Albie Sachs: It was so tough being called an advocate, a lawyer, an attorney in an apartheid court, even with decent judges. The judges were white, the prosecution was white, the lawyers were white, the accused were frequently black. So it was really, as Mandela once said, “I should get equal justice, but I feel I’m a black man in a white man’s court. I shouldn’t feel that.” Even outside of the obvious racism in many of the laws, there were racist assumptions in the court that were so taxing and enervating. The judge would say to an African woman twice my age, “And, Rosie, what did you see next?” He might say it in a very kindly voice. I couldn’t call her Rosie. She was Mrs. Shabalala. But if I called her Mrs. Shabalala after the judge had called her Rosie, it’s like I’m giving him a little punch, and that could be bad for my client. The judge and the prosecution would speak about “five Bantus,” “five natives.” These weren’t natives, these were people. Five men, five men and women. But if I challenged the use of language, then it was like I was having a go at them and my client could suffer. So even in the very simple way you expressed yourself, you either compromised with derogatory or undignified terminology, or you became contestational on a peripheral issue that didn’t deal with the guts of the matter and your client could suffer as a result. It cost so much psychological energy to find ways of avoiding that, neither the one or the other. You just say, “Uh huh,” you know, to the witness, not using either term. The racism in that sense impregnated everything about the court from the beginning to the end.