TRANSCRIPT: MY THANK YOU, IF YOU LIKE, TO ENGLAND
I come out of detention. I’m about to be disbarred on political grounds. Our movement is destroyed. People are dying in detention. It’s either go underground and fight or go abroad. And I ask for an exit permit. It was Vorster and his jaunty kind of a way. If a fly is buzzing around and making a noise, open the window and let them go out rather than keep them inside the country. You could leave but it was on condition you never returned. It would be a criminal offence to return. I remember being angry with the officials in Pretoria because they were taking so long in giving me permission to leave. And I’m angry with myself for being angry with them about something that’s humiliating for me. But eventually the permission comes through. Stephanie and I decide we’ll marry but we’ll go to England.
I’m on the boat. And I make my last phone call, Dullah Omar – advocate, the only black advocate in Cape Town at that time. And I say, ‘Dullah, I’ll be back, and we’ll be back,’ and I put the phone down. And the boat goes out [makes sound of the boat] and the sense of just peace. And tranquillity. And I’m not being followed, I’m not about to be detained, I’m not being listened to. And there’s nothing you can do at sea. I’ve got no responsibility, I don’t have meetings to work on, I don’t have clients to defend, and the dread is gone. And there’s a sense of kind of physical exaltation and elation. I’m just away from that danger and that threat. And I decided, okay, I’m leaving, and I feel a sense of shame. I feel, I didn’t have the guts to carry on, but I’ve made my decision. I don’t turn back. I don’t look back now. I must make the most of everything. And in that sense the boat trip was exciting for me. I could play ping pong and tennikoits... I still had two arms then. I was the runner up in the Union Castle championship. ’66, it was August, England won the World Cup Soccer. There was such a roar in the ship, you felt the ship came up out of the water, it was steering itself. It’s the second goal that England scored in extra time.
And it was a great time in that sense to arrive in England. Of change, of the Harold Wilson government, of Mary Quant, of Private Eye, of satire, challenge, Carnaby Street. It was a sassy time. And the anti-apartheid movement was very significant. I travelled all over the UK. I went up to Scotland, to Wales, meeting wonderful people but feeling that heaviness and that sadness. Something in me was destroyed. We would have ANC meetings, and it would be in a Labour Party controlled council town hall room, usually with broken windows. You’d get up and the seats would all go klunk, klunk, klunk, klunk and people sing Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika and all the right arms would go – my arm didn’t go up. It didn’t consult with me, it just took its own decision. I didn’t feel that courage to put up my right arm. That sense of sadness in a sense followed me. And we’re working, we’re doing anti-apartheid work.
One very important meeting for me was when Wolfie Kodesh, who’d been a wonderful comrade friend of mine in Cape Town… And he loved having a secret. But there’s no point in having a secret if you don’t let people know you’ve got a secret. So he would say, ‘You’ve got to come to Peace House this afternoon, very important meeting.’ And I went with him. And Oliver Tambo comes on to the platform, there’re the usual revolutionary songs. Rather boring, routine stuff. And then Oliver Tambo announces, ‘I’ve been instructed by the National Executive of the ANC to report that the Albert Luthuli Brigade of uMkhonto we Sizwe crossed into Rhodesia, as we called it at that time. Their objective was to reach South Africa to raise the level of armed struggle against apartheid in South Africa. They evaded detection for a couple of weeks but eventually they were betrayed by local peasants to the Smith regime. A fire fight ensued and eventually the enemy fled leaving two dead or three dead on the field.’ And one of our comrades was wounded but not severely.
We stand up and we cheer. We cheer, ‘At last, at last, at last we’re fighting back!’ And a voice behind, well elocuted English voice says, ‘That’s murder!’ And we look around. ‘That’s murder!’ We’re angry, who’s this British guy telling us? And we’re waiting for Tambo to say, ‘We pursued the non-violent path for years, they shoot us down, life has got worse, our rights are fewer than they were before.’ And OR remains quiet for a moment. And he says, ‘Yes, we’ve become killers. Maybe the worst thing that apartheid has done is to transform our young people, who otherwise would have grown up to be doctors and lawyers and farmers and nurses and teachers, to become killers.’ I was stunned by that answer. And very deeply moved. I’ve never forgotten it. It was just one of those unexpected pivotal moments in the development of… of an outlook. It’s one of my most powerful memories of that whole 11 years that I spent in England.
I got to know London quite well. I got to know London on anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. I could find my way around – from Hyde Park Corner to Trafalgar Square where we would meet. And then I got to know the rest of the city. But all the time I’m thinking: I’m not living in exile, cut off from South Africa, wondering am I British, am I South African. I was living in exile, absorbing everything I could, learning about the law, belonging to the critical legal studies movement, the Haldane Society, meeting left wing legal activists. I did a PhD at Sussex University on the history of the South African judiciary and its torn nature – one part so thoughtful, erudite and polite; the other part sentencing a hundred people to be hanged every year, whipping, forced removals, pass laws, all the ugly stuff. How could this co-exist in one institution – the judiciary?
My professor Colonel G.I.A.D Draper, who’d been one of the investigators for the Nuremburg Trials, had a hatred of Nazism and racism. A kind of bent back… strange like this strong British military voice… And he said to me that a good thesis makes a bad book, and a good book makes a bad thesis. And I said, ‘Yes, Colonel Draper.’ But I decided, I’m going to write a book! And it will have enough footnotes to be a thesis. But it will be interesting and compelling enough to be a book. And that became Justice in South Africa. It was banned in South Africa. It was banned as a book. It was banned because I was banned. It was banned because it quoted Mandela and Tambo – banned people. It was a criminal offence to have a copy of my book in your possession in South Africa. And of course, when it was banned, everybody wanted it. So, they put on a false cover, and they read it. The minute it was unbanned, they stopped… stopped reading it.
And in terms of knowledge, I taught everything I could at Southampton University. They wanted someone to teach international law. I’d never even studied international law. But because I was a foreigner and I could speak quite well, they thought okay, you’ll do.
I got heavily involved in reading about the feminist movement, the suffragettes and gender issues. It was the only issue in England that reached me with anything approaching the same intensity as race had in South Africa. Partly because it became very personal. It’s in your life, in your daily conduct, in the practises and habits of society. And I ended up writing a book on sexism and the law – together with an American woman feminist, social historian. And that was my tribute to England, if you like, for finding a place for me where I could get a PhD, I could teach at Southampton University, I could have a home, I could make friends, support the anti-apartheid movement. My thank you, if you like, was Sexism and the Law.
Stephanie in many senses was a very marvellous companion to have – bright, neither of us could cook. She learned to cook. She’d chuck me out of the kitchen. She learnt about dressing; she learnt about London. She was sassy. When she arrived there, she was very destroyed. But slowly she recovered, and she was doing work, deep work for the underground.
London was a great city to be in. And at that time, we had very little money. We were so different in temperament. I’m saving, saving, saving all the time and she would want to go on Friday night to the pub and have a drink and enjoy herself! And I hated it. I was terrible, I could never get to the front line to order a beer, and I didn’t like the smoke and the noise. And she was totally at home there. It was just one of those temperamental things. But the idea of spending a couple of quid on booze for me was unthinkable. And she would say, ‘Albie never lets up. He’s verkrampt,’ you know, ‘he’s narrow, he’s tight.’ Who knows?
I would work at night writing my manuscripts, my books and she is just ‘round the corner from me and she’s trying to decipher a message from the underground, and she can’t get the message and she’s going kind of crazy. And I’m loving her so much for the work that she’s doing. And I don’t know if she’s loving me at all for the work I’m doing. And we’re like two yards apart and we’re destroying each other. We agree on everything that divides people, on philosophy, on religion, on money. We even liked the same films; we liked the same food. We couldn’t get on. And I worked out a kind of a theory: that relationships can have three different dimensions. And the one is destiny. And the other is passion. And the third is living. In terms of destiny, it was overwhelming. Passion was kind of okay. Living was a disaster. The little details of living…? We should have been the happiest people on earth. And we were amongst the unhappiest. And eventually the marriage broke down. She had more courage and guts. I would have soldiered on forever being unhappy. She saw it was over.
