Albie Sachs Interview (page: 6 / 9) Constitutional Court of South Africa	Print Interview

Speaking of children, we'd like to ask you about our own childhood. To start at the beginning, where were you born?

Albie Sachs: That's a boring question. An interesting question is what's a guy like me doing, being a judge and becoming a judge. But I was born in the Florence Nightingale Hospital in Johannesburg, which happens to be directly across the way from where the new Constitutional Court has been built, in the heart of the Old Fort Prison.

Who were your parents?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Albie Sachs: My mom, Ray -- she was Ray Ginsberg -- came as a baby of six months from Lithuania, fleeing the pogroms there, to South Africa. She was a typist for Moses Kotane, a very prominent African leader. My dad was Solly Sachs, General Secretary of the Garment Workers Union, who came -- aged, I think, about six -- also from Lithuania, also fleeing the pogroms, the persecution of the Jews. Every Easter time, the Cossacks would ride around saying, "The Jews killed Jesus, now we're going to defend the name of Jesus by killing some Jews." A very awful, ugly form of racial persecution which, I think, influenced the consciousness of a whole generation of refugees who ended up through London coming to South Africa.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I might say I didn't stand a chance with parents so involved, so conscious about injustice, and not just thinking about it as an idea but living in their daily lives, in very practical terms, campaigning for the rights of people, rights for workers, against discrimination. I didn't stand a chance. I just grew up in that atmosphere. And I think what was particularly valuable -- a white child growing up in racist, segregated South Africa -- my mom would say to my brother and myself, "Tidy up, tidy up, Uncle Moses is coming," and she had enormous respect and love for Moses Kotane, the African leader. So it was quite natural for me to see that people respected people for their quality and their worth, and it didn't depend on your race, your appearance or your background.

How did your mother first come to know Moses Kotane?

Albie Sachs: She had been a young rebel herself, and she met my dad. They were both in the Young Communist League and had very, very strong ideas about transforming the world, emancipating the workers everywhere. And Moses Kotane was then the General Secretary of the Communist Party. He was also the National Executive of the African National Congress, which is a very diverse organization, and he was particularly strong on insisting on people thinking in broad terms, working with other people for a common end.

I just remember him as Uncle Moses. He used to smoke. This is not very politically correct today to even have this memory, but he had a little cigarette holder, and he was kind of quite stylish. He came from a very, very poor, sort of peasant background. He'd been to night school and my mom taught him, at night school really, to read and write English. And he used to joke afterwards, "She taught me to read and write and now I'm her boss." But it was said in a very lovely, loving and kindly way. Totally unusual then for South Africa, but establishing a norm that we now take for granted.

What values did you learn from observing your mom's relationship and conduct with Uncle Moses Kotane?

Albie Sachs: It wasn't conscious values, it was just being. Respect for somebody whom you admired. The total meaninglessness of a race as an indicator of what a person is like, what they mean, what they stand for, how you get on with them. I think that was probably the strongest thing. There was also a lot of humor, a lot of fun. This was now the beginning of World War II. Racism was being extolled by Hitler -- Nazi Germany -- as an ideal, and getting quite a reception in South Africa, because of our past. And I was growing up in a little home world that was completely different.

The other thing was that material possessions were really very unimportant in our home. We lived actually very modestly, but filled with ideas, and a world full with ideas was also a world filled with fun. Sometimes people feel you get rid of all your possessions, but you become very severe, and you don't enjoy food, you don't laugh, you don't dance, you don't sing, you don't go and swim on the beach, because you're out doing good things in life. It wasn't like that at all.

Sadly, my mom and my dad split up when we were very young. There were lots of strong women around, so I grew up in a world where women took decisions, got on with their lives, had tremendous kind of fun and laughter amongst themselves. So that also became natural for me. As Americans would say, I didn't have a chance. I grew up something of a feminist, without the ideology, just with the situation in which I lived.

Was religion part of your upbringing?

Albie Sachs: Religion was, in the sense of being a very contested area. Ray and Solly fought their parents over what they regarded as the imposition of a religion on them. They were Jews. I'm a Jew. I was born into a Jewish family. It's part of a culture, a history, a being, a personality if you'd like. But religion didn't play a role in that, and it was very complicated for me. I was at a school where half the kids were Jews, half were Christians. I was a Jew by birth, association, culture, history, being, existence. But when it came to Jewish holidays, Christian holidays -- some of them were public holidays like Christmas and so on -- Jewish holidays, I didn't feel it within me that I ought to take those holidays, because I didn't belong to the cultural, religious side of things.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. It was very, very, very tough for a nine, ten, 11, 12-year-old child, thinking through the questions of belief and conscience for myself. My parents never put it onto me. They always said, "It's your choice. It's your set of beliefs, and you must make your own way." And I remember feeling, "If I don't have that belief, it would be dishonorable to me, and to my conscience -- and very disrespectful to God if God exists -- if I am pretending a belief that I don't have." I think back now. That was tough for an 11, 12-year-old. And yet, it turned out to be decisive in my life in surprising ways.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The issues of conscience played a bigger role in my life than issues of race. I didn't have to overcome the usual racial stereotypes and prejudices that most white kids had growing up and battle for years afterwards to get rid of those prejudices. I wouldn't say I wasn't influenced by them. They seep in all the time consciously and unconsciously. It wasn't a major battle for me. But the question of integrity of conscience -- what it means to you as a human being, as a person, to believe in what you believe, not to pretend to believe because people expect it of you, even people close to you, even people whom you love, or your community or your peers at school, but because you truly believe, because it's true to you and it's part of who you are -- that I kind of worked out at that age. And as I say, I often felt very, very lonely, very lonely and -- but I got through it.

And consequently, there are two consequences.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The one is, to me, the question of conscience is number one. It comes before food. You can survive on almost anything, but your dignity depends on your conscience. And if you've got the right conscience, and you meet other people with the right conscience, you get together. You solve the problems of food, but you can't solve the problems of conscience just through food, and through eating and dining and wining and whatever. The other thing is it's made me enormously respectful of the beliefs of others. It was so difficult to be a non-believer in a believing, or sometimes pretense-believing environment. It's made me hugely respectful of belief, of religious belief of all religions, of all faiths. And strangely enough, when years later, Oliver Tambo, who was the President of the ANC, wanted somebody to help him prepare for a meeting of world leaders of conscience and religion, he didn't go to the religious desk of the ANC to discuss it. He came to me. He came to me, and we worked on themes together. He just felt there was something deeply respectful of conscience and belief, not sectarian. The religious desk of the ANC would say, "How can we get the Catholics on our side? What can we do for the Muslims, for the Jews?" and so on. And that wasn't what it was about. It was about that intrinsic respect for human dignity, for conscience, for belief of all people that Oliver Tambo -- this very, very committed Christian who often thought of giving up politics to become a full-time minister in the Anglican church -- and Albie Sachs, who had grown up in this totally secular home -- we just got on. Got on like that because, I think, of our mutual respect for conscience.

Do you remember when World War II broke out? What did you know about the war as a young boy?

Albie Sachs: I was how old? I was born in 1935, so now we're 1939, so I was four and a bit. It was everywhere, on the news, people were speaking about it. I can't say I remember where I exactly was when the first radio broadcast came of the Nazi invasion of Poland. It dominated by childhood. War, war, war. We read about it, we heard about it. It was far away. It was a big abstraction out there, the terrible enemy. I had some uncles who joined the army, and in South Africa they called it "going up north." You went from South Africa to fight up north.

There was a clandestine, quite active sabotage movement -- who supported Hitler in South Africa -- of extreme right-wing Afrikaner nationalists. Very anti-British and also very racist. That was around. There'd be strange things when you entered a cinema. They always ended with playing, "God Save the King," and you were expected to stand. Most people would stand, and some would sit. That was their little way of publicly showing their opposition to the war.

Occasionally at school we would have memorial services for a kid whose dad was killed in the war, and there'd be a kind of a gloom and we would sing, "Abide with me, fast was the eventide." It still resonates in my head. It's six decades or more later, but it was done in that funereal way. It wasn't real, it wasn't tears for someone close, it was kind of institutionalized, but it was part and parcel. Perhaps the tough part was preparing young boys to kill and to be killed, to be soldiers.

Courage was the big thing. Would I be strong? Would I be brave? Would I win the Victoria Cross? Somebody from our school won the highest award given to soldiers by Britain -- and South Africa being associated with Britain, by the South African government -- for heroes, and usually dying in battle, saving your comrades. So we grew up in this very macho world, and the good side of it was selflessness with courage. The bad side of it was almost a blind willingness to go out there and destroy the enemy and risk being destroyed yourself. Very complicated.

Boys never fully outgrow that. I think I sang more in sorrow than anything else. You never fully get beyond that idea. You measure yourself in terms of -- certainly when I was a kid, as a young boy -- in terms of courage. That was the number one quality. Courage being determined by flying your plane and shooting down the Nazis -- Messerschmitt and so on -- lobbing the hand grenade as you charged over the top and saved the lives of so many people. It was interesting, actually, growing beyond that.

The war ends, and courage is kind of in the air, not quite in that same intense way. And then the smart, attractive boy, and that's seen as who will get the girls. Okay, it's good if he's good at sports and he's robust and strong. It's a continuation of the natural thing. But it was good to be clever, to be smart, to be brainy. That counted for quite a lot. And for years that continued, sometimes with the kind of war between the macho, hunky men -- brave on the one hand -- and the smart, clever guy who could be seen as a bit of a nerd on the other.

I still remember it took decades to go to the next phase of the attractive man. Now it's not just the boy. And the attractive man had savoir faire, was stylish. I used to see Frank Sinatra. I mean, now I think, "Frank Sinatra's my role model for the attractive man?" And I ended up so crumby, but he would light the girl's cigarette and they would mix a martini in those kind of fake apartments. And gee, I could never be like that.

I enjoyed school, I enjoyed the kids, I enjoyed listening to their stories after the school break. They would boast about their sexual conquests. I was two years younger than all the other boys in my class, because when the war broke out a lot of male teachers went to fight up north, as it was called, and they had to use the women teachers. There weren't enough of them, so they pushed the kids up and made the classes bigger, and I ended up leaving school. I was only 15 when I went to university. I was still just turning 16.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. So I was younger than all the others, and they were sexually much more boastful than I could be and I was always worried about that. I remember going to a dance at University of Cape Town, and I had the advantage of being tall. That shouldn't make any damn difference, but it counts. And I could talk, you know, quite confidently. I was quite good at talking. I read lots of books, I had been in our debating society. I loved quizzes. But I was terrified the girls would ask my age. 'Cause what do you do? You meet somebody, and the first thing you want to know, "How old?" And I thought, "Gee, you know, she is 17 and I'm only 15. Just turned 16. She's never gonna dance with me." And I couldn't dance then either. So I would see the question coming, and like five, six, seven steps away, like a chess player, I would turn the subject until I turned 21, and then suddenly I didn't care anymore. So it was that mixed feeling of being very proud. "Gee, I'm brainy. I'm so young and I'm getting all these good scores, but I don't want her to know." It's strange, but these things cost one a lot. You spend a lot of energy on that.

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