We, the People. Albie Sachs
that starts with surviving the bomb and feeling triumphant, and now we are returning home, not begging for anything, but returning home knowing we are on the road to achieving the things we’ve been fighting for.
The Constitutional Committee of the ANC is very active. We’re invited to talk all over the world, to see different constitutional systems at work – interestingly enough, every country that invited us assumed that they had the best constitution. Even England, which doesn’t have a constitution! And we come to the United States of America and this is where the HW diversion comes in. Any guesses? I’ll make it easy. Chicago. Yes. Harold Washington! Sadly, Harold Washington had died, we didn’t meet him, but his aura was there. The memories were there; they were memories of hope, of breakthrough, of possibilities. And a phrase that he used was passed on to us, I might not get it exactly right, but the sense of it was, and it was so relevant to us in South Africa: ‘No one’, he would say to the people of Chicago, ‘no one – whoever you are – can escape my fairness’. And that’s exactly what we’re thinking in South Africa: no one, whatever you’ve done, whoever you’ve been, will escape our fairness. We don’t want to be like you, only stronger; we don’t want to say, ‘Now it’s our turn’. It isn’t simply about getting into power. It is about transforming the very character of society, and feeling the power and strength of that transformation. It’s not based simply on force. It’s based on core moral ideals that can work in practice, and bring people together instead of dividing them.
And so the fable continues. Imagine you are helping to write your country’s constitution! I heard from US Supreme Court justice, Harry Blackman, a story told to him by Thurgood Marshall about the time when people were writing the Constitution in Philadelphia: ‘It’s not true that my ancestors were not in on the constitution-making process. They were there in breeches and carrying trays’.
Now in South Africa, we are all making the Constitution. And look at us! All our skills are being used not simply to undermine apartheid, or to trip up the enemy, or to denounce the people who were aggressors, but to create the vision of the country we want to live in. It’s why we would go to jail, it’s why, in my case, I lost an arm. It’s what makes sense of the pain. It takes on meaning, it’s all validated, by the accomplishment and achievement of the ideals that brought us into danger in the first place.
And so we draft a new Constitution. Many people died before we got the Constitution, even while the Constitution was being drafted. But we got it. The whole world had predicted a total bloodbath in South Africa, and yet peacefully, if with difficulty, we negotiated a new Constitution.
And in fact, that’s not enough to end the story of fables: we create a Constitutional Court. This is the body that’s now going to ensure that the principles of the Constitution are applied in practice. And I’m one of those people called to serve on it. It’s beyond a dream: the very things you’ve been fighting for in the muddy trenches of the struggle, and now you’re one of the guardians of the product of that dream. And if that’s not enough, we have to decide what kind of building we’re going to work in, and where it will be. And we choose to place our new Constitutional Court building in the heart of the only prison in the world where both Gandhi and Mandela had been locked up. Now, if that’s not an example of soft vengeance, then I don’t know what is.
It’s not denying the past, it’s not saying it didn’t happen, ignoring the history that shaped our despair and hope.
I was reading a very nice brochure about this Marriott Hotel, saying: ‘Oh what a beautiful place Charleston is!’ But there’s no mention of slaves here, no mention of struggles, no mention even of the Civil War which started here! You’ve just got details of pretty buildings and lovely gardens and this very important port, and I feel it’s eviscerating your own history.
I urge you not to be ashamed of your history, but to find a way of facing up to it and making it present as part of your ongoing sense of who you are. And that’s what we were doing as intensely as we could. If you want to have a court that is upholding the fundamental rights of everybody, you place it right in the heart of the site of the deepest pains society has had, unafraid. You have transformed the negativity into positivity. Turned the energy that’s lying in the ground – you don’t say cover it up, deny it, and suppress it, it didn’t happen, forget it. You say, ‘Yes, the energy is there, and now it must become energy for transformation and change’.
I often have the vision of a waterfall with the water thundering down, crashing down, and it gets caught in the funnels of the turbine and the turbines spin and convert the energy, the brutal kinetic energy, into positivity, turning it into light, into heat.
So my Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter is having quite reasonable sales, and getting good reviews. I meet Vanessa. She comes from a different generation – hadn’t herself been actively involved in the struggle. She has a brightness, a vitality, I find immediately attractive, and we get talking. We go our separate ways. She disappears and I forget about her. What I don’t know is that somebody has told her, ‘Albie seemed to take a real shine to you’. And she claims to have said, ‘Who’s Albie?’ I must say that given my appearance, I find that hard to accept. But her story is that she was advised to read my book. So now my book becomes a chapter in the story of our lives.
And she said she had just come out of a very abusive relationship and she found that my book was speaking very, very directly to her: a man who could cry, who could speak about things inside of himself. As time passed, she placed the book next to her bed at night and when she was feeling a little bit lonely she would read a couple of passages.
And then we bump into each other by pure chance at possibly the least romantic place in the whole world: the business-class lounge of Johannesburg airport. And she decides to make a move. And the next thing we’re meeting at a party that she’d helped to organise, and we just hit it off. More time passes, we start living together, and then another book comes out. It’s called The Free Diary of Albie Sachs. And it describes the journey we take together in Europe where I’m reminiscing about a lot of the experiences I had had during the struggle. We travel to meet different friends in different countries, going to Ireland, where the Troubles were beginning to come to an end. And she writes a counterpoint to my Free Diary. She starts off by saying how she had read The Soft Vengeance and fallen in love with the narrator, but now she wanted to know if the guy who wrote the book corresponded to the narrator, to the writer. Fortunately, she didn’t tell me that in advance, it might have made me self-conscious. She doesn’t expressly say it, but it seems I passed the test. She goes on to study architecture and becomes an architect. We’re very close together, and our son, Oliver, is born.
The work of a judge on a constitutional court defending fundamental rights in a country in the process of transformation, is exhilarating, it’s testing, but truly, truly wonderful. Every, every bit of you is using your literary skills to find the language, to find the words to define what it means to be a human being in the twentieth century, now twenty-first century, in Africa, in the world. You’re using your sense of history, your curiosity, your deep sense of fairness. Why, why, why? Why does Mrs Grootboom – and a thousand other people – have to sleep out in the open with their children, with the rains about to come, when so many people are living in beautiful homes with lots of spare rooms nearby? Why, why, why? And what can a constitution do about that? And what can we as lawyers do about that? And why, why, why do we take people who’ve killed others, and put a rope around their neck and literally kill them ourselves to show our abhorrence of killing? Is that permissible? These are profound questions of life and death.
In the last chapter of my ultimate book, The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law, I state that judges have become the great storytellers of our age. They might not be aware of it. And the story they tell might be a dull, boring iteration of a technical set of phrases, detached from the real lived-in world, without any passion and without any sense of humanity. But that is a story in itself. It’s a story about the law, it’s a story about the society, it’s a painful story because all passion, empathy is excluded. But the opinions (judgments) can be stories filled with heart and feeling, not just with emotion like happiness and sadness, anger and sorrow, but with a special kind of emotion related to fundamental rights, to humanity, to human