Albie Sachs Interview (page: 5 / 9) Constitutional Court of South Africa	Print Interview

Did you have a private moment with Mandela after that first meeting in Lusaka?

Albie Sachs: A week or two after the meeting in Lusaka I was in London, and Nelson and Winnie Mandela are coming to London and everybody's excited. I'm excited all over again. Some people go downstairs and some upstairs, and it turned out that Madiba (Mandela's nickname) was going to go to the one group and Winnie to the other group. We're standing in a row, and she's being escorted, Winnie Mandela, along the row, and comes to me, and she doesn't recognize me. I hadn't known her from before. And somebody says, "Albie Sachs." "Albie Sachs!" she says. She opened her arms and she just embraced me, and that's what I actually wanted from somebody, anybody. It came from Winnie. She's a very controversial figure in South Africa. She was. But there are moments like that, that belong to you and another person, and even though I was often critical of some things she was associated with, I never forgot that particular moment. Then I could relax. That embrace that I wanted and needed had been given.

Now it became a question of planning for democracy, and flying back into South Africa after 24 years and about two months -- and I knew it exactly then -- so many days, and so many hours I'd been away. It was actually quite lovely. As the plane was flying in, it was from Zambia, there'd been a group of women from South Africa at a women's conference in Zambia, and they all put out their hands, and clasped my one arm, and said, "Welcome home, Albie." It was spontaneous. It was just a really lovely gesture. Then we go into the hall there, and I don't have proper documentation. I've been stateless for a long time, but I'm coming back, and I'm not going to worry about documents. A white, Afrikaans-speaking official comes up to me, looking very stern, and he says, "Welcome home, Albie." He was very gracious and very lovely. I see him occasionally at the airport. "Do you remember me?" he says. And I do remember that.

I was back, and flew down to Cape Town, and I'd had this dream I would climb Table Mountain. Every day I thought about climbing Table Mountain on my first day back, and I went to my mom, who'd been waiting all these years for me, and we had some tea. And I said, "Mommy, I'm going out to Table Mountain," and I put on some appropriate shoes and we walked up the back. It wasn't rock climbing. I didn't know if I could do it. All the way right across the back and down. I even remembered some of the paths very, very well. And the other thing I was dying to do was to go to the symphony concert on Thursday nights. It had been a moment where, in the midst of all the imprisonment, and the pain, and the difficulties, if I could go to the concert on Thursday night, I could love my Beethoven and Mozart. And during the interval, someone came up to me and said again, "Welcome back, Albie. For 20 years you never missed a concert, except when you went to jail." And I felt that, in a way, it was a reconnection.

Then the hard period of negotiations. Now Nelson Mandela is effectively the leader of the ANC. Oliver Tambo had a stroke and wasn't able to do what he'd done before. Very close, working with Nelson Mandela in planning for a new constitution for South Africa. He didn't play an active role in the details. His job was to really negotiate with President de Klerk, and represent the ANC publicly. But he played a very important role as the sort of person steering the tone, the temper, the quality, and insuring that there were good teams working on the constitution.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. There were many of us working on the constitution. Many, many, many. Cyril Ramaphosa, a lawyer who'd been a trade union leader, became the head of the negotiating team, and we would work with him and with Nelson Mandela. We even had a quarrel with Nelson Mandela at one stage. I was sent by the ANC Constitutional Committee to fight with him. He wanted the votes to go to 16-year-olds, and we said, "No. Eighteen is the international standard." He said, "No, but the youth fought hard for our freedom." And we said, "But that was the youth of '76, and now it's 25 years later. They're older people." He said, "No, we've got to get the youth in." He said there are seven countries that allow votes to even 14-year-olds. It was North Korea and Yemen, and we said, "We can't be associated with countries that are not known for the open, pluralistic, democratic system." Eventually he said, "Well, you will see. You will see that I was right." But he accepted. He was wounded. Years later he gave that as an example. He was trying to drop a hint to President Thabo Mbeki about presidents must know when to admit that they're wrong and to climb down, that they can make mistakes. So he acknowledged that he'd been wrong on that particular one.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. We had a very industrious team. We worked day and night, day and night. We'd lived everywhere in the world. We'd lived in the United States and Canada. We'd lived in East Germany and West Germany. We'd lived in Cuba and we'd lived in the Argentine. We'd lived all over Europe, all over Africa. We didn't have to study textbooks to know about political systems. We had to remember our lives in the Soviet Union. We'd seen advantages and disadvantages of different systems, and we had a very, very powerful negotiating team. And in the end, I think it's fair to say all the main elements of our constitutional order derived their strength from the wisdom of the leadership of the ANC in wanting a constitution that would embrace everybody, and that was the vision of Oliver Tambo. He'd always had that. He'd always had the vision of the Freedom Charter, an open, pluralistic, democratic society where people could say their say. They could agree to disagree, as long as they agreed on certain basic fundamentals. No human being was more important than any other human being, that everybody had to be looked at with equal respect and concern. That was foundational, and that was our answer to the idea of the whites having special reserved seats and veto powers which would have been a disaster in South Africa. Whites had to be people like everybody else, with the same rights, responsibilities and duties. The same concerns, anxieties, hopes for their children, whatever it might be. Fully respected, but not somehow a specially protected group in our society. We fought hard for that, and we won that in the new constitution order.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

Can you recall the first time you voted in a democratic South Africa?

Albie Sachs: I was in Cape Town. I stood in a line, thinking our whole lives had been devoted to the vote, because South Africa was an independent state. We didn't want independence in that sense. We wanted "One person." We used to say, "One man, one vote," but we changed that to "One person, one vote." It was our equivalent of a Declaration of Independence, and now we'd achieved it, and we stood in line, black and white, brown. Everybody -- young, old. I didn't feel anything. I was so surprised. I thought I would be elated, and somehow it was so banal, and just putting a little X. My vote is my secret but I can whisper to you -- it was next to Nelson Mandela's photograph -- and I felt flat. I was surprised and disappointed. I wanted that sense of exultation, and somehow I suppose it made me equal in a way that I didn't want.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I wanted to be a freedom fighter, doing something special for my life, for my country, and what this did was make me the equal in a marvelous -- and in some ways a terrifying way, of the oppressors, of the rich, of the poor, people who'd done nothing. It was like a very ordinary act, and it's not easy to become ordinary. Then I would start telling myself, the paradox of South Africa was we'd fought -- all our passion -- to create a boring society. A boring society in the sense that people didn't kill each other and push each other around. We had all the normal complaints and dramas and hopes and disappointments of a democratic society.

You have to detox, and not everybody managed to do that. Living in dread, living in hope, living with your body on the line, living with physical pain, living in exile, living in imprisonment, confinement, all these years, and now you've just got to be an ordinary person in an ordinary society. And then another emotion started surging. It's wonderful to be able to heal, to construct, to build, to enable things to grow. We'd spent all our lives dedicated to pulling something down, something evil and wicked. And I personally found that terrific.

For me personally, as an individual, it was part of my physical recuperation to see the country now beginning to grow, and the constitution was the bedrock of everything. It didn't build houses. It didn't get people access to schools. It didn't solve the problems of the country, but it gave a mechanism, a matrix, a way in which people could solve the problems without being at each other's throats. So it was the foundation of everything. And then to be appointed to the court that defended that constitution in which our lives were invested, it was just a marvelous continuation of what we'd been struggling for. And now it's 15 years. Whew! It just passed like seconds. I just remember being sworn in. We started our court with nothing.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. We had one chair. I know we had one chair, because when the Chief Justice Arthur Chaskalson retired a few years ago, his secretary said how terrifying it was, sitting on the one chair that the court had, with this tall figure going around firing questions at her. And so from one chair we had to build up. It's now an exceptionally beautiful building in the heart of the Old Fort Prison, where both Gandhi and Mandela had been locked up. It's got a library that's trying to be the biggest human rights library in the southern hemisphere. We get people from all over the world doing internships there. We have young South Africans working there, spending a year with us, recent law graduates. It's a marvelous, open, friendly place, and I think our court has helped to pioneer legal thinking in a number of very, very difficult areas. We struck down capital punishment as being a violation of the fundamental dignity of every human being. The state just doesn't kill in cold blood. Corporal punishment of juveniles, we've declared that was unconstitutional. We've developed a foundation for dealing with fundamental social and economic rights, that rights are not simply "keep out" in relation to the state, but obligations on the state to meet certain core ways of protecting human dignity when it's really under threat. We have written on same-sex marriages. The court asked me to write the judgment, and we were unanimous that to deny people the right to celebrate their love, affection, intimacy, mutual responsibilities and supports -- simply because they happen to love someone of the same sex -- violated our equality clause. So it's been not just a court trying to catch up with other courts in the world, but a court that's been providing leadership in many, many areas.

Did you come to know Archbishop Desmond Tutu at the time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission? When did you first meet Archbishop Tutu?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Albie Sachs: The first time I met him he wasn't Archbishop. He was, I think, at Kings College, studying or teaching theology in London. This very bright little chap shared a platform with me, and we kind of eyed each other, and I was very, very serious and I think I spoke far too long. I was very worried about this, that and the other and I used the word "imperialism" quite a lot. I think it was him. I'm not even sure it was him. And then years passed, and suddenly he's Archbishop Tutu, and he's making wonderful speeches and he's bringing civil society into the big debates, the grand dramas. He's at the right place at the right time. He's supporting the struggle for democracy with that very effective voice that he had, and of course he gets the Nobel Prize and we all feel we are getting the prize. Then, when it came to a truth commission, I was a strong supporter of the truth commission. Partly, we had to deal with crimes committed by ourselves, against people who we'd beaten up and tortured when they -- before we introduced the Code of Conduct into the ANC. We had to come back to South Africa with clean hands, no secrets. We had to acknowledge this, explain why and what we did about it. But it was more important to deal with all the assassinations, the tortures inside South Africa, the violations. So I argued for a truth commission even before we got our new constitution.

By the time the Truth Commission was established, I was a judge so I couldn't deal with that. In fact, we had to sit in judgment on whether the act -- the statute that created the Truth Commission -- could exonerate the torturers, the killers, from civil liability as well as criminal prosecution.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. In a most exquisite judgment, filled with almost poetic legal language, written by the deputy head of our court, Ismail Mahomed, we explained why the project of getting truth -- in exchange for not prosecuting the people who came forward to acknowledge what they had done -- that project meant to encourage the truth to come out, we wouldn't allow civil damages or imprisonment. And it had a very special meaning for me, because one day I got a phone call, and reception says, "There's a man called Henri and he says he has an appointment to see you." I said send him through. Henri had phoned me to say that he had organized the placing of the bomb in my car. He was going to the Truth Commission. Would I meet him? I was curious, and I was pleased that he had the courage, if you like, to come and see me. And opened the door and there's a young person -- tall, thin like myself. I'm looking at him. So this is the man who tried to kill me, and he's looking at me. "So this is the man I tried to kill?" We don't say that but it's in our eyes. And we walk down, and he's striding like a soldier, and I try to hold him up, to walk like a judge, to slow him down. We get to my office and we talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk and eventually I stand up and I say, "Henri, I have to get on with my work now. I can't shake your hand, but go to the Truth Commission. Maybe we'll meet one day, and who knows?" I remember, when we walked back, he was just shuffling like a defeated person, going out the security door. It was over.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Months passed, and I'm at a party at the end of the year, and the band is playing. I'm very tired. We work very hard as judges. I hear a voice says, "Albie!" I looked around. "Albie!" My God, it's Henri! And we get into a corner and I say, "What happened? What happened?" And he said, "I went to the Truth Commission, and I spoke to Bobby and Sue and Farouk." He's calling me Albie. He's using their first name terms, people who were put into exile with me, who also could have been victims of the bomb. "I told them everything and you said that one day...." and I said, "Henri, only your face tells me that what you're saying is the truth." And I put out my hand and I shook his hand. He went away absolutely beaming, and I almost fainted. I heard afterwards that he suddenly broke away from that party. It was television people. He went home and he cried for two weeks. That moved me a lot. To me that was more important than sending him to jail. I wrote a book called The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter, saying that if we got democracy in South Africa, roses and lilies would grow out of my arm. Sending people to jail wouldn't help me at all, but to get the country we'd been fighting for, that would be quite wonderful. That would be my soft vengeance. And now Henri and I -- I don't phone him up and say, "Let's go to a movie." But if I'm sitting in a bus and he sits down next to me, I say, "Oh Henri, how are you getting on?" We're living in the same country because of the Truth Commission.

How would you describe the Archbishop's role in the Truth Commission?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Albie Sachs: Archbishop Tutu had an absolutely fundamental role. He didn't create it. He didn't establish it. But he gave it a personality, a presence, a leadership. It couldn't be somebody who said, "I'm neutral on torture." You can't be neutral on torture. He had emotion and feeling. He encouraged the people to sing hymns beforehand. African people would often feel -- poor people -- that they would get courage and strength from singing hymns. He encouraged witnesses to testify with a comforter next to them, to hold them, to hug them when they started crying and remembering the terrible things. He gave it an African feeling, a humane feeling, a quality of ubuntu, of coming out with the truth, acknowledging the interdependence of everybody. Perhaps it had more of a confessional aspect then I personally might have felt appropriate to my particular world view and outlook. But he was very much in touch with millions and millions of ordinary people. He said his section of the Truth Commission allowed the little people to speak.

They moved around. It wasn't some big, important commission in a big, important building. They would go to little school halls. People would come and they would feel represented there. Since the Truth Commission has completed it's work I've encountered Desmond Tutu quite often. Of course we've shared platforms. There's a marvelous bond between us. There's just something. It's unstated so I'm not going to try and state what it is. He comes from a deeply religious background. I come from a totally secular background. When we went to an event at the Anglican Cathedral in Grahamstown, where people were asked to bless others by waving wands of plants, of branches, he asked me to bless him. In some ways it was quite cunning and tricking, because he's involving me in a religious ceremony. But I did it with all my heart, because there is a bond and a connection -- spiritual relationship -- between us that's very strong. He's a marvelous voice for our country, and he's funny and he's provocative and projects himself in a way that really communicates with people.

What about former President Mandela? Have you seen him recently?

Albie Sachs: Nelson Mandela I've seen less of in recent years. As he said, he's retired from his retirement. But his legacy, his memory, his personality is just so strongly with all of us, in so many ways. But he represented a generation, a culture, and many, many other people of that generation. I feel I must be one of the most privileged people on earth, because I was born into white privilege. It just came whether I wanted it or not. I could dream if I wanted to go to the moon. Having read Jules Verne, I could imagine I could do that. If I wanted to become a lawyer, I could imagine I could do that, or whatever it might be. But then I had the privilege of belonging to a freedom struggle. A wonderful, wonderful experience. You break through barriers, you work with others, you develop a sense of common humanity you could never do otherwise. Now, the privilege of working on the court that defends fundamental rights of the people, and the happiness that comes from having what I call L-L-L. Everybody knows www. L-L-L -- "light, life, love," and working in a beautiful court building that will be a legacy that will go on, with the marvelous art collection, and having a gorgeous little child, Oliver, born to Vanessa and myself. Lots of happiness at this period of my life.

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