TRANSCRIPT: AFTERNOON, EVENING, LATE INTO THE NIGHT
When I came out of detention afterwards, Ray Alexander, who was one of the top communists in Cape Town – trade union organiser, marvellous person, wonderful woman – she meets me and she says, ‘Albie, we are so proud of you. We are so proud of you.’ And then she says, our next meeting is Friday whatever it is. And I said ‘Ray, I can’t. I can’t. I don’t have the guts anymore.’ I said, ‘There was a time I was walking to the toilet after interrogation, I wanted to throw myself over the balcony because I’m trapped between a desire to speak and get out of this terrible isolation. And something inside saying don’t talk, don’t talk, don’t talk…’ She was very stern with me, ‘Don’t you even think in those terms!’ But to this day, I have a horror of heights. And I used to be a mountain climber. There was something, a moment, you know – I wouldn’t say an active suicidal moment, but a possible suicidal moment – that, that springs back to life when I’m looking down over a big height since that day. And so I didn’t come back into the Communist Party.
When you’ve been in the Party now for like ten years, it’s such a central feature of your life, it’s a connector of so many things, the danger you’re in, the exaltation you have, your hopes and dreams for the future. And suddenly I’m on my own. Part of it is just glorious. I can just be me. Just be me. I can just get through life doing little things, enjoying little things. I’d often thought of being a writer. But I was too busy at the bar and you’re writing legal opinions that almost destroy creativity. It’s focused, it’s to achieve an end of solving a particular technical legal problem. I’m going to tell this story. I’m going to tell the experience, I’m going to share with people outside, people like me who’re curious, what’s it like to be locked up. I’m going to tell that story. And it took a long time. And now I’m writing and I’m getting some people secretly to type up the manuscripts. Out of that emerged The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs. That was my response in a sense through literature.
In the meanwhile, I’m encouraged to defend Stephanie Kemp. The attorneys Frank, Bernadt and Joffe had been approached. And Himie Bernadt, whom I’d done a lot of work with over the years, said, ‘Look, can you defend Stephanie when she comes out of the detention?’ I said, ‘Hymie, I can’t. You need a certain objectivity to be a lawyer. You need to separate yourself and I’m so overwhelmingly identified with detainees. I can’t, I can’t do my job.’ He said, ‘Alright, you don’t have to be counsel, just see her when she comes out.’ And I said okay. And I’d seen the picture of her in the papers, beautiful young person. And she’s now going through everything I went through. And I straighten my tie, and I comb my hair and I go to Roeland Street Jail, and the interview room. And I’m looking forward to meeting this very beautiful… and somebody comes into the room, and she’s shouting and being shouted at, and it’s raucous and her hair is a big mess and her skin’s not looking good. She’d been 90 days in detention. She’d just been released. And prison had in that sense coarsened her behaviour – it hadn’t changed her spirit. And then we start talking and her story comes out and I’m saying okay, I can’t defend her, but I can help her when she comes to the defence. And finally, after a long period of lots of interviews and now she’s beginning to recover that physical beauty and there’s a beauty of spirit that was quite admirable… I say, okay, I will be junior counsel, get somebody else. And I was actually at the trial. But I didn’t have to do anything. I could maintain, in that sense, my independence of spirit. But we’re falling in love. The only time I touched her was to shake her hand and wish her courage and luck as she is sent off to jail.
Two years later, she’s back in Cape Town. And she warns me. She says, ‘Stephanie,’ they told her, ‘don't have anything to do with those people in Cape Town – we're going to take action against them soon.’ Sure enough, not long afterwards, I’m off to jail again. You don’t get stronger. But my second detention’s completely different. Now its thuggery, it’s ruthless, it’s relentless, no holds barred. And this time, it’s a different team now. ‘Rooi Rus’ Swanepoel is in charge. A bully who cultivated the appearance of a thug. Thick, heavy, bloodshot eyes, short-crop red hair. I discovered afterwards their technique was to bang the table, two of them. Big noise for ten minutes. Twenty minutes total silence. Then they go out. Another team comes in, shouting (imitates the sound of shouting) and then total silence. Clearly psychologists had been helping develop – maybe in America, in Quantico or who knows where – this kind of technique to break people down without putting electrodes on them, without pulling out their fingernails. And it’s going on afternoon, evening, late into the night.
I ask for some food, and they smile. The food comes and I suspect there’s something in the food. And then early the next morning, my body is fighting, fighting and fighting against my mind. And the fatigue is total. It’s overwhelming and I collapse onto the floor. And they’d been working in relays and they come in. Suddenly there all six of them and I see these polished shoes, brown and black, around me. And, you know, I feel water pouring on me and I’m lifted up, placed on the chair and I collapse again. And they prise open my eyes… and it happens a few times and eventually I’m sitting in the chair, and I know that I’m breaking. And I decide I must control my breakdown. We’d had other people, Fred Carneson, who’d been five days standing. He collapsed and broke completely. He never recovered. And other people had broken. And I decide I’m going to control my breakdown. I start making a statement and I begin saying, ‘I’m making this statement under duress…’ I describe the whole process, they’re writing it down, writing it down but I’m still intensely tired. And then eventually I’m signing something and Swanepoel says, ‘It’s very strange, all the people you mention are dead or out of the country. Okay, we’ll be back.’ And he’s shuffling the pages around and I realise afterwards that he’s probably eliminated that page where I describe the methods that they use. But I’m too tired and I’m feeling even more defeated now.
The relationship with the guards was very complex. The ordinary cops, they were people from our society doing their jobs in their own ways. Very proud they’ve got an advocate in their prison, you know, it kind of elevated them. I mean the one – I remember, his name was Frikkie, he loved to talk. And he said, ‘Can I tell you a joke Advocate Sachs? It’s about lawyers, I hope you don’t mind.’ And he said, ‘Little Johannes swallows a sixpence, and someone says, ooh, we got to take him to the doctor. The other person says, no, take him to the lawyer, he’ll get the money out of him much more quickly. You don’t mind, you don’t mind Advocate Sachs?!’
The station commander at Wynberg Police Station, he shouted, he swore, he was hated by his colleagues. ‘You’ll never hear a rude word in my prison,’ he would say. But he was lonely, and I was someone he could speak to. And he felt somehow a divine intervention had sent me to his prison for him to convert me. And then he would tell me stories about the bible. He says, ‘The Israelites were wandering through the desert for 40 years. Their skin became hard, their wives were unattractive. And they meet the Samaritan women, and their skin is soft. And they go with them and the children are born, and that’s where all the problems started. They’re just like the coloureds in South Africa today.’ And that’s his world view. He says, ‘When I joined the police force, the English hated the Scots, the Scots hated the Irish, and the Scots and the Irish all hated the English. But they all hated the Afrikaners, and we didn’t stand a chance.’ And I’m keeping a straight face. But you know, I get a sense of who he is, how he sees the world.
In our movement our position had always been we’re fighting a system, not a people. And so just to hate the guards somehow wasn’t fighting the system. We had to change the system. And I could see most of the ordinary cops, I’m sure they were racist and I’m sure most of them were very ugly towards black people in many, many different ways. But that was part and parcel of the whole apartheid set-up. And if there was responsibility, the bigger responsibility was much higher up. And it was the intellectuals and the professors and the others justifying apartheid. So, if anything, that experience reinforced my feeling we’re fighting a system.
I used to feel, to be honest, there was a deficit in me. A real revolutionary would have wanted to kill them. And I was a bit of a failed person. I didn’t want to kill them! I wanted to change the system. But I discovered in 1990, when we’re now about to go back to South Africa. And I’m being interviewed by Anthony Lewis from The New York Times. Did I feel rage, did I want Nuremburg Trials? And I said, ‘Anthony, I think there’s something wrong with me. I didn’t feel that rage.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry Albie, I’ve spoken to Mandela, he comes up with the same answer. I’ve spoken to Kathrada, the same. Sisulu, the same thing.’ It became clear to me we were part of a culture. It wasn’t a purely individual thing. And the culture was to transform the society, to change the system. And that meant getting rights and getting a different vision of South Africa and having different institutions for South Africa, rather than slapping some people in jail.
When eventually I’m released, this time people are saying, ‘Well, Albie, what you going to do today? Where’re you going to run?’ I said, ‘Take me home.’ There was something deeply broken inside me, deeply broken. I’d kind of got through with a certain measure of dignity. But I’d been overwhelmed. My body had fought against my mind and… I felt that fracturing, that fragmentation.
