IN ALBIE’S WORDS: I was born into struggle. Even my name Albie, I was named after Albert Nzula who was a communist, he was a trade union leader, one of the first African trade union organisers who died not long before I was born. My parents had enormous admiration for him. So, they called me Albert. I didn’t know it was an unusual home, because the environment in which you grow up seems to be normal to you. But I remember very vividly my mom Ray Sachs, born Ginsberg saying to my little pikkie brother Johnny, aged then about eighteen months, and Albie, now aged about two-and-a-half, three, ‘Tidy up, tidy up, Uncles Moses is coming.’ And Uncle Moses wasn’t Moses Cohen or Moses Kantor. It was Moses Kotane. He was the General Secretary of the Communist Party. And my mom had enormous admiration and affection for him. And she was his typist. So, I grew up in a home where it was quite normal to see a white woman showing great respect and affection for an African man who was her boss. And to me that was normal. And that world outside where people were treated in a very discriminatory way because of their skin colour just seemed quite absurd to me.
IN ALBIE’S WORDS: That's my mom and she's walking in the streets of Cape Town, maybe Adderley Street, with Bill Andrews, who was the chairman of the Communist Party of South Africa. At this time, my mom would have been the typist for Moses Kotane, the General Secretary of the Communist Party. Bill had come as a working-class man from England to fight in the Anglo Boer War. He'd stayed on and he was very highly respected. Comrade Bill he was called. He would have a little wax moustache, English working-class style. And he's carrying one of those little leather tiny suitcases… not suitcases, briefcases we call them today. And I can see my mom’s actually quite well dressed. I don't remember her as being smartly turned out. But she told me that her mother was a seamstress and when she was younger, she was very well dressed. And this would have been a picture taken by a street photographer. They would take a snap of you, and you’d give them some money, and you'd collect the picture afterwards.
IN ALBIE’S WORDS: I would have been about two and my brother six months. I had fair hair then. I see my mom had a nice haircut. The beach also became very important in growing up with a sense of freedom. We had very modest living circumstances. Our aunties would knit us jerseys. We would never think of going to a restaurant to eat, it'd be too expensive. I'd never stayed in a hotel until aged 20 when I went to stay with my dad in London in 1954 and he was looking for a place that I could be with him. So, we stayed in a hotel. I’ve never lost that sense of freedom you get growing up with the sand between your toes, and there was a big rock on the beach. You’d see the big boys jumping off it, you’re waiting til you’re old enough to do so, and one day, I’m much younger than them, and I'm jumping for the first time. An unforgettable, triumphant jump. Next, the casual meetings on the beach. Then, as a young advocate, I would know how to put my towel down in a way that gave me maximum freedom but could be attractive to girls. And just getting the space on the beach to imagine and dream was very great.
My mom would move every six months because we could get a lease for six months in a basement. So, I remember staying at Fourth Beach. And I also remember staying at First Beach quite vividly. I remember staying above the road for a couple of years. It's completely different. I don't remember staying in the area where we are now, Third Beach.
When the plane landed [in South Africa], after 24 years and three months and so many days and so many hours and so many seconds since I'd left for exile, and I'm at what was then called the DF Malan airport, the question is, ‘Albie where do you want to go now?’ I'm going to work immediately with Dullah Omar at the Community Law Centre as Professor Albie Sachs, not waiting interminably in London for the ANC to say ‘Comrade Albie, you can now go home’. And then Dullah says I could stay with him and Farieda in Rylands (on the Cape Flats in an area then classified as for coloured people under the Group Areas Act), I could stay with his colleague at the Community Law Centre, Bulelani Ngcuka, in Gugulethu (then classified as a black township), or I could stay with my mom, Ray, in the Gardens (overlooking the Cape Town CBD in an area reserved for white people). And that question wasn't simply, ‘where do you want to stay?’, it was, ‘who are you?’ And I would obviously spend time with my mom, but I didn't want to be a rebel in a white area. I didn't know Bulelani and his family. Apart from knowing the words of some freedom songs in isiXhosa, the mother tongue of the people in his neighbourhood, I’d never learnt the language. So, it would be complicated staying with him. Dullah I’d known from before. So, I said I'll spend time with my mom, but that I'd like to live with Dullah and Farieda.
I remember with amusement how cross I was when I spent time with my mom, and she would say ‘Albie, it’s cold outside, you must put on a jersey.’ The reason I was cross was that it was cold outside, and I didn’t wear a jersey.
So, I’m back now for maybe a week the first time, and then two weeks the second time, going back and forth between London and Cape Town. Somebody would have to meet me at the airport, and for a number of visits, it was, oh what was her name….? Her husband was a lawyer and attorney. He became a judge afterwards. Essa Moosa! He died a few years back, such a lovely guy on the Constitutional Committee of the ANC, and his wife would come and meet me at the airport and take me to Rylands or wherever I'm going. Several months passed and I visit a friend in Clifton.
Her name was Dusty. She had been Dusty Goldberg. She was now Dusty Holloway. And then maybe on my fifth journey back to Cape Town, I felt my rage against the white areas had diminished, and Dusty had a spare room at Third Beach, just up the steps from where I'm recording this now. So, I would stay there and reconnect with Clifton. After a year or two, I decided I would actually like a place of my own. There was a small bungalow on the spot where I'm speaking now, owned by a distant friend of mine, his name is Philip Goodman, who had married Dawn, who was the niece of a very close friend and comrade, Wolfie Kodesh. When I had left to go into exile in ’66, Philip had been a bit of a happy beach bum, just enjoying life, and he’d bought a bungalow, he'd redone it, and then married Dawn. They had moved out, and now the bungalow was to let, and the near-hippy had become a well-established estate agent.
So now I'm living in my own space in Clifton. And then in 1994, the City of Cape Town decides that they're going to sell off the plots, instead of having a 99-year lease, which had been the position before. And Philip was saying, ‘Albie you'll have to leave. I want to sell it.’ I said, ‘Philip, I'll give you market value, and we can get an independent person to give us a price’. I had a flat in Maida Vale in London that I’d been able to buy with a deposit with the proceeds of a benefit performance at The Young Vic, by four British actors who had each played the role of Albie in The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs. I sold the flat, and my brother Johnny helped me with some money, so when he came here, he would have somewhere to stay. So, I was able to buy the bungalow. And then when Vanessa moved in some years later and Oliver was born, we decided it was just too small. The building was crumbling, and we had to redo it. Vanessa had gone back to high school to complete her matriculation, qualified as an architect, and designed the exceptionally beautiful and well-appointed bungalow in which we live today.
IN ALBIE’S WORDS... I think it was 1946, and you can see me and my younger brother Johnny in the SACS school uniform. We'd been allowed out of school for maybe the afternoon to see our father, Solly Sachs, about to leave on a Union Castle boat for Europe and, I think, North America. He did the trip as the General Secretary of the Garment Workers Union of South Africa. And I see that I was just about as tall as my dad. In 1946 I would have been 11 years old. I was on the tall side. And looking at it, it's not a warm ‘daddy and his boys’ picture with his arms around us. It's a fairly formal one, and he was wearing a suit and on official business and we’re wearing our school uniforms.
IN ALBIE’S WORDS: That would have been on Clifton beach. I been born at the end of January, and he had been born towards the end of August a year later, so there were eighteen months between us. Johnny and I were very, very close. We did lots of things together, and we shared everything. What became a famous story was how once I was standing outside a small ice cream shop above Fourth Beach and looking at somebody who’d just bought an ice cream, and my eyes were like popping. She was eating from a cone, and she kindly said, ‘Would you like an ice cream?’, and I said, ‘No, I'm sorry I can't have one because my brother's got a tummy ache’. When he told the story, he’d say he’s the one who said no, it was I, his brother, who had the tummy ache.
I think back with some sadness on how, as we were growing up, I tended to push him away emotionally to get my own space. He twice contracted rheumatic fever. There were no antibiotics then, and he got lesions to his heart. He later became one of the first beneficiaries of open-heart surgery in the world. So, my mom’s friends commented to her that her son the lawyer went to jail, and her son the doctor to hospital.
We had good times together in the later years of his life. I inherited his motor car. Vanessa discovered that there were tennis rackets in the boot. This encouraged her, at the age of 50, to take up tennis, and she went on to represent South Africa in an international competition at the age of 55.
IN ALBIE’S WORDS: I'm standing on Maclear Beacon. I would have been about 11 or 12. In 1946 my mother married for a second time, Norman Edwards. We'll see a picture of him later, and I'll speak about him bit more later.
Through him, I would have climbed Table Mountain, and this is the highest point on the mountain. At the back, you can see the top of Devil's Peak. And having climbed the mountain, it was quite easy to climb up to the top of the beacon. It’s near the front of the table and not too far from the walk up Platteklip Gorge.
The mountain became very important for me, over many years. So, if this is 1946, right up to 1966 when I left for exile, I would regularly climb. Norman had separated from my mom, they divorced. I had a group of friends, and we would meet at Kloof Nek corner and decide where to walk from there. And even when it was raining, we would go on the Contour Path and find a cave. In those days you could make a fire on the mountain. Towards the end of the walk, you would look for spaces with firewood and little streams of water with a wonderful, special mountain taste.
There were two Mountain Club huts, so the whites had a stone double story building with sleeping bunks and a tap with water from the reservoir. I think also they had electric lights. And then a little bit down the slope was the open club with a corrugated iron roof. No bunks that I remember; no water; no electricity; but filled with people with energy, joy and laughter. It was one of the few public spaces where you could meet and associate and where people from all communities could meet, associate and enjoy life. There was even a competition between the best of the coloured rock climbers and the best of the white rock climbers. The best white climber would open up a new and dangerous climb, and a week later Neville Garret, the best climber from the coloured community, would repeat it. Then the next week, Neville would open up a new climb, and a week later the white climber would follow him. The competition became intense. They would climb without ropes, climb down, and do it at night, until we stopped them. I’ve often thought of a film being made about it.
During the days of hardest repression, the mountain was my refuge. When my movements were severely restricted by banning orders, I would commit a criminal offence if I moved out of the white areas of Cape Town. But I was restricted to paradise. I could swim at the beach and climb the mountain. And if the security police were following me, they would have to get ropes and climb up Woody Buttress.
There was one horrible part. I would look down from the top of the mountain and see all the beautiful white suburbs with lovely views overlooking the sea, and then, in the distance were the Cape Flats and the townships. I'd feel an anger and rage at the visual injustice. I began to hate the beauty of Cape Town. Something terrible happens when you hate beauty. I was hating beauty. Could I ever enjoy beauty again?
When I came back from exile in 1990, I was determined that on the first day I would go up Table Mountain. I didn't know, now after the bomb and I’m older, if I could do it. A team of people from the ANC were waiting to escort me up. And we walked up from Constantia Nek, over the top, past the reservoirs. It was a misty day, but after 24 years I remembered the way. I’d done it so often. And then a strange, totally surprising thing happened, something I’d totally forgotten about. It was feeling the stinging from the prickly little bushes I'm walking through scratching my shins, so subliminal, so evocative. A thing you don't even notice exactly, but it came through very, very, very powerfully. I came down Kasteelspoort and walked along the Pipe Track to Kloof Nek corner and felt triumphant. I was reconnecting with Cape Town, glimpsing the possibilities of being able to love its beauty.
What was amusing was that Dullah Omar had arranged a meeting to meet the returning exile, and I was, like, two or three hours late, and he was furious. For him, the meeting was much more important than my mountain walk. I was never rude to Dullah, but if I had been, I would have given him the finger, because I'd been dreaming for 24 years about my day back! Meanwhile, I wrote at the time that I had believed that when freedom came there’d be no more meetings. Was I wrong! Was I wrong!
IN ALBIES WORDS: That's my dad, Solly Sachs, looking quite relaxed, and with him is Bill Andrews. My dad had enormous respect for Bill Andrews. Solly had been expelled from the Communist Party for right wing deviationism. Bill Andrews had also been expelled. Bill Andrews came back to the Party. Though my dad continued to have a very strained relationship with the Communist Party after that, he never lost his love for Bill Andrews. Bill, I think, found Solly to be stormy but rich in personality, and very effective as a leading creator of modern trade unionism in South Africa.
The little boy between them was Jackie Stapelberg. He was one of three little white kids who had been found abandoned at the central railway station in Johannesburg. And somehow Garment Workers Union members got to hear. Johanna Cornelius, who didn't have children, took the one girl and Hester Cornelius, her sister, who also didn't have children, took the other girl. Dulcie Hartwell (my dad’s second wife) and Solly, took the boy Jackie. They never formally adopted him. But he grew up with them in their home, and Johnny and I regarded him as our younger brother. Here he is on holiday.
So now Jackie didn't do very well at school. He got work as a telephone operator. And then Solly died, aged 76, in London. Solly had always insisted on being organised, ‘You've got to be organised!’ But he didn't leave a will. Johnny and I were basically left as heirs to his house in London, and we shared the proceeds of the sale of the house. Solly and Dulcie had had a child, Andrew, our half-brother. Johnny and I felt that Jackie, although he didn't have any legal connection, was really like part of the family. So, we split the proceeds of the sale of the house four ways. But that was only after paying a sum back to the International Defence and Aid Fund. Solly had sent out an appeal to a list of supporters of the Fund, where he had been working, to get some money for what he called the Sachs Family that had been persecuted by apartheid, to buy the house. And some of the people in the Fund were not amused at all. I paid back that amount and divided the rest. And who was the purchaser of the house? My uncle Bernard. Jackie later used his position at the phone company to phone me and say thank you. That was the last I heard from him. And then I was told some years later that he had died.
Bill Andrews, by the way, had a bungalow in Clifton. I think it was on or near First Beach. Meanwhile, another communist leader, Eddie Roux, had a flat overlooking Moses Beach (next to First Beach). Moses Kotane would stay with him and be able to walk over to my mother with documents for her to type. Some years later, other communists, Brian and Sonia Bunting, built a house on the mountain slope above Second Beach. Every year we would have a great New Years Eve party there, with truckloads of people coming there from the Cape Flats and the townships. And sleeping over on the lawn. As far as the Security Police were concerned, Clifton was seen as being at the heart of subversion! Today regarded as the Malibu of South Africa, Clifton was then seen as the heart of revolutionary subversion.