We, the People. Albie Sachs
of the death penalty
Equality Jurisprudence: The origin of doctrine in the South African Constitutional Court
8.MORE THAN CRUMBS FROM THE TABLE:
ENFORCING SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC RIGHTS
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Bringing human solidarity back into the rights equation
Nothing About us Without us: Disability
From Refugee to Judge on Refugee Law
A Conversation about the Sacred and the Secular: Same-sex marriage
Getting the Last Laugh on Rhodes
10.ARE THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE BORN?
Are the Beautiful People Born?
Figure 1: This portrait of Albert Luthuli by struggle photographer Eli Weinberg used to be displayed in modest homes throughout South Africa. Luthuli was president of the ANC from 1953 until his death in a restricted area in 1967. In 1958 he worked with the ANC’s then Secretary General Oliver Tambo on drafting a new constitution which prefigured the organisation opening its membership to all. Through his integrity, courage, thoughtfulness, openness, warmth and lack of personal ambition, Luthuli became the model of what a president should be.
Figure 2: Oliver Tambo as a young articled clerk in the 1950s, before he and Nelson Mandela went on to set up the first black legal partnership in Johannesburg.
Figure 3: Albie [back], a second-year law student aged seventeen, gives the ANC thumbs-up salute as he is arrested, along with Hymie Rochman [front left], and Mary Butcher [Turok] [half hidden], for sitting on a bench marked ‘non-whites only’ at the Cape Town General Post Office during the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign in 1952. The magistrate declared that he was a juvenile and sent him home to the care of his mother.
Figure 4: Albie, aged 21 in January 1967, after being admitted as an advocate of the Supreme Court of South Africa, Cape of Good Hope Provincial Division.
Figure 5: Albie in exile during a visit to York, England, in 1967, where he had gone to thank the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust for a stipend which enabled him to do a PhD at Sussex University.
Figure 6: Albie speaking to poets, writers and photographers in his apartment in Maputo, c. 1980.
Figure 7: Albie at the ANC conference in Kabwe, Zambia, in 1985, introducing the ANC’s Code of Conduct forbidding the use of torture on captured enemy agents. On the far left is Oliver Tambo, acting president of the ANC, and next to him, Tom Nkobi, the organisation’s treasurer general. Zambian troops surrounded the building to protect it from possible commando raids by South African forces.
Figure 8: Albie marching on May Day in newly independent Mozambique in the late 1970s under the banner of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU). The ANC had an official office in Maputo but was not allowed to conduct political activity in the country. The only work it did publicly was attending funerals of members who had died, mostly as a result of actions by South African security forces, and cleaning the graves of comrades on 16 December each year. Members were permitted, however, to march under a SACTU banner.
Figure 9: Memorial gathering to honour Ruth First, killed in August 1982 when opening a parcel bomb in her office in the Centre for African Studies, the building in the picture. Albie is sitting in front of Ruth’s picture, which is below that of Samora Machel. Ruth’s husband, Joe Slovo, is seated to the right of the rector of Eduardo Mondlane University, Fernando Ganhao. Eduardo Mondlane, who had studied at the University of the Witwatersrand, was the founder and first leader of FRELIMO. He was killed by an assassin’s bomb in 1969.
Figure 10: Albie on the pavement moments after his car exploded in Maputo, Mozambique, on 7 April 1988, causing him to lose most of his right arm and the sight in one eye.
Figure 11: Albie hugs Dorothy Adams at the Young Vic Theatre in London after a benefit performance of The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs had been put on by the British theatre community to assist him in his recovery from the car bomb attack in 1988. Adams had whistled to him while both were in solitary confinement in Maitland prison 23 years earlier. Peter McEnery of the Royal Shakespeare Company played Albie, while Simon Callow and two other actors who had played him in previous productions took other parts on this occasion. One of the other actors, Matthew Marsh, was to play Eugene de Kock in another play some decades later.
Figure 12: Albie with Louise and Kader Asmal and their sons Rafiq (left) and Adam in 1988 at their home in Dublin, where he and Kader prepared a draft Bill of Rights based on the principles of the Freedom Charter.
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