Conversation with Albie Sachs

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

Photo by Jane Scherr

Page 5 of 8

Writing

In looking at your life and work, writing is a very important skill in telling the story of your experiences, in putting issues like gender on the agenda. Where did you hone those skills? Was it in these early years or did that come later?

Well I edited the school magazine. We had a school that was the first formal school in South Africa. It used to train prime ministers and judges, and it was now kind of declining -- "too many immigrant children" (that's the way the school authorities saw it). We lost out in terms of discipline, our sporting teams would always lose, we didn't even get the best results. But we had a debating society, we had a chess club, and we had a school magazine that was full of creative work. Sachs I'm sure that's where it started.

Then at university, I got the prize for English in my first year. It was unheard of for a law student to get that. But then when I became politically active my marks went down and I became just another average student, from being a top student. And then, afterwards, when I was locked up, detained, the idea of writing a book brought an immediate sense of turning disaster into something good. And all the intensity of emotion and the violence of what was happening to me, to my psyche -- I felt, when I come out I'm going to write it up. I'm going to turn bad into good, the bad being like that current, that energy, that waterfall that's coming down, and this was the turbine that would spin round and round producing electricity which would be beautiful.

Writing seems to be the step by which you communicate to a broader world. It seems to emerge out of this background of the vitality of interacting with people and building communities.

Writing in moments of disaster has been extremely important for me, to come to terms with what's happened and to turn the ugliness into beauty. And the idea of communicating with others, sharing with others, has also been very, very important. But in legal practice, you write boring legal opinions that exclude all these things. Maybe some lawyers are more witty and more flavorful than others but your writing is actually a very cold kind of a writing. The passion goes simply into the logic and the sorts of arguments. This was now a chance to express a totally different side of my nature, personality. Also about ideas, also about values, but through biography, through incident, through subjective immersion in experience, not in the categories of the law.

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