["Love & Hate" by Michael Kiwanuka playing]
Albie Sachs is a South African activist, lawyer, writer,
and a former judge appointed by Nelson Mandela
to serve on the first Constitutional Court of South Africa.
During the struggle to end apartheid,
Albie survived a bomb planted in his car by the South African Security Service.
He lost an arm and the sight in one eye.
And yet years later, when asked what the world needs most,
his answer remains unflinching.
[chuckles] The word "kindness" keeps popping into my head, uh,
and maybe because there's so much
braggadocio, that's become popular. That's been supported.
But you refute it through
uh, connecting up with others.
Through contact with others, through getting energies to...
to point in the same direction,
and through
accepting and embracing diversity.
This was inspired by Nelson Mandela, who once said,
"What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived...
[Meghan] ...it is what difference we have made to the lives of others
that will determine the significance of the life we lead."
[Harry] His life left a lasting mark on the world.
A legacy that has helped inspire so many others to stand up...
[Meghan] ...to fight for change and to become leaders.
[Harry] So this is in memory of Madiba.
[Meghan] It was made to remind us of the difference one person can make.
[Harry] It's about people who have made brave choices.
Leaders who have walked alongside him and followed in his footsteps.
[Meghan] Caring for others, working for a better and more equal world.
[Harry] And giving inspiration to the rest of us
to live to lead.
♪ You can't break me down You can't take me down ♪
♪ You can't take me down You can't break me down ♪
♪ You can't take me down ♪
My first report card from school, I was six years old,
started with the words, "Albert is a dreamy boy."
And now, uh,
70-plus years later,
Albie is still a... [chuckles] ...dreamy boy.
- [explosion] - [glass shatters]
- [car alarms blaring] - [muffled shout]
[news anchor] The latest target of worldwide attacks on the ANC
was opening his car door when the bomb exploded.
Albie Sachs was critically injured.
[anchor 2] When he was taken to hospital, he was given little chance of survival.
Miraculously, he did survive.
Shattered. He'd lost the sight in one eye. One arm was amputated.
Nevertheless, two months later, the ANC leader remained optimistic
about his homeland's future.
Vengeance won't bring my arm back.
Uh, and on the contrary, vengeance will demean me
and in a way, make it all for nothing.
Uh, I think it's very important that we maintain a positive outlook.
Freedom will come in South Africa. Freedom...
We'll have freedom in our lifetime, and we'll build a decent society there.
That has to be our objective.
["Lost in the Light" by Bahamas playing]
[man 1] Our guest today is Justice Albert L. Sachs,
a member of the South African Constitutional Court.
♪ I'm lost in the light ♪
Justice Sachs was a leader in the struggle for human rights in South Africa
and a freedom fighter in the African National Congress.
[man 2] His involvement in this line of work
landed him in trouble with the police.
[man 1] Twice he was detained without trial.
[man 2] As he was subjected to imprisonment,
solitary confinement, detention,
he endured a period of exile...
[man 3] And eventually became the target
of a state-sponsored assassination attempt.
[man 4] And then, Nelson Mandela was released.
[man 5] Here, after 24 years in political exile,
Albie Sachs being greeted by his mother at Cape Town Airport.
[man 2] He took part in the negotiations that made South Africa
a constitutional democracy,
and he was appointed by Nelson Mandela to serve in the Constitutional Court.
Through his time as judge,
he earned a reputation as the conscience of the court.
[woman] The way Albie lives his life,
the lack of bitterness...
Albie gives you faith in being human...
in being South African.
A white South African man, you look at Albie, you think...
Albie is what is possible.
♪ Bein' free, leaving me on my own ♪
There's a little story, age six,
when I was packing to go into exile, I found a card,
a birthday card from my dad, Solly Sachs.
Um, "Albie, may you grow up to be a soldier in the fight for liberation."
Now, I think that's pretty heavy for a six-year-old,
but that was the kind of universe in which I grew up.
[anchor] Laws made white people officially superior,
and the large Black majority
faced discrimination in every aspect of their lives.
South Africa was overwhelmed by that system of apartheid.
Age 17, I'm in a hall with overwhelmingly Black people,
maybe 200, maybe five, ten whites,
and people are singing,
and they're singing freedom songs,
and they're calling for volunteers to join the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign.
And I say to my friend, [whispers] "Avi, I want to join."
He goes, "You can't." "Why?"
"Because you're white."
"We're fighting racism."
"It's a Black struggle led by Black people."
But nine months later,
after I'd written my end-of-year exams, during the break, I was leading a group of
four of us young white people
to sit on benches marked "non-whites only."
And becoming active and meeting
and finding... I think it was so important for me,
the people I met in the struggle against apartheid
had energy, vitality, imagination.
So much more interesting
than the world that was mapped out for us
of some kind of career to make money, to get on, to be important.
Becoming a lawyer, uh, was part and parcel of the activism.
A whole range of different cases,
but a bulk, the core of the work I did,
involved people being
punished or threatened with punishment,
because of their views, because of their stand against apartheid,
or because they didn't have the documents.
They didn't comply with the multitude of laws that oppressed Black people.
It was dreadful.
1960, the year of the massacre at Sharpeville...
[anchor] At Sharpeville, police fired into a crowd of unarmed demonstrators.
[siren wailing]
[Sachs] Sixty-nine people shot dead, mostly in their back.
The ANC, African National Congress, banned,
everything driven underground, impossible state of emergency,
and then things became much, much grimmer.
You could be plucked out of your home,
your work, walking in the streets, at the whim of a police officer.
I saw my clients being picked up one by one.
You're locked up under what's called the 90-Day Law.
They can keep you, without access to lawyers,
without access to court, to family, to anybody, for 90 days
on the basis that they suspect you have information that would aid terrorists.
[interviewer] Because you were fighting this injustice,
not just as a lawyer representing Black people,
but as an activist,
they came after you too.
You join a struggle.
You're a volunteer.
You become part of a culture of resistance.
So it was the people fighting the Nazis,
the partisans who identified with them very strongly in Europe during the war.
Uh...
the people who'd been to jail,
who'd written books about their jail experiences, you read them,
and you prepare yourself for the moment,
"So this is what it's like to be in jail."
And you're not prepared.
You're not prepared. You're not prepared for isolation.
You cope because, in a sense, there's no alternative.
What can you do? You can cry.
Uh, there is an alternative. You can collaborate. You can capitulate.
So the fight then is to prevent yourself from cracking up
and giving information away, and...
After a while, you don't even know why you're in jail.
You don't even know why you're... You just know, somehow,
the big phrases that were so powerful and strong,
that seemed to be so meaningful, become empty.
Freedom? What is free... It's nonsense.
You have a little, extremely narcissistic, enclosed world
of just you, yourself, and that pain you're feeling.
On a good day, I would be depressed.
On a good day, just depressed.
On a bad day...
not quite suicidal but close to that,
in a state of total despair.
[metal door bangs]
[keys jangle]
One day, I hear whistling.
I can't believe it because it's not just the general noise.
Prison is noisy.
People screaming, shouting, doors being slammed, everybody shouting,
and I hear whistling,
and I whistle back...
[whistles "Symphony No.9 in E minor" by Dvořák]
And I hear from far away in the prison...
[distant whistling of the same symphony]
I don't even know who it is.
["Symphony No.9 in E minor" by Dvořák plays]
And this was a wonderful form of contact.
And then I would do exercises as part of my regime,
and I'm in the middle of trying to do 100 press-ups,
and I hear the whistling, and I say, "No, I'm only up to 75!"
"Please wait, wait, wait! Can't you wait?"
And then we had to, kind of, establish a time during the day
when we would be ready for the whistling, and I never found out who it was.
And then I'm released after 90 days.
I'm walking out to the street, and...
I'm locked up again.
[metal door crashes]
They take my tie away. They take my watch away.
And another 78 days.
And then I'm released, not knowing why, and I was so...
triumphant, euphoric,
that I ran all the way from the center of Cape Town to Clifton.
Maybe...
[symphony continues]
...six, seven, eight miles. I'd never run that distance in my life before.
Flung myself into the sea.
My colleagues came, dressed in their suits with their shiny shoes, down on the beach.
Uh...
And they thought I was, like, crazy. I was a bit crazy.
I seemed to be triumphant, but inside, something was broken.
You never get over solitary confinement.
You never.
[symphony ends]
And then, years later, now I'm in exile,
and...
I'm blown up.
[poignant music plays]
My friend, Ruth First, had been killed by a letter bomb.
There was a portion of the cemetery in Maputo
where many South Africans were buried. Over 20 who'd been killed.
And each time we went there, we wondered,
"That little space over there, is that for me?"
[woman] The very fact that he was such an important opponent of apartheid
meant that he was in enormous danger all the time.
[Sachs] I felt they wouldn't go for me. I was so obviously a soft target,
uh, and there would be a reaction against it, and
I was wrong.
[muffled shouting]
[anchor] The explosion was heard throughout the Mozambique capital Maputo.
The booby trap was suspected to be the work of South African agents.
His car was meant to be his grave.
- [people yelling] - [car alarm wailing]
[Sachs] I feel arms pulling me, and
I say, "Leave me, leave me. I'd rather die here."
And I think I'm being kidnapped and taken over the border to South Africa.
Total darkness.
Something terrible's happened.
I don't know what it is. I hear a voice in the darkness saying,
"Albie,
this is Ivo Garrido speaking."
"You're in Maputo Central Hospital."
"Your arm is in lamentable condition. You must face the future with courage."
I say into the darkness, "What happened?"
And a woman's voice says, "It was a car bomb."
I faint back into obscurity but with a sense of joy.
I'd thought I was being kidnapped,
to be thrown into jail in South Africa.
And I knew I was safe in the hands of FRELIMO,
the government of Mozambique.
And...
some time passes.
I'm feeling very light. I'm lying on my back.
I can't see anything. My eyes are covered. And I tell myself a joke.
Uh, it's about Hymie Cohen. Like me, he's a Jew.
He falls off a bus, he gets up,
and... his hand moves over his...
past his body like this.
Someone says, "Hymie, I didn't know you were Catholic!"
"What do you mean 'Catholic'?"
"Spectacles,
testicles,
wallet, and watch."
[chuckles] It's an old joke. Not normally told in those circumstances,
and I started with testicles, seemed to be in order.
Wallet, okay.
Spectacles...
If there's a crater there, I'm in big trouble.
Okay, and I've lost an arm.
I've only lost an arm.
That moment every freedom fighter's waiting for.
"Will they come for me today? Will I be brave?"
They'd come for me, they'd tried to kill me, and I had survived.
I felt joyous and triumphant.
And that was in April 7th, April 8th, 1988,
and I still feel that.
It blew away the misery of solitary confinement.
It gave a whole different perspective on life.
I somehow came back into the world.
I can't explain it fully,
and I'm a little bit worried there might be a collapse afterwards.
Uh, clearly now I've reached the stage where I have to,
uh, rebuild myself,
physically and emotionally.
And it was like...
learning to write again. "Look, Mommy. I can write!"
Uh, learning to stand. "Look, Mommy. I can walk. I can stand."
There was something very joyous about the recovery after the bomb.
[poignant music]
And, um...
I receive a letter.
I'm lying in a hospital bed in London,
and it says, "Don't worry, Comrade Albie. We will avenge you."
"Signed, Bobby Naidoo."
And I think, "avenge" me?
We gonna cut off the arms? We gonna blind in one eye?
Is that the country we're fighting for?
If we get freedom, if we get democracy, we get the rule of law,
that will be my soft vengeance.
Roses and lilies will grow out of my arm.
Today, I'm able to announce far-reaching decisions.
The prohibition of the African National Congress,
the Pan Africanist Congress,
the South African Communist Party, is being rescinded.
[politicians cheer and applaud]
[man] Order! Order!
[De Klerk] People serving prison sentences merely because they were members
of one of these organizations will be identified and released.
In this connection, the government has taken a firm decision
to release Mr. Mandela unconditionally.
["Khala My Friend" by Amanaz playing]
[crowd chanting joyfully]
[jubilant whistling]
♪ Hello, Khala, my friend ♪
♪ Where do you think you're going to? ♪
♪ And the road you're taking It has no end ♪
♪ Khala, my friend, come back to me ♪
♪ Khala, my friend 'Cause I'm gonna miss you ♪
[Sachs] I came back to South Africa.
♪ Khala, my friend ♪
♪ The world is full of... ♪
Our vote is equal for the first time.
[anchor] At this moment, in South Africa's newly born democracy,
its most revered architect made certain it was well-recorded for posterity,
declaring it the fulfillment of his lifetime struggle.
I have fought very firmly against white domination.
I have fought very firmly against Black domination.
I cherish the idea of a new South Africa.
[Sachs] That's the achievement of the things we were fighting for.
That's the validation of everything.
And then I'm appointed to the Constitutional Court
to guard those things we'd been fighting for.
The last time I appeared in court...
was to hear
whether or not
I was going to be sentenced to death.
Today, I speak not as an accused...
but to inaugurate
a court South Africa has never had.
A court
on which hinges
the future of our democracy.
And then, perhaps to cap the whole process of soft vengeance,
I meet the man who organized the bomb in my car,
Henri van der Westhuizen, going to the Truth Commission.
And he wants to see me before he goes there,
and he comes up to my chambers office, as a judge.
We have an extraordinary conversation.
He tells me about his youth, and how good he was at school,
and how quickly he got ahead in the army.
He's so proud. He got ahead.
He became a top member of the hit squad. [chuckles in disbelief]
And this is where the curiosity in me
is just, like, rather amazed.
There's a naivety to his expression.
And... But he's going to the Truth Commission.
He's gonna tell the story.
It required courage for a soldier to break ranks,
to join the new South Africa.
I forgot about him, and six months later, I'm at a party,
and, uh, I hear a voice saying, "Albie!"
I look around. It's Henri. I can't believe it.
He's beaming. He said, "I went to the Truth Commission,
and I met Bobby...", the one who'd written to me,
"...and Sue and Farouk, and I told them everything,
and you said, one day, if we met, maybe you could shake my hand."
And I put out my hand. I shook his hand.
He went away elated. I almost fainted.
But I heard afterwards that he'd broken away from the party,
he'd gone home and cried for two weeks.
I don't know if it's true. I want to believe it's true.
I'd rather not check up and find it's not true.
But for me, that would be more important than sending him to jail.
Restorative justice, different forms of accountability,
we're now starting to live in the same country.
For me, that's miraculous.
[interviewer] How is it that you found this capacity for love and forgiveness,
and for...
optimism, generosity?
Where did this come from?
I get asked that all the time,
and I don't want to frighten it away by interrogating it too much.
It's something that's inside you. It's with you. Uh...
1990, Mandela's released.
I'm about to go back to South Africa,
and an American journalist, Tony Lewis, said, uh,
"Albie, you must be very angry now you're going back?"
And he's looking at my arm.
I said, "You know, Tony, I used to feel I'm a failed revolutionary."
I didn't have that rage.
I should've wanted to pick up a knife and plunge it in the back of the guards.
And I saw them as people doing their job.
They weren't the worst of the interrogators and so on.
And I thought I was a failure.
He said, "You can relax. I've asked the same question of Mandela."
"He's given a similar answer."
"And Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada and Albertina Sisulu."
So I realized it's part of a culture
and all of us involved in this big dream of a free South Africa.
Meeting others, connecting up with others,
and finding marvelous sides to ourselves through acting with others,
and it's an optimism that we can live together in one country.
There's a very strong African concept called Ubuntu.
I'm a person because you're a person.
I can't separate my humanity from acknowledging respect to your humanity.
The interdependence of human beings.
And so much of this came from growing up in a struggle
that's been led by African people with that...
It's not just the singing and the mood. It's the interactions, uh, the grace.
It's not to say terrible things didn't happen and don't happen, they do.
But there was something of that at the core.
For me, conscience is number one.
Comes before bread, comes before speech rights.
Conscience, it's the core thing of who you are.
And that, if you like, that gyroscope inside you
that centers you and that enables you
to live with a...
significant virtue.
Not because you're obeying commandments and going through rituals,
but because something inside...
it's correct.
It's right.
It fits in with all those things that have made you feel human
and a person of dignity and courage and style and bravura and imagination,
and all those things that are lovely and nice about a person.
Uh, all of them radiate around that,
and I found it hard to lie even to the security police.
Even then it was difficult for me to lie because...
It wasn't, "You're naughty to tell a lie."
It was violating something inside me.
Face the truth,
uh, whatever the consequences.
["Call it Dreaming" by Iron & Wine playing]
Live your life
for yourself.
Don't even model yourself on
Albie, who's speaking to you about how to live your life.
Model yourself on yourself.
In that sense, don't follow your dreams,
follow your life. Your dreams follow you.
Whatever that means, "your life,"
uh, and explore and allow it to reach out
and to take chances and...
and risks.
Not to always go for the well-traveled road, the cozy way.
At one stage, I was telling myself,
"If you've got a choice about some important decision
and the one journey's gonna be hard
and the other one's gonna be much easier,
take the hard one."
Because you've done more than just get from point A to point B.
You've traversed some difficulties.
You've explored, you've risked, you've gained something.
- [unheard dialogue] - [interviewer] Last question.
What advice, if you had the chance to give your 20-year-old self some advice,
looking back on your life,
if you could say one thing to that young man...
I could say...
"Keep on dreaming."
♪ You can have mine ♪