Albie Sachs Interview (page: 4 / 9) Constitutional Court of South Africa	Print Interview

While you were in Mozambique, you began to prepare for eventual freedom in South Africa. You began drafting human rights guarantees as a model code for a democratic South Africa, didn't you?

Albie Sachs: Yes. It wasn't just me. I was part of a very big ANC team, and I worked very, very closely with Oliver Tambo, who was the president of the ANC in exile, who had an enormous influence in my life. It's no accident that our little son is called Oliver. He was working in Lusaka, Zambia, and there'd be a weekly flight. One day he phoned up, and I'm quite excited. Oliver Tambo, President of the ANC is phoning! I had been working as a law professor at the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane. The law faculty was closed down. I'm now working for the Ministry of Justice. I'm doing a lot of research. I'm reading, thinking, writing in Portuguese. To this day, sometimes I'm searching for a word, and the Portuguese word comes to mind before the English word. And he very politely and quietly asked me if I'm getting on with my work, my health, how things are happening in Mozambique. I'm wondering, "What do you want? What do you want?" And he said could I possibly come to Lusaka for an important project. If it would help, he would phone President Samora Machel to make it possible. And normally, in the ANC, the message would come saying, "Comrade Albie, you've been appointed to go to Greenland for a conference next Thursday. Catch the plane and prepare a 25-page paper." That was the normal way. The President would say, "If you're free we'd appreciate it very much." And of course, when he said that, you said, "Yes, please. Please, I'd love to come." So I flew to Lusaka about a week later, very curious, and again come to his office and he's asking me politely how I'm getting on. What is it?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. And he (Oliver Tambo) said, "We've captured a number of people who were sent from Pretoria to destroy the organization. And we don't have any regulations about how they should be treated. The ANC is a political organization. It has an annual general meeting in terms of its statutes, and elects its leadership. You pay your subscription. You agree to the aims and objects. Political parties don't have provisions for locking people up and putting them on trial and deciding what to do with them. Can you help us?" And possibly the most important project -- legal project -- of my life emerged from that. He said, "It's very difficult, isn't it, to know what the standards are for treatment of captives?" In a rather cocky way, I said, "Well, not so difficult. We have international instruments that say no torture, inhuman or degrading punishment or treatment." He said, "We use torture." I couldn't believe it. ANC -- fighting for freedom -- we use torture? He said it with a bleak face, and that was why he wanted me in there because what to do about it? The security people had captured these rascals who were trying to blow up the leadership and introduce poison and do all sorts of terrible things. They were beating them up. I didn't know at the time. I didn't know the details. They did emerge later, but he knew the details. And so we prepared our whole document, which was nothing short of a code of criminal law and procedure for a liberation movement in exile, without courts, without police force, without prisons. But how to deal with those people. The host country said, "It's your problem. Our courts are busy enough. You deal with it." So we had to establish a code of legality, and a concept of fundamental human rights. Fundamental human rights. No torture, no abuse, no ill treatment, whoever they are, whatever they're trying to do.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

And a year or two later, in 1985...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The ANC had a delegates conference, basically ANC people in exile -- a few from underground in South Africa -- in a small town called Kabwe in central Zambia. And we were surrounded by Zambian troops, in case commandos from the apartheid government regime came to take us all out and destroy us. We were discussing a future democracy in South Africa and fundamental rights for everybody. But in particular, we were discussing what to do with captives who'd been sent to destroy us and kill us, and should it be possible to use what were called -- euphemistically called -- intensive methods of interrogation. And one by one, I still remember so strongly the delegates coming. Some of them were in Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC, young people, and saying, "No. We don't use torture whatever the circumstances, whoever the enemy is, whatever the dangers, because we're not like that. We are fighting for life. How can we be against life and disrespect the human personality even of those sent to kill us and destroy us?" I felt so proud. As a lawyer I felt, you know, we lawyers, we speak about rule of law and no torture, and it's easy for us in our relatively comfortable lives. These were people risking danger every day in their work and their lives -- from very, very poor backgrounds -- insisting on those core elements that kept us together as an organization. We didn't want to become like the others.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

Get the Flash Player to see this video. It wasn't just a question of who was stronger physically, who could mess up and hurt the other side the most effectively to extract information. It was what we stood for, and the ANC, as an organization, took a very, very firm position that we put people on trial. We don't have indefinite detention without a trial, whatever the suspicions might be, and we don't use torture -- sleep deprivation, water boarding, suffocating people, physical abuse. We just don't use that, because that's not the kind of people we are. And I mention this with some emphasis, because it meant, when eventually it came to writing the South African constitution, we didn't need any persuading about the importance of fundamental rights. We had applied the theme of fundamental rights to our enemies in circumstances where conditions were often desperate for us. It was part of our integrity, and our personality, and that dream and sense of idealism that made us a liberation movement, and not just another group of people fighting for power, to dislodge one group and replace them with another group.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

Of course the enemy came to me. I was never in the armed struggle. I supported philosophically the right of the oppressed people -- who'd been denied the franchise, the vote, any possibilities even of protesting against the awful conditions in which the people lived -- the right to use armed force as part and parcel of a broad political struggle, involving the whole world with the divestment campaigns, the isolation of racist South Africa, mobilization inside the country, bringing people together -- black, white and brown -- in a common endeavor to replace the system of apartheid with the system of democracy. But I've never been involved myself in using bombs and carrying a gun and anything of that kind. So I wasn't personally involved in the armed struggle, but the armed struggle came to me in the form of state terrorism.

My friend Ruth First had been killed by a letter bomb in 1982. She was teaching at the Eduardo Mondlane University, a wonderful and marvelous intellectual. A seminar sponsored by the United Nations -- and boom! She was blown up. And we cried so much, and we sang. We threw flowers into the grave. We carried her to the grave. And there was a portion of the cemetery in Maputo where many South Africans were buried, over 20 who'd been killed. And each time we went there we wondered, "That little space over there, is that for me?" Of course it was nearly for me.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I knew I was in danger. I actually bought an alarm for my car in the United States. I thought, "Well, I'll use my life savings to protect myself," and I spoke to Professor Jack Greenberg of Columbia University, and I felt in the U.S. you can buy anything. You can buy security with a little money that I've got. But he didn't know about terrorism and protecting yourself. So he put me in touch with the human rights specialist from Precinct 34 or 49 or something in New York, and I went there, and it was Captain Smart, I think his name was -- a very strange discussion. He was African American, and he knew that I was a South African in danger, and he assumed I was in danger because I was white -- from the ANC, and I explained to him that the danger actually came from the white government not from the ANC. And in the end, what he said to me was, "You've just got to be paranoid. Change your modus of living. Don't follow a regular pattern." And I felt I was very secure in the apartment where I lived, but he said, "Have you thought about somebody drilling a hole in the ceiling?" And now I was really paranoid, because I thought at least I'm safe when I go to sleep at night. And I felt the car possibly was the most vulnerable thing, and eventually I ended up buying a very sophisticated alarm, which no one in Mozambique knew how to fit. Finally there was someone from Denmark, an electrician, and he fitted it, and it would make a terrible racket. It frightened me. I went away one year, and lent the car to a friend, and he felt he couldn't give it back all dusty and dirty, and he hosed it down and short circuited the electrical machinery, and that was the end of any protection.

I felt that they wouldn't go for me. I was clearly a law professor. I wasn't working in the underground resistance. I was very friendly with many diplomats, including the United States. I would take visitors around, and I felt they wouldn't go for me. I was so obviously a soft target and there would be a reaction against it. I was wrong.

A lot of people who were living in exile were vulnerable. Farmers in their fields, people in hospital. Everyone became a target.

Albie Sachs: It was the last throw of the securocrats in South Africa, saying, "You're facing the total onslaught. We have to be ruthless in our response." They assassinated an ANC person in Paris, her name was Dulcie September. A bomb exploded the Anti-Apartheid Office -- the ANC office -- in London, and clearly I wasn't safe in Mozambique. But you didn't want to give way. You didn't want to flee because of the danger. So many people inside and outside the country were accepting risks.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I was doing fascinating, interesting work. I was working on a new bill of rights, why we needed a bill of rights in a free South Africa. And there was a lot of opposition from very progressive, very bright, young black students to a bill of rights. They saw it as a "bill of whites." That the bill of rights was there to be opposed to democracy. "Once we get the vote, we won't be able to do anything because our hands will be tied by provisions in the constitution that will insure that all the property..." and by law the whites owned 87 percent of the surface area of South Africa. But... "By law they would be able to hang on to 87 percent of the surface area through a bill of rights. They would constitutionalize apartheid." And I had to explain -- and under Oliver Tambo's leadership I was given the authority and the responsibility of doing that -- "The bill of rights can be emancipatory, a progressive bill of rights that includes social economic rights, that allows for transformation and change under conditions of equality and fairness is part of a bill of rights. We mustn't allow extremely conservative, ultra-conservative people to write the bill of rights and tie our hands and make the constitution an unpopular document in our country. We must insure that the terms of the bill of rights recognize the rights of everybody, and especially the rights of the dispossessed, the marginalized, the poor, the women suffering under patriarchal domination, the children who have no rights at all, people dispossessed of their land, workers trying to get a decent job with a decent wage. They are all part and parcel of the bill of rights project, as well as people who invest who want their investments protected, who want to insure that there is a rule of law if there should be any economic transformation." So we were debating all these questions while we were in exile, and it meant we were ready. We were ready when the day came.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

In 1990 I was in Masaka (Zambia). We were working on some legal project with the Constitutional Committee of the ANC and we worked right through the lunch. I still remember, we just had some black tea and a stale roll to eat. We didn't live it up in luxury in exile. The head of the Constitutional Committee said, "Well, let's listen to the BBC." It was about ten past three in the afternoon. We switched phones. We knew that Prime Minister-President de Klerk was going to make an announcement. We thought, "Not again. He has done so many times. Don't have any expectations." And this very confident English radio announcer's voice said, "...and because of the unbanning of the ANC..." What? We jumped up! We danced around. There was a young chap who'd come clandestinely, to learn about doing secret underground work in the trade union movement. He was in the room and he was staggered. He'd only known illegality. We'd known legality years before. This was a restoration of negotiations which we'd wanted all our lives. He hadn't known what it was like to be legal, and he couldn't understand why we were so happy. Then it was a question of being able to go back.

Tell us what it was like when you finally saw Mandela and the other freed prisoners.

Albie Sachs: A few weeks later, in Lusaka, we were so excited. Nelson Mandela, after all these years, was coming to Lusaka. The ANC, that had been split -- between those on Robben Island, those working in the underground in South Africa, and those of us in exile -- was being united physically. We went to the airport, and an interesting and not very nice thing was happening. We were told some dignitaries could be on the tarmac, other important officials of the ANC behind the rope, and the rank and file would stay in the airport building itself. There were good security reasons for that, but somehow one felt this was a division that wasn't very nice, and I wanted to be ultra-democratic, so I stayed in the airport. Then somebody pushed me forward and said, "No, Comrade Albie. You must go forward." I went forward to the rope, and there we saw Mandela getting out of the airplane. Oh, what a special moment it was! And he came past, and we hugged, and it was terrific.

Later that day, there was a hall where we all met. I remember, as the people came in, we'd known them 30 years earlier. Thin, lively young people, lots of hair, dark hair. And now, gray hair, bald, sometimes with a paunch, but recognizable from the smiles, the voice. Coming in -- about twenty of them coming in -- and a couple hundred of us, and everybody running and hugging and embracing, and I felt very alone. I felt very alone. I wanted something emotional and special, and there wasn't any particular person. The only time I felt the loss of my arm was that particular moment, that I'd be coming back to South Africa without my arm, and that was the moment I wanted an embrace. Eventually somebody came from the Eastern Cape, and he gave me a beautiful hug.

You say you felt the loss of your arm. What were you thinking of?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Albie Sachs: I thought back to that darkness when I'd been blown up, and I didn't know what was happening, and total darkness. And I knew something terrible was happening, and I thought I was being kidnapped to be taken to prison in South Africa. And voices talking, and my body being pulled, and I shouted in English and in Portuguese, but not too loudly. I'm conscious even then that I'm a lawyer in a public place. We mustn't make a noise. "Leave me, leave me. I'd rather die." Then I'd faint and I feel terrible pain in the car. I thought at least they could have decent springs in the car if they're gonna kidnap me. And then total darkness, total silence and a voice says, "Albie, this is Ivo Garrido. You're in the Maputo Central Hospital. Your arm is in..." and he used the Portuguese word lamentável, "...it's in lamentable condition. You have to face the future with courage." And into the darkness I said, "What happened?" and a woman's voice said, "It was a car bomb," and I collapsed into darkness again, but with a sense of euphoria. I'd survived. For, I don't know how many decades, every single day in the freedom struggle, wondering, "If they come for me today, if they come for me tonight, if they come for me tomorrow morning, will I be brave? Will I survive?" They'd come for me and I'd got through. I'd got through. I just felt fantastic. Then darkness, quiet, nothing.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I come awake. My eyes are covered. I can't see anything but I'm feeling very, very light. I feel there's a sheet on me and I tell myself a joke about Hymie Cohen who, like me, is a Jew. He falls off a bus and he does this (gestures) and someone said, "Hymie, I didn't know you were Catholic!" "What do you mean Catholic? Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch." I told myself that joke. And I decided now to discover what had happened, what the woman meant about the car bomb. And I started with my testicles. Everything seemed to be in place. My wallet -- my heart -- was okay. Spectacles -- I'm feeling any craters in my head. That's all right. Then my arm slid down and discovered that my arm, my right arm, was short, and again, I felt marvelous. I'd survived, and it was only an arm, and I've got through. And I had a total extra conviction that as I got better my country would get better. Had nothing to do with rationality, evidence. It was just that powerful emotion that I'd got through the worst, and South Africa would get through the worst, and we were now on the way to constitutional democracy.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The recovery, it turned out to be a marvelous period in my life. I wouldn't wish this on anybody, but it is great to be almost literally reborn and to have a fresh start. "Naked you come into the world." I was almost naked. I was going to the beach. I almost went out of the world. Now I'm lying naked on this bed, and I'm coming back into the world, and I'm having to learn to do my bodily functions. Having to learn eventually to tie a shoe lace, to stand up, to walk, to run, to ride, to write with my left hand now. And each time I wanted to say, "Look, Mommy! Mommy, I can write! Look Mommy, I can tie a shoe lace." It was actually a marvelous experience for me.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think everybody wonders, "If I were to die tomorrow, would anybody cry?" And people thought I was dead, and they cried, and I knew that. I never have to ask that question again. It's not a real question you ask, but it's something that's inside of you that you wonder about. And so much love came, and I developed a connection with England that I'd never had before. I'd lived there. I'd worked there. I'd written books. My children were born there, grew up there, but now it was the nurses taking off the bandages, cleaning my body, washing me with love and tenderness and... organized. It made me appreciate British people with an affection and a closeness far deeper than anything that I'd had before, and I emerged from that, I think, a warmer and more generous and a better person, and ready for the tasks at hand in South Africa.

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