Albie Sachs Interview (page: 2 / 9) Constitutional Court of South Africa	Print Interview

How did you keep your sanity during all those weeks of solitude?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Albie Sachs: I would try to keep myself going by inventing games, and I would sing songs, a song beginning with "A," "Always." "Because," "Charmaine," "Daisy," go through the alphabet. It's quite an interesting collection of the hit tunes of October 1963. And my favorite was "Always." "I'll be living here always. Year after year, always. In this little cell, that I know so well, I'll be living swell, always, always." And I would sort of waltz around, singing to myself and be amused with the fact that this Irving Berlin song-- picked up by Noel Coward, who wrote comedies of upper middle class manners -- was keeping alive the spirit of this freedom fighter in Cape Town. "I'll be staying in always, keeping up my chin always. Not for but an hour, not for but a week, not for 90 days, but always." And then it'd be "Because," and "Charmaine," and so on. I would try to remember the states in the United States of America. I had two arms then, so I could count on ten fingers, but -- and I would begin with all the A's -- and I couldn't mark down. And I think I got up to about 47 once.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

I won't mention the names of the states that I didn't remember when finally I got out and I looked at the map. I had a towel, it was a checked towel, and I would use pieces of orange peel to play checkers on the towel. But it's boring playing against yourself. Your left hand knows what your right hand is planning. I would watch ants. There was a caterpillar once, it became very exciting, and suddenly disappeared. It was just a kind of activity.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. After I'd been in a couple of weeks, the only book I had was the Bible, and I would ration myself to read a couple of columns every day. Not too quickly, because I might be in for years, and I didn't want to feel stale and saturated. So I'd read the Bible for a certain period. I would do my exercises, food would come. I would pace around, and I would try to construct some system during the day. And one day the station commander comes in and he's waving a piece of paper. He said, "If they'd listened to me, this would never have happened." I don't know what he's talking about. He gives me the paper, and I'm reading, and I can't read across the page, so I'm reading down in columns. My eyes are going down -- but the sentences -- and it says, "In the Supreme Court of South Africa, Cape of Good Hope, Provincial Division, in the case of Sachs vs. Russo..." Hey, that's me! "Before Justices..." -- it was Banks and Van Vincent, or Van Vincent and Banks -- "...it is hereby ordered that..." and I'm reading, "...that the applicant be allowed reading matter and writing material." I couldn't show my joy. Wow!

Until then I'd been in a rage against the judges, against the legal profession. Being picked up and put into solitary confinement without access to lawyers, without a trial, without charge, indefinite detention without trial. How can that happen? They're doing nothing? And I turned on my colleagues, and your emotions get very exaggerated when you're in solitary confinement. And now they were the most marvelous people who had ever been on the whole earth. Fantastic. The legal system, rule of law, even in these dark circumstances. That saved me.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. That suddenly I got books. And then, what books? What do you choose? And they wouldn't let me have my friends send in books in case there was some secret code. So I had to order from the local library, and it amused me no end to think of this young policeman going into the library and asking for Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and imagining the librarian. I was never able to read it actually. It was too intense, too introspective. But I read Moby Dick and I read Don Quixote, two books that to this day are very powerful in my memory. Two marvelous, magnificent books that I'd never had the time to read. And I particularly enjoyed Don Quixote, especially the second volumes where Cervantes himself had been in prison. And he wasn't writing about this crazed person pursuing futile honor. He was writing about this brave idealist who kept being knocked off his horse, and he's down in the dust, and Sancho Panza comes and picks him up and he gets back onto the horse and he goes and he's knocked down again and he gets up. And of course I identified totally, totally.

I'd always imagined the librarian thinking, "My vocation is made if a policeman comes in and asks for Don Quixote, even if he can't pronounce the name properly, and asks for Moby Dick. It's great to be a librarian!" I told that story at a world conference of librarians in Durban, a couple of years back. They were very moved. Sadly, the actual librarian -- they knew who it was -- he'd died in the meanwhile, so I was never able to meet him.

How did your second detention come about?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Albie Sachs: Two years later I was picked up again. By then, half of my clients had been picked up and things were much rougher now. And the investigation was much tougher, and sleep deprivation was being used as a major mechanism of breaking people down. And I'm locked up and it's not, "Will you answer our questions?" And I would say, "Depends on what the questions are." And they would say, "We can't tell you what the questions are..." and it was a game, "...unless you tell us what you're willing to answer or not." Now it was just, I'm seated at a table, they work in relays. They bang, bang, bang, bang for like 10 minutes, and then total silence for 45 minutes. And then they go out and another group comes in, and shouting and shouting, shouting at me for ten minutes, and then total silence.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

Were they able to detain you longer the second time?

Albie Sachs: It was now called the 180-Day Law. Later on, it became the Terrorism Law. The word "terrorism" was used to justify just locking us up, and we were fighting for freedom, for democracy. But the label was used to justify keeping us in indefinite detention without trial. And they went through the afternoon, through the day, into the night, deep into the night.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I asked for food at one stage, and I remember them smoking as they gave me the food -- and I'm convinced there was something in it, and it emerged afterwards they were using chemicals to break down your resistance. And by early morning, I'm feeling myself getting weaker and weaker and weaker. And my body is fighting my will. So it's not even them anymore. And they're working in relays, there were about eight of them, and they're taking turns, and they can sleep and come back. And the head was a Colonel Swanepoel. "Rooi Rus" (Red Russian) they called him. It's like he cultivated ugliness. I don't think how people appear is significant about them at all. But it was as though he liked the fact that he had short, cropped, reddish hair and bloodshot eyes and a thick neck. And heavy ham-fisted hands which he would slam onto the table, and a bellowing voice. And he was notorious. People had died -- I knew that -- had died under his interrogations. And then, bam, bam, bam, screaming and shouting and start banging the table, then total quiet. And eventually I feel my resistance going.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I say, "Albie, you've got to manage your collapse. It's coming. Your clients had sometimes held out for two, three, four, five days and when they broke, they broke completely." And so now I'm thinking about it, how I can control. Eventually, early in the morning, I just toppled off the chair. I'm lying on the ground and I see all those shoes coming. And I hear the excited voices, black shoes, brown shoes, and they're all shuffling around me, and I'm just lying inert, and water comes pouring down on me and my hair gets matted. And I'm lifted up, and these Swanepoel's heavy fingers pushing open my eyes, pushing them open, I closed them, he pushes them open, I close them, he pushes them open. And eventually I just sit and I collapse again, and the same thing happens a few times, and eventually I just sit and I'm going through my head, I'm going to say something. What am I going to say?

[ Key to Success ] Courage

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."

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I'm sitting in the chair feeling absolutely horrible. It was the worst moments of my life, by far. I'm humiliated and I say, "I'm making this statement under duress..." and Swanepoel is writing it all down. And I describe the circumstances, being kept awake, my eyes bring pried open, water being poured on me. He's written it all down. And then he starts asking me some questions, and I'm fencing, and he says, "Why is it you only mention people who are dead or out of the country?" And I just ignored his statement, and it's stale stuff. I'd been out of the struggle for two years anyhow since my previous detention. But I was saying something, I was speaking to them. And our principle was you don't say anything to them. You give your name and address and nothing more. And I felt totally degraded. He said, "We'll be back. We'll be back." And I noticed he was like shuffling papers around, and he gets me to sign certain pages. And afterwards I realized that he'd left out the page with the opening statement, "I'm making this under duress." And I feel even more humiliated.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. A day or so later -- somebody was smuggling in messages to me, in a thermos flask, in fact -- and there's a message to the effect that somebody else had been locked up, an architect, and had been through similar experiences, and his wife saw him and, and he was like a ghost. And he'd whispered to her what had happened to him, and she'd gone to court with that information and got an order restricting the security police from continuing the interrogation. And I wrote the second most important legal document I've written in my life, and I include working on the Constitution of South Africa. And a tiny piece of paper in the note that was smuggled out, saying what I've just explained to the camera now, in just a few words, that it could be used in evidence in his case. But the fact is, they didn't come back for me, so it did save me from further interrogation. And I'm sure the intention was to pile it on, pile it on, pile it on, break me down completely. So though I ended up not giving away any information of any value, I still feel something inside me was broken, some strand of dignity and self-possession, and I've never got over it, never got over it. There's some humiliations and pains you carry with you. You get on with your life, you manage, you do things, but you can't say, "It doesn't matter. It doesn't count." It counted. It was worse than being blown up, much worse then being blown up. The attack on my mind, my spirit, my dignity, much worse then the attack on my body which came many years later.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

What brought about that release, when you were released the second time? And then what drove you into exile?

Albie Sachs: They actually wanted me to be a witness, in a trial of somebody who'd been through that whole thing, and he saved us from being called as a witness because he made various admissions in the court and we were all released. This time, when I came out of the prison, my friends were expecting me to run to the sea again, and I just shook my head. I said, "Take me home." I was restricted, another banning order. I couldn't leave Cape Town, I couldn't go outside of a white area in Cape Town into what was called a black area. I couldn't go to a school, I couldn't be published, very severe restrictions, but it wasn't house arrest. I was restricted to paradise, because it had Table Mountain and the beautiful beaches. And every Sunday I would climb the mountain and it was so important for me, I would feel free, because if they were following me, I could look down the cliff face and see. So I'd have five hours of freedom, and that's one reason why I'm such a strong believer in the green movement. Somehow the mountain represented more then just a safe place. It was nature. It was the world that we're being touched with, the earth, the sands, the rocks, the plants. And come rain, come shine, every Sunday, I would climb.

One day I went up with a psychiatrist friend of mine -- and by the way I'd been introduced to Freud through all this because I couldn't understand why is it so difficult to be brave. There was something inside me that wanted to collaborate all the time with the people who wanted to destroy me, and I was searching for it, and I found there was a thing called the unconscious that everybody has. And you've got to be in touch with the unconscious to understand a lot of your behavior. And I read through volume after volume after volume of the collected works of Sigmund Freud. I still remember that light blue paper of the Tavistock series. Page one to page 400, Volume 2, all the way up to the letters. And I got stuck in my unconscious for years. I had trouble getting out of explaining, "When I walk, why does my left foot go in front of my right foot?" There was nothing that just happened. Everything had to be predetermined, explained.

In any event, my friend, Professor Lynn Gillis, and I -- he was a great mountain climber -- we went up one side of Table Mountain, and on the left was Devil's Peak. And I said, "Lynn, I'm going up Devil's Peak," and I went up, I came down, we climbed Table Mountain. We walked right across the top, we came down and I said, "Lynn, I'm going up Lion's Head." So these three mountains in one day. I was totally exhausted. He got really worried when I came down exhausted at the end of it. And he told me about what he called "Türschloss syndrome," the "closing door" syndrome that elderly males often suffer from. You feel you're losing your virility so you go through extraordinary feats of physical activity to prove that you're still a macho guy. I was only 31, but he was absolutely right. It was, for me, desperately trying to rescue something of an inner youth through physical activity. I was very, very defeated.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. 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.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

Get the Flash Player to see this video. When I said good-bye to her and first time I shook her hand when she went off to prison, I just knew destiny had brought us together. She came out, we met, we carried on, developed our relationship a little bit. She being followed by the police all the time. We went down to the beach one day, and it gave me some pleasure to know that the big, heavy security officer in his suit was sitting out in the boiling sun while we were eating ice creams down on the beach. But we couldn't even be together, and the choice was going full-time underground -- there was no underground existing, I'd lost my courage -- or leaving the country and asking for a permit to leave, which was another humiliation. And we decided to leave, and that we would meet in London and we would marry.

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