Curated Images

IN ALBIE’S WORDS: This picture is taken from a book written by my uncle Bernard, we called him Benny, who was a writer, the youngest of the siblings. He wrote one book called Personalities and Places, and one of the personalities is my dad, Solly Sachs. And you talk about sibling rivalry and competition, they had it in spades. Bernard wrote an autobiographical book and the story of the family, first in Lithuania, where they were subjected to considerable persecution as Jews because of the rampant organised antisemitism there, and they’d come to South Africa. And the book is called Multitude of Dreams, and it's being launched at the biggest hotel, the Carlton Hotel in Commissioner Street in Johannesburg. And my dad, Solly Sachs, the older brother of Bernard, a well-known personality in the city, is asked to speak at the launch, and he agrees. Quite a big crowd there, and my dad holds up the book, and he said, ‘My brother Bernard is a rat. He's always been a rat and will always be a rat. And this is exactly the kind of book I would expect a rat to write’ and he slammed it down and walked out. They didn't speak for 20 or 30 years after that.

What angered the family was Bernard saying that their father, their dad, received stolen goods, and much of it was in Lithuania or in South Africa or both. And they felt that, the way I heard it from the family, in fact, it wasn't true, but Bernard felt it was like making his family more interesting, exotic, and he's the brave child telling that story. My mother, Ray was the only person who had any connection with both Solly, even after she was divorced from Solly, my dad, and with Bernard. So, I would see Bernard when I came up with my brother to Johannesburg, and I kept up some contact with him. Now, Bernard builds a whole thing about this particular picture, saying you can see Solly’s head flopping to one side, that people worried about him, and that he learned to speak really late.

The part of the grandmother that interests me was she looks like quite a formidable person. One of my cousins, who's older than me, said that our Bobba (grandmother) had been very tall, and that could be an explanation of why my son Oliver is so tall. So here she might have been seated. I'm not sure who the other children are in the picture. They could have been my aunties and my uncle, Auntie Sarah, Aunty Janie and an uncle, Yossi. They were my dad's siblings who were delighted by his denunciation of Bernard.

An interesting thing that I've discovered was that the births of Jewish children were not registered. So, neither my mother nor my father knew what their actual birthday was, so they never put anything into celebrating my birthday or my brother's birthday. They knew my birthday, and Johnny's, but it wasn't a day of, if you like, in the culture of the family, it wasn’t a day for a party and celebration. I seem to have inherited a little bit of that, I’ve avoided any form of celebration of my birthday.

Now I’m celebrating my 90th birthday, in a way sort of wrapping up a whole phase of my life and activity. But I'm doing it not for sentimental purposes but for transactional reasons. A series of activities… the launching of The Albie Collection website, a symposium by law schools on my alchemical life as a lawyer, a big event in a tent on Constitution Hill and an exhibition on my life in art, entitled ‘Spring is Rebellious’, at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town.

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: When we first looked at the Old Fort Prison as a possible site for the new Court building, I saw the word FLORENCE daubed on a wall across the road. I’d been born at the Florence Nightingale Hospital, popularly referred to as ‘The Florence’. The building was battered but the name had somehow survived.

Later, when serving on the Court, on what came to be called Constitution Hill [I had proposed naming it Freedom Hill, but Arthur Chaskalson had countered with Constitution Hill, which had turned out to be a better choice], I used to tell people I’d been born across the road at ‘The Florence’, been all round the world and come back home again to my birthplace.

When I left the Court in 2009, the word was still there, rather smudged, on a battered wall. I believe it is still there.

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 ALBIES WORDS: So that's me at Mrs Tischauer’s - ‘Auntie’, we called her - in a kindergarten in Sea Point suburb, based on Montessori principles. My hair is already turning dark. ‘Auntie’ was a refugee from Germany whose husband had died in a Nazi concentration camp. As World War II progressed, she moved to a farmhouse in Klapmuts near Paarl, because she feared that Japanese submarines would come and shell Sea Point. So, for safety, she moved to Klapmuts. And I used to go out there, and I can still remember I would take the train, and then there'd be a cart pulled by a pony or donkey, and I would lie in the back, and I'd hear klopklopklopklop, you know their hooves beating, and I'd see the trees as the cart went through. And I’m just remembering now, the occasion when, decades later, I was sick with hepatitis in Berkley, California, I'm lying flat on my back in the back of a car, seeing the lampposts flash by, and repeating that emotion.

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.

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 don’t remember this picture…I have a very faint memory of going to… it's not even a lake; it's a part of a river on a picnic. We loved picnics. A picnic was a big thing, fun, meeting other children in a new place, eating nice things and playing games. People laughed a lot at picnics, though in the picture we look a bit disconsolate as we are asked to smile for the camera. Then, when the roll of film was complete, it would be taken to the chemist to be developed. If you were lucky, you would get the pictures back in a week and remember the moment when you were standing in the water.

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.

SEE QUEST FOR JUSTICE SOUND MEMOIR EPISODE 1 FOR MORE

IN ALBIES WORDS: That was a studio picture. I’m not in a high school uniform, so I was probably still in junior school at South African College School (SACS).

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 ALBIE’S WORDS: It was Norman Edwards who introduced me to mountain climbing. And he also invited me to his darkroom when he would be printing and developing pictures. The experience was quite wonderful. You had the negative which showed the image in reverse. You would then make a print and place it in a chemical tray and see the black and white picture slowly emerge. The next intervention would be to crop the image for design purposes. This was to open up my imagination in later life for designing pictures, newspaper layout, and books. It also opened up my ways of seeing art.

So, the mountain climbing and the photography darkroom were two big things that I got from Norman. The third was classical music - he played the French Horn in the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra. He constructed a hi-fi gramophone on which he played 75-inch shellac records using needles made of prickly pear thorns which he would sharpen on sandpaper. One day he trapped me into listening to the scherzo from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony No 8. I heard it out and ran from the room as quickly as I could. But later in the year when staying at the home of my Aunty Sarah in Johannesburg, I discovered a set of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. I had time on my hands. I think there were something like 5 records which dropped one-by-one. You then took them out, turned them over and played the reverse sides. I studied the programme notes and played the records again and again. Slowly themes began to emerge. Bit by bit, I could recognise structure and began to feel beautiful shapes emerging. It was hard work but is proving to be immensely enjoyable. Da-da-da-daaaa! – fate knocking at the door! This theme has stayed with me throughout my life. When I was thrown into solitary confinement and the cell door resounded behind me, I responded by hearing my voice singing out loudly and defiantly, ‘Da-da-da-daaa!’

Norman and my mother had married a year after the war in 1946. Johnny and I called him Norman. We had a correct rather than loving relationship with him. When we left cheese rinds on our plates with plenty of cheese still on them, he would be shocked and cut off the protruding bits for us to eat. His mother had been a cook and his father a gardener on an estate in Surrey, England, and he couldn’t bear seeing us waste good food. He had loved music and the only way he had been able to become a musician had been to join the Royal Marines. The war had broken out. His ship had docked in Cape Town. The officers had been fêted in Constantia and Bishopscourt and the ratings and musicians had gone to the People’s Club in the centre of Cape Town. That’s where he had met my mother, Ray. The years had passed, letters had taken months. Once she had heard that his ship had been torpedoed but learnt later that he had been saved. She told us one day that Norman was coming to stay with us in Cape Town. This was not news to me. I have a dim memory of having discovered a stash of letters she had tucked away in a drawer and had secretly read about his love for her and his intentions to join her in Cape Town.

Dentistry was pretty brutal in those days. Whenever I went to the dentist I hated the pain and cried. But on one visit I started crying before the drilling had even started. The dentist asked my mother whether something was happening in my life, and she said, yes, she was going to marry Norman Edwards.

About 5 years later he left my mom, which was a very hard time in her life. And then he died while I was in exile. When I came back, she mentioned this to me when I asked after him. She added that before his death he had called for her to come to his bedside.

IN ALBIE’S WORDS: It looks like a lion cub. And you would think one would remember playing with a lion cub… but I don't remember it.

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.

Image of middle section of Modern Youth Society Mural

Image of right hand section of Modern Youth Society Mural

Image of left hand section of Modern Youth Society Mural

Seated from left: Kobie Coetzee, Frene Ginwala, Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Michael Corbett.

Standing from left: Yvonne Mokgoro, Richard Goldstone, Johann Kriegler, Ismail Mahomed, Arthur Chaskalson, John Didcott, Albie Sachs, Laurie Ackermann, Pius Langa, Sidney Kentridge and Tholie Madala.