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On my Life, Love, Law, Literature and Laughter

Looking back on nine decades, I can't believe my own life. Did all these things really happen to me?

Some people remember their first kiss. I remember the first time I went to jail. The experience of solitary confinement proved to be far more difficult to bear than I had ever imagined. On my release I ran to the sea and threw myself into it, but something inside me was broken. I wrote about it, and it became a part of my life. The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs is made into a play performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and broadcast by the BBC. This was the start of my feeling of being both embodied and disembodied, in theatre, literature, visual art and film.

Two years later I'm back in solitary confinement and they're depriving me of sleep, and I'm falling on the floor, and they're pouring water on me and prising my eyes open, and something in me breaks. I've held out completely, refusing to answer their questions, and now I am desperately trying to manage my breakdown. The most horrible moment in my life. It is at a time when I'm a lawyer falling in love with a client named Stephanie Kemp who is being charged with blowing up electric pylons as part of resistance to apartheid. Eventually both Stephanie and I are outside prison and married and living in exile in London. I feel an overwhelming need to deal with and communicate this worst moment of my life, and painstakingly my second book comes out, Stephanie on Trial.

Decades later, I'm blown up. What's going on, a nice guy like me, I'm blown up by a bomb put in my car by South African security agents, and I lose an arm and sight in one eye. This is all crazy stuff for someone who is basically a quiet person, soft in demeanor, who breaks up fights, doesn't look for a fight. When I told my young grandson recently that that was in fact the best day of my life, he looked incredulous. I explained that that had been the moment that every freedom fighter waits for, wondering wilI I be strong, will I be brave, wilI I survive? The enemy had tried to kill me, and they had failed. I'd only lost an arm - it was the best day of my life! He shook his head and said: ‘But you lost your arm, Grandpa.’ Maybe when he's bigger he'll understand better by reading my book The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter in which I told of my joy at surviving the bomb, learning how to stand and walk again and write with my left hand. And perhaps he'll discover my notion of soft vengeance - that we wouldn't cut off the arms or blind the eyes of those who'd tried to kill us. Instead, we would achieve democracy, social justice and the rule of law. That would be my soft vengeance, that roses and lilies would grow out of my arm.

And, as my life would have it, in between the worst moments and the best moments of my life, there were two ecstatic moments. The first was the launch in a garden containing a giant mural by the Mozambican artist Malangatana, of an exquisitely designed book entitled Images of a Revolution, the Murals of Maputo. I'd come as a law professor to newly independent Mozambique to help build up its legal system, been awestricken by the country's outpouring of public art, and, with the aid of brilliant photographers, produced the book which we were now handing over to the joyous artists. At a time of civil war and great hardship in the country, we managed to bake a giant cake which the artists then decorated with piping bags, and we all went on to consume as highly comestible communion art. Malangatana was astonished: ‘Is this really happening, Albie?' he asked.

The second euphoric moment came when I was in Zambia introducing a document called The ANC Code of Conduct. I'd been tasked by the ANC leadership to write the Code to outlaw the use of torture by ANC security against captured enemy agents. While Zambian troops surrounded the hall in case commandos sent by Pretoria sought to kill or kidnap us, I'm at the microphone, asking the hard question: Was it permissible to use intensive methods of interrogation in extremely serious situations? There I was, deeply moved by being embraced with affection and comradeship by a black organisation waging armed struggle against the system of white supremacy, worried by what the answer would be. Immediately a young member of the ANC military jumped up on to the stage, took the microphone and said with great emotion: ‘The answer is no, no exceptions at all should be permitted, we are fighting for life, how can we be against life?’ For me that captured everything.

Fast forward and I'm still telling stories, but now no longer as Comrade Albie articulating the values of the freedom struggle, but as Constitutional Court Justice Albie Sachs pronouncing on the law of the land. Sometimes there is direct continuity between themes of my life and themes of the law. So, soft vengeance in political terms morphs into restorative justice in law enforcement. I uphold the rights of prisoners to vote. I uphold the right to be different as part of the right to equality, requiring Parliament to pass a law permitting same sex couples to marry. I wonder how much growing up with a quietly doughty single mother with resolute, independent, activist women friends, influenced my interpretations of our explicitly pro-feminist Constitution. I use my last sabbatical leave from the Court to work as a scholar in residence at the Ford Foundation in New York to write The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law. I'm a judge judging my judgments, not in terms of their correctness - others will do that - but in terms of what was going through my mind when I wrote them. Judges, I conclude, are the great story tellers of our age.

Artistic and literary representation of my life, often by myself, has become part of my life, shaping me and the way people see me, and I see myself. Storytelling also brought me what I call Late Life Love. Vanessa September fell in love with the narrator of The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter. She then set out to find out if the actual me measured up to the narrator. Our joint book The Free Diary of Albie Sachs followed, as did our marriage and son, Oliver. Through many vicissitudes, my three sons Alan, Michael and Oliver have provided me with deepest joy.

Let me end. In the last quarter of each year, at a star-studded ceremony at the New York Public Library, the Amal and George Clooney Foundation gives a statuette to persons who have fought against the odds for justice. The statuette, designed by George, has one long arm and one short one. It is called The Albie. At the first ceremony in 2022, Michelle Obama invited me on to the stage as the last nominee of the evening to receive The Albie. This time, I was to feel the experience of being embodied, disembodied and re-embodied. I went up the steps, took the statuette, and said to it: ‘Hullo Albie. All my life I’ve been an iconoclast, now I’ve become an icon. What’s going on?’

Let me now say hullo to you, and invite you to meet me, a little spruced up as a virtual figure. With the help of the beguiling work of a great creative team, you’ll be able to encounter many of my fables and some of my foibles. And in so doing, you’ll get a rich idea of what went on in the ninety years.

Warm greetings, Albie