Albie Sachs

Albie Sachs retired South African Judge and anti-apartheid campaigner

Albert "Albie" Louis Sachs (born 30 January 1935) is a South African anti-apartheid activist who was targeted by the State Security Council and badly injured in a car bomb attack in 1988. Albie Sachs lost his right arm and was blinded in his left eye. Ever since, he says, life has been like a fable:

"Until then I was just another one of thousands of people in exile who had been in the struggle. The bomb for me introduced the element of madness you find in fable. To wake up without an arm but to feel joyously alive, to learn to do everything – to sit up, to stand, to walk, to run, to write again. Every little detail became a moment of discovery and breakthrough. I had an absolute conviction that as I got better, my country got better."

He gave his account of the assassination attempt, and his recovery, in a memoir entitled "The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter". When Sachs wrote the memoir about his rehabilitation, he was a lawyer in exile and it was far from certain that apartheid would be replaced by stable democracy. After the publication in 1990, the fable of South Africa and Sachs unfolded in unexpected directions and now, aged 76, Sachs has added several postscripts to his story. After recuperating in London, he returned to South Africa and played a key role in drafting its democratic constitution. Nelson Mandela made him a Judge in the new Constitutional Court, where Sachs made a number of landmark rulings, including recognising gay marriage. If the car bomb precipitated a kind of rebirth for Sachs, he has also been granted a second go at fatherhood:

"That sense of one fabulous episode after another has continued and then finally, as in all good fables, the guy gets the bride," he says, speaking easily in the immaculately modulated tones of a – recently retired – judge. After meeting his second wife, Vanessa, they had a son, Oliver. "He's been a total delight. So I now have a son of 41, a son of 40 and one of four."

In December 2014, Albie Sachs became a visiting professor of law at Strathclyde University in Scotland.

Early life

Albie Sachs was born into a South African Jewish family of Lithuanian background. He attended the South African College School (SACS) in Cape Town. His career in human rights activism started at the age of seventeen, when as a second year law student at the University of Cape Town, he took part in the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign. Three years later, in 1955, he attended the Congress of the People at Kliptown, where the Freedom Charter was adopted.

He started practice as an advocate at the Cape Town Bar aged twenty one, where he defended people charged under racial statutes and security laws under South African Apartheid. Sachs has a law degree from the University of Cape Town and a PhD from Sussex University.

Imprisonment and exile

After being arrested and placed in solitary confinement for over five months, for his work in the freedom movement, Albie Sachs went into exile in England, and later Mozambique. He was represented in court by his advocate Wilfrid Cooper. In 1988, in Maputo, Mozambique, he lost an arm and his sight in one eye when a bomb was placed in his car. After the bombing, he devoted himself to the preparations for a new democratic constitution for South Africa. He returned to South Africa and served as a member of the Constitutional Committee and the National Executive of the African National Congress.

Awards and writings

In 1991 he won the Alan Paton Award for his book Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter. The book chronicles his response to the 1988 car bombing. A revised, updated and expanded edition was released in October 2011. He is also the author of Justice in South Africa (1974), The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (1966), Sexism and the Law (1979), and The Free Diary of Albie Sachs (2004). His most recent book, The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law (2009), also won the Alan Paton Award, making him the second person to have won it twice. The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs was dramatized for the Royal Shakespeare Company by David Edgar, as well as for television and broadcast by the BBC in the late 1970s.

He helped select the art collection at Constitution Hill, Johannesburg, the seat of the Constitutional Court.

In 2006 his alma mater the University of Cape Town awarded him an honorary Doctorate in Law. On 8 July 2008 Sachs was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws (LLD) degree by the University of Ulster in recognition of his contribution to human rights and justice globally.

In 2009 Sachs received the Reconciliation Award as well as the Academy of Achievement Golden Plate Award.

On 16 July 2010 Sachs was further awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of the University of York for his contribution to the construction of post-apartheid South Africa, in particular for his involvement in the creation of the Constitution.

On 20 June 2012 he received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Dundee. In all, Sachs has 14 honorary degrees across four continents.

On 21 June 2014 Sachs was awarded Taiwan's inaugural Tang Prize in the Rule of Law for his contributions to human rights and justice globally.

Other Roles

He has also served as a member of the Kenya Judges and Magistrates Vetting Board.

External links

• Biography at the Constitutional Court of South Africa website
• An interview with Albie Sachs by the Conversations with History program of the Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
• Voices on Antisemitism Interview with Albie Sachs from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Interview with Justice Sachs on Chicago Public Radio's Worldview program
• Hear his talk "The South African Court Looks At Same-Sex Marriages: The Fourie Case" at the University of Chicago
• Interview with Albie Sachs on The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law, "The Law Report" (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), 14 September 2010
• On idealism, passion and reason in South Africa Albie Sachs Speaks on BBC The Forum