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

What do you see as the next great challenge, or the next great frontier, for South Africa?

Albie Sachs: It's the same frontier, it's not the next. We haven't crossed the frontier of unemployment, of poverty, of dispossession, of landlessness, of homelessness, of lack of access to health, to education, all those different things. We just have to keep going steadily, steadily, to plan well, to involve the people and not simply deliver things from the top and hope that people will be grateful, and get upset when they're not grateful. We just have to carry on doing more and better what we're doing. We certainly have to allow our extraordinary creative cultural energy to emerge. People are so rich in that sense in this country. Poor people are rich people. Rich people are often poor in terms of body movement, laughter, conversation. We are finding ways. Painting and sculpting and needlework and embroidery, that's a great richness of our country.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. We have to find ways of linking with the rest of Africa, so we don't become -- I'm sorry to say it -- what some people call "the Yankees of Africa," in that sense of being seen to be domineering and we know everything. But at the same time to be proud of our democracy. Our biggest export, our biggest contribution is not going to be railways and cell phones and IT technology and so on. It's going to be a sense of human rights, and not because we take it somewhere else, but because it works here. It solves our problems. It enables people to come together while maintaining their diversity. So when I leave the court, I'm going to have more than enough to do, just to carry on, maybe telling something of our journey to people who didn't go through that. And also reflecting on our successes on the court, which have been enormous, but also accepting the criticisms of our failures.

Will you be writing more? You had a new book out recently.

Albie Sachs: Yes. Last year I was on sabbatical leave. Every five, six, seven years we can take a few months off, and I was a Ford Foundation "Scholar in Residence." All with capital letters, all the way through! And Monday to Friday, very, very industriously from ten in the morning 'til about six in the evening, I just sat and wrote, and revised and revised, and wrote. And this book came out, The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law, with a very conscious attempt to distill some of the major experiences of being a judge, and the extent to which they depended on looking back at a rather astonishing life that I've lived, or that happened to me.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I never set out to be a judge. I never imagined I would be a judge, but I became a judge almost by an accident of history. I've loved it. I love meeting judges in other countries. I had a glorious lunch at the U.S. Supreme Court. I met judges from the top court of the United Kingdom. I met judges in Kampala from all over East Africa and in different parts of Africa. We used to say, "Workers of the world unite." Now I say, "Judges of the world unite."

We just have to do what we can to insure certain basic, fundamental, decent values of human dignity: no torture, I believe no capital punishment, no indefinite detention without a trial. Just certain fundamental things, whatever your circumstances, whatever your constitution. And also, law as something that can help the desperately poor -- it can be meaningful in their lives -- that brings people together. For me, it's been a life wonderfully, wonderfully enjoyed. I look back on it with a sense of achievement at having been part of that tremendous process.

Justice Sachs, what do you know about achievement now that you didn't know when you were younger?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Albie Sachs: When I was young, I learned to dream. I learned to imagine doing impossible things. I learned to feel that we have just one life that can be very rich. It can be very special, it's really up to us. I don't think that's changed really. The details, the formatting of it, the experiences have changed. I've had to rethink a lot of things about happiness. I thought you would just be happy, and then -- personal happiness -- you'd meet the right person, you fall in love and you just become happy. I thought that everybody who had money would be happy. Poor people are unhappy 'cause they're short of bread and they can't go to school and so on. I discovered rich people are unhappy. I discovered you could meet someone you loved very much, you'd been through a lot together, but somehow you weren't happy together. Life in that sense is a much richer, more nuanced experience, in many ways much more wonderful because it's not automatic.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

Get the Flash Player to see this video. When I got an award from the South African government, I was interviewed afterwards by a young journalist. "Tell us Justice Sachs, what message do you have for the youth of South Africa?" And I felt, "Oh, that's so boring." As a young person I hated messages from important people who'd come to school and speak about the stormy seas of life and so on. And I said, "Well, my only message is I hope that they are as irreverent and as cheeky and as ebullient as we were as young people, and that they don't listen too much to people like myself." But I do like them to listen a little bit, sometimes. What I want more then anything, I don't want them to feel they're being lectured to, and they have to try and model themselves on the heroes of the past. That's awful. There's only one hero in a person's life, that's yourself. You've got to find qualities inside yourself that maybe weren't able to come out before. And you draw inspiration from the lives of others, but you've got to be your role model. I feel very firmly about that.

I want young people at least to acknowledge idealism, that idealism does mean something in the world. It's great to become important, it's maybe nice if it's important to you, something important in the sense of you doing something important for the world, to be successful in your ambitions and your career, to have achievements. But there's nothing like that quality of leading a decent, dignified life, meeting up with other people who have similar ideals, expressing kindness and love and curiosity and challenging and argument and the excitement of ideas. Ideas can be marvelous. I'd like young people to feel all of that, and they might come up with solutions completely different from anything that we wanted, but to do it in dignity. That's what I hope to see.

What do you think will be one of the big achievements in the next quarter century? In South Africa, the rest of Africa, the world?

Albie Sachs: I remember at the time of the millennium, people looked at predictions made before, and almost none of them came true. A whole range of other things happened, so I think unpredictability is something we've got to live with.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Gosh, what I would love to see is disarmament, ending of nuclear weapons. I would love to see race becoming less and less and less significant. By "race" I mean all the stereotyping about people and individuals. I would love to see diversity being celebrated. It's great that we're different. It's not something threatening, not forcing people into mainstream ways of doing things. I would love to see more joy and fun and laughter and dance and expressiveness. People are very timid. They're very scared of being badly thought of or doing the wrong thing. You shouldn't be afraid of doing the wrong thing, otherwise you'll never get to the right thing. You take chances, and sometimes you want to cry because you've done something and it wasn't correct. But you learn from that, you move on. I'd love to see people generally more adventurous. I'd love to see less risk and danger in the world, whether it's danger from automobiles or from famine or floods or threats, danger from your partner. So many people are terrified of their partners. It just hurts me so much that you can't love somebody and be close to somebody and express yourself physically to somebody, and (you) feel terrified. And yet it's so common in all countries, amongst rich and poor. It's just not a class thing or a color thing. Oh, there are lots of things I'd love to see.

Justice Sachs, it's been an honor to sit down with you. Thank you so much.

Albie Sachs: Thank you for having me here.

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