Conversation with Albie Sachs

Albie Sachs Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

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The Law

At the time you were pursuing a degree in the law and then went into civil rights work?

At university itself I was very torn. It was a five-year course; we had some outstanding constitutional lawyers. It was a time of constitutional crisis in South Africa, cases being litigated.

This was what year?

This was the early 1950s.

I felt intrigued but alienated -- all this is book stuff; it's ideas, very, very abstract. And by then I was involved in study classes in the townships and we would meet. I'd have to speak quietly, at night. They asked me to be there. Frequently it would be just by candle. And it's something very extraordinary, that when you only see people's eyes and cheek bones lit up by candlelight and you speak to them, it's like the face is so strong and the human experience is so strong. To me this was the real world and this was real knowledge. This was what really mattered. And I turned my back on all that stuff on the campus, at the university -- it was literally high up on the hill and the to Sachs wnships were down on the plains. Years later, when we had to draft up a new constitution, it was actually by linking up the vitality of the lived experiences of the people (who are now educating me) with the grand concepts and ideas that my law professors had been teaching me. When they came together we got our new constitution. It was important for me to see that the one set of knowledge is not opposed to the other set; they're not inherently antagonistic. That in fact the name of the game, if you like, for the lawyer, the constitutionalist, the scientist, is to link up the two.

And navigate that apparent chasm, that in fact the two enrich each other.

That's the point. It's not even navigating through the shoals, it's finding the streams flowing together and creating a new kind of a turbulence.

So you did become a lawyer, a civil rights lawyer. Tell us about the frustrations of that existence.

I was extremely ambivalent about it. I loved striding into court wearing my gown -- "Advocate Sachs." I loved the cut and thrust, the parry, the tension. The judges asking you questions, cross examining the witnesses, strategizing. It was engrossing. It was interesting. And I hated it! We were mercenaries. You could be employed by anybody just to argue for them. It didn't have that core sense of justice and right. So that was all kind of mixed in. The worst part wasn't even that, that's intrinsic to the legal profession anywhere in the world. The law was being used, the courts were being used, to oppress people not to protect people. The judges were white, the police who commanded things were white, the prosecution was white, the laws were made by whites. And the majority of people whom I defended in criminal matters or appeared in civil matters were black, and they had no say in the law. So it was injustice through law. And we had to follow the protocol and say, "yes my lord," "no my lord." -- the gymnastics we had to do even in terms of address. When an African woman, elderly, grizzled hair, seen a lot in life would be called "Rosie," and a young white woman would be called "Mrs. Stander" or "Mrs. Smith." And if you call the young white woman "Rosie," she would be offended and you'd feel you might be doing something damaging to your client. You're provoking, you're creating atmosphere. If you call the African woman "Mrs. Shelbelila" when the judge just called her "Rosie" it would be like a slap in his face and your client might suffer. So you had to do an enormous amount of jumping around, acrobatics, not to buy into this whole Apartheid linguistics that could be so demeaning, but not to be too confrontational on the other hand.

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