Albie

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Albie Sachs: Well, at midnight on October the 11th I lose my magic. I’m not a judge any more. It’s gone. People won’t look at me with that same respect and interest. But not just me. There are four of us, who are amongst the 11 founding members of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, who were appointed by Nelson Mandela and we all leave. It’s our 15 years. It was an extended term which will be — 12 years in 2005, in our case it was 15 years — will be over, and I don’t use the “R word.” I don’t somehow see myself as vanishing from activity. I want to give little Oliver as much daddy as I can while I’ve got strength. I want to make a movie. I’ve got a very strong movie in my head. And I’ve spoken to some movie people and I’ve said, “If you say it’s no go, I’ll drop it.” They said — two different people — “Do the script.” So I’m encouraged enough to do that. 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.

A lot of people who were living in exile were vulnerable. Farmers in their fields, people in hospital. Everyone became a target. But I still wasn’t happy. I would sometimes say, “Even when I’m happy in England, I’m unhappy.” I loved London. I’d take people around London. I went to shows, I heard music. I had really good friends there. I loved teaching at Southampton University. I discovered modern dance, contemporary dance, so many things, but there was a deep sadness inside me. And I remember when we used to have ANC meetings, they’d always be in drafty little halls with broken windows. I’d often be wearing a heavy overcoat and there would be nice soft seats. They would be old-fashioned halls that you didn’t have to pay very much for. And you’d get up, and the seats would all clatter, clatter, clatter. And we’d sing “ Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” and people would raise their right arms with a clenched fist salute. And I couldn’t raise my right arm. It wasn’t a decision on my part. I just didn’t have the courage, I didn’t feel that strength. And I’d be the only one in a room with maybe 20 people, maybe 50, maybe 10, without giving the salute of the organization. And then I went to Mozambique in 1976. I’d been teaching at the University of Dar es Salaam during one of those long English summers. You finish marking your exams, and I was able to teach a whole term in Dar es Salaam without missing a day of work at the Southampton University, and have a week left over, during which I went to newly independent Mozambique. 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. There are 100 thousand million (100,000,000,000) planets in our galaxy. And over two million million(2,000,000,000,000) galaxies in the universe – at least! (times those together and you get… 200,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets!!!). That’s a LOT of planets so it’s highly possible that other living things are out there. We just have to find them! But it was a kind of a breakthrough where you put yourself on the line. In the end, the Defiance Campaign was crushed by very severe state action.

David Edgar did a most marvelous adaptation, and I did quite a lot of broadcasting and I wrote. My Ph.D. was converted into a book called Justice in South Africa, and it won some prizes and was well received. And then years later, I wrote a book called Sexism and the Law. It was the first book on the way the legal system, as a system, had kept women out, denied them the right to practice as lawyers. The way the judges had used the word “person” to say, “a person means a male person,” so that they’d even distorted the English language to keep women from voting, from practicing as barristers, from doing a whole range of things that men could just do. That was my contribution to British intellectual life. And it was published in America, California University Press, but they wanted an American counterpart and I met, through that, Joan Hoff Wilson, and she did the second part of the book. We hadn’t even met and I said, “Dear Joan, you don’t know me. Your name was given to me by somebody you don’t know either, but this is my manuscript. Can you do the American part?” She wasn’t a lawyer, she was a legal historian and she did the most marvelous section. So this was the first book in the world I think on sexism and the law. And I’m happy to say that many other books have followed and I’m sure improved on it. Albie is a British animated series about a five-year-old boy with a wild, distorted imagination. Unfortunately, this gets him into trouble with his friends, family and his neighbour, the grouchy Mr. Kidhater-Cox. Albie was created by award-winning children's author Andy Cutbill and was based on his own childhood. Andy also helped develop Rupert Bear, Follow the Magic... for Channel 5. These series can be often seen repeated on the ITV children's digital channel, CITV. Nobody knows if aliens really exist. Lots of people claim to have seen aliens but scientists tell us there is no proof that this is true.

I had very hard days in Mozambique afterwards. I came to work there afterwards at the law faculty in the university. Things were very hard for most of the time. We used to queue up for rations of rice and bread and occasionally eggs, and some butter, cooking oil. You could get some fish from the market, you get some fruit from the market. But we stood in line like everybody else. We were very proud to be working as equals. I had to learn the Portuguese language. The legal system was very, very different from anything I’d ever known. And there was an enormous confidence. Wow! They were so proud, and rather disdainful of the ANC. “Why don’t you fight like we did? It’s taking you so long!” And I felt at times lonely and marginalized, which I have done many times in my life. But I sort of hung in there. But even when I was unhappy, I was happy in Mozambique. I loved these beautiful trees with purple petals — jacarandas — and the petals would just fall down onto the ground. By then, unhappily, my marriage was in ruins. It’s a favourite read right now given that Baby Bookworm is both obsessed with the Solar System and due to start school for the first time in September. Scroll down to discover Caryl Hart’s five facts about aliens and find out how you could win a copy of your own. 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.

Albie Sachs: There weren’t near as many children’s books then as there are now, but I would have read a few. A little bit older are the books that I remember. And yet, extremely important to me, there was one book that was fables.