Conversation with Albie Sachs

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

Photo by Jane Scherr

Page 7 of 8

The Bombing

Subsequently, almost twenty years later, you were the victim of a bomb attack by the South African security forces. You almost lost your life, and you describe your recovery in The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter. One thing you say in that extraordinary work is "I have to use my imagination," talking now about the process of your recovery, "this is where a certain measure of courage comes in perhaps. Not physical bravery but the courage of conception."

Well, I wrote that book some time ago and it's interesting to hear because when I write something I forget immediately right afterwards. It's so vivid in my mind, I write it out and it's gone, and then I carry on living and there are new experiences. This whole theme of courage has been with me since I was a kid, and courage for children, young boys, growing up in South Africa was military courage. We had the prototype of this brave man who would kill, risk being killed, and expressed courage in a physical sense. Afterwards that was a thing that we all had to do battle with in all sorts of ways, a very damaging, narrowing, inhibiting concept of courage.

Here now I'm getting an enormous amount of love and support, and so on, from all over the world, from people close to me and from people I've never heard of, because I'm the guy who survived a bomb. I'm so courageous, look at what I'm doing sitting up in bed, writing, all the rest. And I didn't feel that was courage. To me, whatever courage meant it didn't mean that. Courage was something where you pit yourself against something else, where you have to make decisions, where you are aware of the challenge. And you hang in there and you see your way through. I think a lot of these great heroes of my childhood were psychopaths. I don't know if that's courage. It's problematic. Sometimes courage is perverse, you do things because you're driven. And it's not real, clean, open courage. But the courage I was speaking about in that excerpt would have been not dramatic, not visually available and there to be seen, not fitting into the prototype of this person who's strong and who stands up to something even stronger. It would be in the head. It would be the courage of thinking something through, of developing an idea, of following it through, and not being lazy.

We should explain to our audience that your recovery involved learning to walk again, learning to write again, learning to defecate again (as you beautifully describe). And all of these efforts seem to be summed up when you write, "What is far more heroic is this totally unheroic act of pulling myself across the bed and then defying the risk involved in the topple onto this commode."

It seemed to me such an extraordinary paradox that courage was moving my bum across the bed onto the commode. It wasn't even funny. I wrote afterwards, "I shit therefore I am." It was a revival of me as a person -- I walk therefore I am, I run therefore I am, I laugh therefore I am. That's the progression right through the book. But this was something humiliating, that you can't even do simple functions like that easily. It's strange because something you do quite normally, unthinkingly, unconsciously, now you have to be conscious about every moment of it. And it's that day to day, quiet courage of not feeling sorry for yourself, not giving in. Just moving, having a shit, and then moving back again. It was difficult and it involved a risk. I could have called in the nurses and asked for help but I didn't. It wasn't pride, it was ... well maybe it was a bit of pride, but it was that sense that this was the way I've got to do it.

You were ambivalent, in a way, about the extent to which you were being made a hero. You were willing to do that for the movement, for the anti-Apartheid struggle, but really that was not helpful to you. It's really what we just talked about that was most important.

I didn't like it then, I don't like it now. It's a label, it's an imposition. I sometimes joke that if you're a hero you're expected to conduct yourself well. You're not allowed to do things that ordinary people do and commit all the little peccadilloes that ordinary people go in for. I do find it very intrusive. It's intrusive on me, my space, and my relationship to the world. And yet I used to love heroes. I used to read about the resistance heroes, heroes of struggle, and it energized me. But then I also became a little distrustful of that afterwards because you know how weak you are in those situations, how easy it is to break. And some people break. We all broke up to a certain point. And so that concept of a hero was actually destructive of the things we wanted to achieve.

People would be detained in solitary confinement and people outside would say, "Oh, Sam says she'll never break, she's a hero." And after three days of sleep deprivation and standing with her ankles swelling up like balloons, she would break. Because the people outside felt no one breaks. So it actually became, even from a purely instrumental point of view, very damaging to the struggle. And I don't like role models and the whole idea of role models, and of people trying to be like someone else. We've all got to be more like ourselves and have the confidence to be like ourselves, to discover who we are. And to share with others and get things from others, but not be like wonderful people, not to be like them, to be wonderful in ourselves.

In the end, in the final analysis, what was very important for you was your image of yourself and your being comfortable with the way you dealt with your situation.

Yes, it might sound a little bit odd but I was quite proud of that guy who went through all these difficult things. And the humor made quite a big difference, the funniness of it all. The capacity to convert it all, to store it up as experience for writing subsequently also helped a lot. But I did feel that in a way I was like an ambassador for our struggle. And it was easier for me to depersonalize myself in that way, and to see myself as an exhibit. My arm, the trauma, could be seen. And that was the physical sign of what millions of people were suffering and I was willing, in that sense, to allow my body to be used as an exhibit, if you like. Not as a crude exhibit, but as a living, active, participatory exhibit in the anti-Apartheid struggle. Now I don't like it anymore. Now we're getting on with our lives. And my body is my body and it belongs to me. It doesn't belong to struggle. I wrote it there, it's in the books, people can remind me of it. It's for the public record. But I'm back into myself again.

You call your book, which is an account of this recovery, The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter. What did you mean by "soft vengeance"?

I didn't have a title for the book. I didn't know what it was going to be called. I knew what the experience was and I knew the beginning, the middle, and the end. And I kept finding myself towards the end, as I'm now recovering, back in the world of ideas and values and speech-making and I'm reading stuff in the newspapers. I kept finding myself saying, "and this will be my soft vengeance." I heard they'd caught the guy who'd put the bomb in my car. To this day I don't know if it was true or not, but I said, "Fantastic, I'd love to meet him. I'd love to have a human, face-to-face contact with him." To humanize the relationship. The idea of being almost blotted out by someone who doesn't know me, who's only seen me in a photograph as an object to be eliminated was unbearable. And I just wanted to speak to him. And then I felt, let them put him on trial and if the evidence is sufficient to convict him beyond reasonable doubt, then let him pay. If the evidence is insufficient, he must be acquitted. And that will be my soft vengeance, his acquittal will be my soft vengeance. Because it means we're living in a country where the rule of law functions, due process functions, these values have triumphed. That will be my soft vengeance. Now I said that in the narrative, and I remembered that twenty pages earlier I also used that phrase, "that will be my soft vengeance, democracy will be my soft vengeance." And I realized that that was what the book was about. The title emerged from the book.

Next page: After Apartheid