terrible things happen in the camps. What was important about him was he responded to that. He set up somebody to inquire into the torture that was being used. He asked me, well how do we deal with it? There’s nothing in the ANC constitution that deals with what do you do with captured enemy agents? And I said very glibly, well the international instruments would say no cruel inhuman degrading punishment or treatment, no torture. And he said, we use torture with a bleak face. And that’s when he asked me to write the code of conduct. So, you know, these ugly things were happening. So it’s not that they’re happening, it’s how do you respond, how do you deal with it? Do you throw up your hands? Do you say, oh it’s all a waste of time or do you stand up for principle? Do you try and rally around you all the decent people and we had lots of negativity in the organisation.

Maybe that’s one reason I’m less thrown than many others, younger people today. Fortunately the good people won out in our struggle and hopefully the good people inside political parties inside society, outside political parties. And I still find a lot of wonderful people in South Africa today. And I’m seeing them all different generations. It’s a lot of good will around. People don’t quite know how to articulate and express it. We are a very open society. Tambo would’ve loved that. People can speak their minds. You know, I heard one story from an MK veteran who was angry at the treatment he’d got, how Tambo would come to their camp and some young guy, black constituent jumped up and said, "Hey old man,” he said it, I can’t say it in the African language. “What right have you got to come here from your office? What do you know about what we suffering?” And security were waiting to pounce on this guy and Tambo would tell them to stop. And he said, “I’m coming back here in two months time. Don’t you touch this young man. I came here to hear what people are saying. He told me what he felt, what he believed in.” And he became legendary in that respect. T

hat he really wanted to hear from everybody. To listen to everybody. Very, very thoughtful. And he loved strong people around him. He enjoyed that, he loved being challenged and criticised and in the end he would go off on his own to write his own pieces. He was so different from Mandela when he had to write preface to Mandela’s collective features, he commented on what it was like working with Mandela and he said the youth love Mandela because his impatience reflects theirs. He was very attractive to women now I think, OR was attractive to everybody, but not in that kind of a way. And he wasn’t impatient in that kind of a way, but there was a symbiosis between them. And Mandela had huge love for Tambo, it was an exceptional legal partnership but also an exceptional human partnership. Albert Luthuli is in that league.

• Yeah, that’s true.

• I wish he could get more recognition 'cause he set the standard if you like, for that warm, embracing person who could get Moses Kotani from the communist party to come in, who could speak to religious leaders, could speak to peasants in the rural area. He could speak to professors, university professors. We already got that glimpse even before Mandela, we got it with Albert Luthuli, so there’s something going on.

• I want to come back to Tambo right at the end but I’ve got three more questions if I can get through them. You yourself had an experience with the truth and reconciliation commission? Obvious reasons, cause you were blown up and I once heard you give an extraordinarily moving speech about your own encounter with the person who blew you up, talking about reconciliation. And I really wonder if you wouldn’t just mind sharing a little bit of that with the audience tonight.

• Okay, I’m going to introduce my jury stroke here as a preliminary because it’s got a very painful twist to it. So it’s public holiday, 7th of April, 1988. I’m going to the beach and something terrible’s happening to me. I dunno what it is, I just know it’s terrible. And I hear a voice saying into the darkness you’re in the Mputu Central Hospital, your arm is in laminable condition. You must face the future with coverage. And I say, “What happened?” And a woman’s voice said there was a car bomb and I faint back but with a sense of joy. I’m safe, I’m safe, I’m safe, I’m okay. And that total conviction was I got better, my country would get better. Some time passes, I’m lying on my back, I can’t see anything. I’m feeling very light, very happy. And that’s when I tell myself the joke about how we’re sailors, like music, Drew falls off a bus and he does what looks like a sign of the cross. And he’s French, I didn’t know you were Catholic. What do you mean Catholic? Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch.

And for some reason I started with testicles, seemed to be in order and the word went round the ANC camp, the first thing Comrade Albie did was reach for his balls and I became a macho hero, I’ve been trying all my life to be macho. I’ve never succeeded. Wallet and heart seems to be okay. Spectacles okay, watch, I’ve only lost an arm. And people say that’s the definition of an optimist. Blown up and only lost an arm. That’s how I felt. I felt joyous then and I felt joyous to this day. Somehow that bomb wiped away the misery of solitary confinement, of exile, of problems in my personal life and so on. I felt buoyant ever since then. Any event, fast forward and I’m a judge, the phone rings. Reception says a man called Henry wants to see you, he says he has an appointment. And my heart goes, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Henry had phoned me to say he had organised the bomb in my car which had blown me up. And I go to the security gate, I open it, there’ Henry, tall and thin like me, a bit younger. He’s looking at me, I’m looking at him. Is this the man who tried to kill me, I see in his eyes, this is the man I tried to kill. And we go to my chambers and he’s striding like a soldier. And I try and use my best judges ambulation to slow him down. And we talk, we talk, we talk, we talk. And eventually I say, “Henry, I’ve got to get on with my work. I can’t shake your hand but go to the truth commission.” He tells me he’s going to the truth commission. Tell them everything you know, maybe we’ll meet one day and I forget about him.

And months, months and months later at a party, end of year, we judges work really very hard and I hear a voice saying, Albie, I can’t believe it’s Henry. And he’s beaming. And he said, I went to the truth commission and I spoke to Sue and to Rapkin and Bobby. Bobby Naidoo, Farouk, Timo. And I told them everything. And you said one day. And I put out my hand, I shook his hand, I almost fainted. He went away beaming. But I heard afterwards that he left the party, he went home suddenly and he cried for two weeks. I don’t know if it’s true and I don’t want to even check up, I’d rather believe it’s true that he cried. That’s more important to me than one last bit of . And somehow it was a bit liberating for me as well, instead of the enemy being that abstraction out there. ‘Cause now this guy, Henry, who had at least that amount of courage and conviction to go to the truth commission, own up what he’d done and he got amnesty. And George Bezos was the one asking, representing me. And I’ve got given George’s statement and he tells the truth. I don’t oppose the amnesty. And in that sense, the whole process was important for me. We discovered bodies of people who disappeared and died. That the families knew their last minutes, that they could sing at funerals that were organised for them. It was quite healing and important in that sense, for the nation, it was healing and important for me.

• It’s an extraordinary story and we could speak about that for a long time, but because time’s running out, my last two questions are the following. First one, Albie, what do you say and I mean you do speak with a moral authority and I want to come back to moral authority. What do you say to the, and you must have encountered this often, particularly young black students who are very, very critical of the constitution. Who regard it as a sellout and think that it’s the reason that we haven’t really got the liberation we wanted. How do you respond to that and what’s your view about that?

• You know, about three, four years ago at the height of the Rhodes must Fall movement, I was invited to speak to law students at UCT and I thought I’d say a few things and wait for questions and I couldn’t stop talking cause intergenerational pull is so powerful. And I ended up by saying, it might sound like the height of Nazism, but I see 400 young Albie Sachs’ sitting in this hall. They were so intent on hearing what I had to say. And it came out, it just flowed out. I wasn’t being didactic, I was just connecting up with them. And I’m finding that I’m meeting more and more people who are very, very curious and they’re tenants and they say sell out. And gosh, you know, there’s one very brilliant professor, I can’t wait till the end of the year when Andre Oodendal brings out his book on the period 85 to 90 and the way we planned and thought and really engineered what would be a programme of first of all using negotiations to get our people out of prison, from exile, unbanning the ANC, that was the first step. The second was to get a constitution, an elected assembly to draught the constitution.

A constitution, this is one of the points I make wasn’t drafted at Kempton Park. Kempton Park gave us a process to get a constitution. A constitution was drafted by 400 people, overwhelmingly black, black majority, been imprisoned in exile, freedom fighters. And if you look at the text, you’ll find it’s not in the way of transformation and change. In fact it calls for transformation and change. If there’ve been failures, they’re not failures of the constitution. They failures of implementation. Everything in the Constitution was fought for, rights for women, rights for workers, rights for gays and lesbians, rights for employers, not that they needed rights so much. All these rights are guaranteed in the constitution. They all came through struggle. And if we want the constitution to be applicable impacters like the TAC had to fight for the right of access to Nevada in the Constitution to get that right. The same applies, the same applies today.

• So my last question is this then. I mean I want to go back to Tambo, people like Tambo and Mandela and I’ve spoken about moral authority, had extraordinary moral authority. There are many people in South Africa today saying, looking at what’s going on, not just in the ANC but governance as a whole. Where is the moral authority in the country? Where are the people who could stand up and say, “No, you can’t do this. No, we do stand for a non-racial, non-sexist society.” Do they have a basis by which to actually be anxious that we’ve lost voices of extraordinary moral authority and they haven’t been replaced?

• It’s a different period now. I feel some sense of sadness that we’ve lost the epic. That first part of my life was epic. It was freedom or death, willing to give our lives. And we paid a price for it. We narrowed ourselves in many ways. We limited our horizons. We could be very intolerant of others, but overwhelmingly it was positive. But it belonged to that repressive violent society against us. Now we in a much more pluralistic society. So that hero you want is pluralized and that’s good. I think it’s much better that way than that you have just one leader. And Mandela was never a leader who led us to freedom. He was a leader at the front of a freedom struggle, working as part of a team, which was always like that. The same with Tambo. He would be the last one to speak. He wasn’t like we followed that charismatic leader. So we shouldn’t be looking for another leader like that. ‘Cause we’re not in that kind of situation where you have to simplify things for a clear, simple, epic cause to dis ploy an unjust system, introduce another one. We’ve got to learn to live with contradictions and manage contradictions and be less epic and in that sense, less demanding. And what pleases me, Dennis, I’m finding people asking the very questions you ask me all over the place of all ages, all generations, there are lots of them. And young people when they challenge me, there’s that fire in their eyes that I used to have at that age, that give me a lot of hope and courage. Even when they’ve been insulting to me, they’re standing up to this white man who thinks he knows better 'cause he’s been around a a long time.

There’s a passion and a commitment and ideas do matter. So there’s so much that is positive in this country and it comes out and there’s so many more people, I think eager to express the interconnectedness, that sense of abuntu, of community, of belonging, than there people who repudiate that. And we’ve got to find those channels and find the connections. And if you don’t mind a little bit of praise from me, you are one of the epitome’s, you’re not an epitome of abuntu, you’re an epitome of intellectual passion, of argumentation, of ideas, of opening up everything for debate. And that’s one of the great virtues of South Africa today, and you’re one of our great exponents, and I just watched you not long ago, cause like you fought a 10 round battle flat out, left and right and left and right, upper cuts and all the rest, a brief interval and now you are going again. That’s energy. And there are lots of Dennis Davis’ around, ‘cause people have seen you and been inspired by you. I’m not saying this to flatter you, I’m saying this as part of the reality of the country that we live in. It’s a vital country, South Africa.

• Thank you very much.

• Yeah.

• Albie, I’ve come to the end of my questions and I know time is on, but Wendy, with permission, can I ask some of the questions that have been put up on the chat line?

• [Wendy Fisher] Yes, with pleasure. Good.

Q&A and Comments:

• Okay. So Albie, some of them are, you know, we get these questions from people, I’m sorry, not all of them are that polite, but here’s the first one.

Q: Did Albie Sachs, Joe Slovo, this is from Anonymous, want South Africa to become a communist country?

A: 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. But South Africa, the Soviet Union, there was China, Eastern Europe inevitably. 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 the ANC had many communists in it, but it wasn’t a communist organisation. It was a very broad church. 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, yeah.

• That’s true because at Codessa he played an unbelievably important role as somebody who was that.

Q: Linda asks this question, may I ask what your views are about the Jews who are part of the National Party, as I understand, it was only about 50% Jews who acted against the apartheid regime? Probably less than that, but doesn’t matter. That’s the question.

A: I didn’t feel. I felt they were actually pathetic. I know a lot of my Jewish comrades felt a rage against them. I just felt they were pathetic, it was this vessel beyond rage. 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. So I didn’t feel a particular anger towards them.

Q: Albie, then there’s a question, did you have any association with Manny Brown?

A: Yes, I did. I did. And I’m smiling because Manny was funny. He was brave. I think the word is and he didn’t fit into your stereotype of the serious committed revolutionary. And yet he ran guns to get AKs and so on into the country, setting up a travel agency. But to be a good travel agent, you had to be debonair and have cracked jokes and had drinks with the upper class wealthy people. And he did that. He could carry that off. He was a great golfer. He loved playing poker and he loved doing underground work. He was very funny. Adored his wife, Babette, sadly they split up, somehow love and revolutionary consciousness didn’t always go together. In the struggle.

Q: Albie, that was from Sandra Myers and Jonathan Stetner says, some 20 years ago, we visited several townships with Richard Nolene. That’s obviously Goldstone. And we were shocked by what we saw. Has the position improved since then?

A: Position has improved in the sense that three and a half million people have moved from shacks into RDP houses. They’re not fantastic and they’re far away from work, but they have water, electricity, sewage, and you can build onto them. So that means something like 14, 15 million people have moved. That’s a lot. And there’s water there. Electricity when there aren’t outages. Life has improved for millions of people. And you know, people say, what’s the matter with the stupid masses? They keep voting for the ANC. The masses are not stupid. They’re not stupid. I think we have a more politicised nation than almost any other in the world. To see people being interviewed on TV in the Transkei, they speaking forcefully, in very articulate, very, very articulate. So life has improved. I go to UCT, it’s profile is changing. It’s becoming an African university without losing that certain sense of elitism if you like of of being the best, of very high quality, high standards. But the ambiance there is definitely not a sort of a white area on this continent with high walls of culture around it. It’s beginning to look and feel and sound like it’s part of South Africa.

And people use English because it’s the language of communication among many African people and people from the coloured community and Muslims are all there. So there are changes. They’re very real changes and meaningful changes. Sadly, the corruption is totally unacceptable. Absolutely. I feel it more strongly than anybody else because there’s no justification for it. Because many of the people who forgot the freedom fighters who were brave, who were brave, brave, brave and virtuous, and now they are destroying their own legacy. The things that were beautiful that they brought into the world, are destroying their own things. I feel very passionately and strongly about that. But I feel our country has moved a lot. It’s not all negative by any means. There’s lots of positivity around and positivity saw me through the bomb, positivity saw me through helping to write a constitution. Positivity saw me working on a court that’s becoming one of the leading courts in the world. I have grounds for my positivity. It’s not just a blindness to what’s happening. I see what’s happening, it hurts me what’s happening. But I’ll never give up on the romanticism, I’ll never give up on that enthusiasm, because that’s where we are and we got to use, if you like, the romanticism that’s in the constitution to take us to the next step.

• Yeah, I think if you talk about UCT, you can also talk about Wits extraordinary and I think the issue of how we got to corrupt state, Albie, that’s another discussion all of its own, but one that I think we should be having for all sorts of reasons.

Q: Lorraine, who has a somewhat more careful eye than most says, I have been intrigued by the painting behind you. Can you tell us something about it and who painted it and what position of importance it holds in your office? There you are, there’s somebody who’s really interested in culture.

A: That painting I picked up in Addis Ababa when I went to speak to the judges at the time of transformation and change there. They were selling them in the streets then. And it’s a biblical scene. It’s ironical that I’m not religious, but I quote from the Bible all the time and I pick up a picture, it’s a Christian biblical scene. It’s there now because it’s a dark screen. And I’m told if you want to look good on a webinar, you mustn’t have something light behind you. So it’s art, performing a very instrumental function right now simply to be a dark screen.

• Thanks for giving me the tip.

• You won’t get them there now, Addis Ababa is modernising and they doing horrible, ugly scenes for tourists.

• Yeah, that’s for sure.

• And mot the deep stuff that they were doing before.

• Albie, Patricia Fine says, I’m constantly reminded of what you said to me in 1993 before our democratic elections. And she quotes you, “It’s one thing to be a liberation, it’s another to be a government.” It seems that the ANC are still struggling with this concept, she says.

• She’s saying that now.

• Yeah.

• You know, we were experts at making the country ungovernable, no one could beat us at that. But to govern it was a whole different thing. It requires different personality, different thought, different relationships. That’s part of it. But you know, it’s extraordinary what we did accomplish. We brought three armies together. We integrated 16 different departments of education. We created new provinces. The institutional arrangements actually worked pretty well from that point of view. What we didn’t deal with, we thought that the branches would be the source of democracy. And sadly, branches instead of being the source of democracy, became captured. And then they became the basis for state capture from the bottom up and then from the top down. And then some people just got tired and some people got into routine. I’ve seen people exhausted, exhausted to carry on and on and on. And plans and plans and meetings and meetings. You can’t keep the fire going. And sadly the crooks have more fuel and more energy because they’re doing devious stuff and planning and so on. So many, many factors come in there. And then there’s historic hunger, historic poverty. And part of me is still anti-capitalist when we say it, the capitalism that says getting rich, using what opportunities you’ve got, that freedom that’s associated with the acquisition, that’s so powerful in our society and we’ve lost a lot of that sense of solidarity. We’ve lost that in what’s called the National Liberation Movement becoming just another political party. So lots of factors along the way.

Q: I’m not sure you want to answer the next one, which is what’s your message to Mr. Magashule and Mr. Malema. But if you want to say your message is just, hello. I’m happy with that.

A: No, you know, I was in the business when I used to catch aeroplanes , which I haven’t done for a year at the business lounge in Cape Town. And I see a familiar face and another familiar face and it’s Julius Malema and it’s Shivambo and they come up to me with a camera and they say, “Can they take a selfie with me?” So that’s a side of Shivambo and Malema that I like, a kind of fun quirky sharp guy and that’s all that I’ll comment. I said, you can take a picture with me but don’t put it in the EFF news next week. And they agreed they wouldn’t do that.

• I can’t resist, sorry, I can’t resist telling my own experience of that with meeting Malema at the airport. I had just given a judgement in which I’d found for the EFF that they’d been improperly and illegally expelled from Parliament, case that was confirmed on appeal. And he turned around to see me. We were both queuing up for the airport, looked at me and said, “Oh my favourite judge.” So I said, “Only because I found for you, I’m quite sure that when the revolution comes, I’ll be the first judge to be put against the wall and shot.” He said, “Ah, yes, but that’s politics.”

Q: The next question’s a very fascinating one for me because it comes from somebody who was an incredibly distinguished judge in South Africa and then left for the United States, David Friedman. He was a judge with John Didcott and he says, Albie, you were a year ahead of me at UCT. I was a great friend of John Didcott and concurred in his judgement , Kanelia a remarkable case dealing, if I recall correctly with legal aid. He also gave the judgement , that’s David, in it’s Sonoli case. Which was again, a remarkable judgement because it was the first judgement that set aside the state of emergency that PW Botha declared. So I’m really delighted that he was on this call, 'cause he is one of my judicial heroes for all of those reasons. But he says, where do you come down in the dispute, which John Didcott had with Raymond Wacks, Professor Wacks on whether the judges during the apartheid era should have resigned.

A: I’m totally with John Didcott. In fact, it says John Dugard here and not Didcott. Dugard and Wacks had that debate and I was totally with Dugard. I’ve met Raymond, we’ve had a little discussion about it. And Raymond was making a beautiful academic abstract point. You lend legitimacy to apartheid by sitting on the bench. We, as I mentioned before in the trenches, we wanted judges like this lot, Herbstein, Ramsbottom, even, not even Michael Corbett at a later stage. In my own case, there was a guy, von Wimson and Banks allowed me to get reading that and writing material that saved me. I probably wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t got reading that and writing material because of them. Corbett gave an instruction when I was in my second detention, sleep deprivation, Swanepoel was willing. He’d broken me to some extent, he is going to break me real, true and proper the next time. And Corbett gave an injunction preventing him from interrogating Bernard Gostrauk, his wife had picked up about his sleep deprivation. He gave that. So those of us in the trenches were glad that there were judges like Didcott and David, I’m glad there were judges like you and people like Laurie Ackerman and Richard Goldstone, a friend of mine who was in solitary confinements and Goldstone was the only judge who visited the detainees at that stage. Others didn’t do it. Laurie Ackerman, wonderful judges in those days and wonderful judges from the constitutional court.

Q: I agree with that entirely. And David’s contribution at the time was quite remarkable. Daniel asked, was there any effort in the part of the ANC to have a with Sobukwe?

A: Sobukwe always had a positive reputation in AMC ranks. They didn’t apply to many other PAC leaders. I met Sobukwe when I defended leaders of the group that marched on Cape Town, 20,000 in 1960 after Sharpeville and I said to them, “Do you want to call any witnesses?” And they said, yes. Can you call Robert Sobukwe?“ I flew up to Joburg, the PAC person said, "Advocate Sachs, can I carry your satchel, your bag.” Now I’m this whitie in the struggle. I won’t allow any person to carry my bag, but I allowed him to carry my bag 'cause he could go in and meet his leader and the guards didn’t even see him. He was just like an invisible black man carrying the white man’s bag. And I found Sobukwe very impressive, thoughtful, the way I put it at the time is he could have been ANC and you read what he said, it was very, very thoughtful. And he made an important contribution. So I would say he’s standing remained high in ANC circles. Unlike the PAC as an organisation, I also defended many PAC people from the Jewish old age home.

There were about 20 young black people and the superintendent, a woman wanted to give evidence when they were found guilty in 1963 on their behalf. She gave beautiful evidence saying that she treated these elderly white people at the Jewish old age home with such loving care and tenderness. The magistrate gave them the maximum sentences. It was one of those terrible moments. And I still remember the accused all wanting to say, we’ll go to jail. But this old man amongst us, he’s got TB, ask the magistrate to let him out early. And that was like Ubuntu in practise amongst young black people. And the magistrate just didn’t want to know, first offence, 63, suffering from TB, maximum sentence. It was very unusual.

Q: Allegro asked, does the name Rafe Kaplinski mean anything, certainly means a lot to me. He was the leader of the sit-in in 1968. I came onto the campus a couple years later, but I should tell you that I now see quite well. I used to see quite a lot of him. And I’m very proud of the fact that he, my friend Mike Morris and myself wrote an article, quite a lengthy article about global value chains and a whole range of economic and other political implications. And he’s a seriously wonderful economist and it’s probably one of the world’s experts in value chains. So yes, I know him well

A: Yes, I knew the Kaplinski family. I knew the elder sister and I remember Michael Richmond telling me that Rafe Kaplinsky, who was I think still in high school, had written a letter to Ian Smith saying that his father’s factory, his father was away at the time, that sold rope. We are not selling you rope because of sanctions against Zimbabwe, against Rhodesia. And they got a big fright, the UDI government in it was then Salisbury, not known to the 17 year old person with no authority to say this. And Michael was kind of very amused. I’m not sure how it happened in the end I met Rafe in March last year on my very last trip to Europe and I went to Sussex University. He’s now an elder there. So he wasn’t like the 17 year old sort of handsome, striking professor. A very much admired by whole generation of students who’ve been there. And we had marvellous conversations. So yes, I do know him and I have enormous respect for him. He’s a deep thinker, a compassionate and deeply intelligent person. And if you’re listening, Rafe, I hope you’re enjoying what I’m saying. I don’t even know that you’re listening.

Q: And the final, well there’s two questions. Do you remember my mother, Ruth Haman, treason trial defence lawyer who was banned in house arrest in 66? I’m sure you do.

A: I do, I do. I was in Cape Town, so I didn’t know her all that well, but I met her later on in London and she became very active in the environmental movement. So from defending treason trialist’s and others in South Africa, she ended up fighting against the expansion of a hospital near Hampstead Heath, that was going to drop the view of Hampstead Heath. With that same commitment and passion. And in those days the green movement wasn’t as powerful as it became afterwards. She was very respected in that, in London.

Q: So the last question, Gunda, I will just make a remark myself, we don’t have to go further. What do you think about the strong anti-Israel stance that one finds at universities in South Africa? Let me just say this to you. A few years ago, it’s probably one of the great joys of my life. 'Cause I was on the same side as William Kentrick. So to be that William was in my team or more accurately I was in his team. And we were debating the question of the academic boycott of Israel at UCT, a massive audience. We were arguing obviously for the fact that there should be no academic boycott. Again, Zachy Achmat, a quite formidable because he’s a very famous civil rights activist and somebody else who’s less formidable. And I have to tell you, we won that debate quite by probably about 60%. I’m not sure that would happen now, that’s the only comment I’ll make. I was very proud of the fact that we won. But it would take a big doing to do it now for all sorts of reasons. Albie, you’ve been unbelievably generous with your time. Been an honour to actually interview. And I must tell you, I’ve done this very often and I’ve always enjoyed them. But I want to say this is the best one I’ve ever done with you. It’s absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much. We say in Hebrew shukayach to your strength and in this case definitely so and may you keep contributing to Democratic South Africa for a very long time. Thank you very much.

A: And I would like to jump in and echo Dennis’s words. I don’t even know how I can add to that, to both of you. To Albie and to Dennis, thank you for this very, very fascinating and enlightening presentation. Albie, your courage and determination to stand up for your principles, to follow your heart and conviction, to fight and dedicate your life in pursuit of justice and freedom is just something remarkable to what eventually became the liberation of South Africa. What a journey you’ve travelled and I’m quite sure your beloved father is, would have been so very, very proud of you. And I just want to add that your optimism and infectious personality, I’m sitting here in LA, you are there in South Africa, it just has infused right through, you know, the internet, one could feed it and I’m sure all the participants felt it. And just add a little bit just to link back, just to say a little bit more. You know, Dennis, just to go back to your presentation earlier this morning, when I heard Albie speak about when he was a young boy of 17 or 18 or 19, you were second year student when you were singing together with your classmates, creating a community, thinking about the freedom of South Africa, it actually took me back to our Pesach service to link back to what you’re saying and how our actual Pesach service is about going from bondage to freedom and how we sit as a family, as a community, as Jewish communities around the world singing together about our liberation. So I just want to say absolutely, once again, thank you for a brilliant presentation. I would like to take you up, I’m not sure if you’d like to take it another step forward and discuss what you said about the corrupt state. Dennis, I would love the two of you to discuss that. And Albie, I’d like to discuss one more thing. I’d like to bring you back for one more thing if you’re prepare to do that. And that is to discuss your interest in the cultural landscape because I was lucky enough to do a, you know, a cultural tour with you of the constitutional court. I had the privilege of donating a work to the constitutional court and David Golblet was and is still very close to my heart. So it’ll be an honour to discuss David, the artwork in the constitutional court and your love of the arts. So to be discussed.

• Okay? Yes and yes.

• So to all of your big asks. So welcome to our lockdown family. It’s an honour having you with us and it’s a pleasure and we’ve loved having you with us this morning and tonight. So to all of our participants, thank you for joining us.

• Goodnight.

• Dennis and to Albie, night night. Bye-bye. And to my parents in Israel. Goodnight. Bye.