Albie Sachs

Albie Sachs is giving talks this week to the Stanford Law School. He was one of the lawyers in the resistance movement in South Africa and he helped write South Africa's new constitution a decade ago. During the apartheid era, he spent time in prison and then went into exile. One morning in 1988 in Maputo, Mozambique--where he was living--he went to his car to go to the beach for a job. Turned out, the South African government had planted a bomb in his car and he was blown up. Lost an arm and an eye. (Ruth First, another anti-apartheid activist, was actually killed by the letter bomb the apartheid government sent to her in Maputo.)

About twenty of us met him in the African Studies Department on Tuesday afternoon and he talked to us about how S. Africa under apartheid was a paradox--ruled by the "rule of law" but the "law" was invidious. Under a "Terrorist Act," the government could detain people up to 90 days without charging them, without giving them legal counsel, and without informing their families that they were, in fact, in custody. After 90 days, they had to release people but frequently the police would re-arrest them as soon as they stepped out of the prison and onto the street. This is what happened to Albie Sachs.

He described the first month in solitary confinement and explained that to keep himself from being broken, he sang songs, a song for each letter of the alphabet. (He rewrote the song "Always" as a freedom song and that became his song while in solitary confinement, and he sang it for us because, as he said, "You're unlikely to ever again hear a justice sing.") He also said the only reading material he was given was a Bible and he got used to reading in columns. When they brought a court order that he was allowed reading material other than the Bible, he had trouble focusing on the non-column writing. But he said that was the most important thing people on the outside did for him. It was the law that allowed him to be detained and placed in solitary confinement (because he is white, he was not subjected to electric shocks through his genitals like so many other detainees) but it was also the law that required police officers to go to the library to fetch books that he requested.

I wrote down a couple of things he said because I thought they were such important concepts:

"When you're deprived of all books, you begin to understand just how precious they are. Book deprivation is like sleep deprivation or human deprivation. Without those books, I proably wouldn't be here today: my spirit would have been so utterly crushed."

I couldn't help but contrast that with Jose Padilla. If you believe his lawyers, his spirit has in fact been crushed by his treatment in prison under our governmental war-time policy that allowed him to be detained for two years without access to legal counsel and three years without being charged with a crime. His lawyers claim he is so traumatized that he is mentally ill. Regardless of whether Padilla is in fact guilty of being connected to al-Qaeda, his treatment certainly violates the spirit of our legal system, if not the letter of the law. (It does seem clear that he has a history of gang-related violence http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2037444.stm). This type of policy reminds me of South African-style laws during apartheid, as well as what happened in Zimbabwe when the white-minority government was trying to suppress the liberation movement. My favorite nun was also detained without being charged, something that led to great outcry on the part of the U.S. and the U.N. She was accused of being a terrorist without having had any connection to the liberation soldiers at all, though she did commit treason during her hearing when she refused to use the word "terrorist" for the guerrilla soldiers. (It was treasonous to use any other word.) (She's the subject of my master's thesis finished in 2001, if anybody wants to know more about her.)

I wish I could go to his talk today because he will be discussing South Africa's post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Committee, which was headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It was an amazing act of grace in this country, which could so easily have devolved into civil war after the dismantling of apartheid. (http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/). The thing I find most amazing about the TRC is that it recognized that regardless of your reason for participating in violence (even if it's to liberate a country trapped by racism, oppression, and debilitating violence), it will damage you as an individual.