The strange alchemy of life and law

235 Pages·2011·1.21 MB·English

by  Sachs

The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law
The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law
•
JUSTICE ALBIE SACHS
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
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First published 2009
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Clays Ltd, St Ives plc ISBN 978–0–19–957179–6
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc ISBN 978–0–19–957179–6
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The lovely little boy that Vanessa and I brought into the world two years ago has
to our delight just used the word ‘why?’ If one day he wants to know why we
named him Oliver, why his Daddy has one arm, and why his Daddy is called a
Judge, he can find the answers in this book.
About the Author
On turning six, during World War II, Albie Sachs received a card from his father
expressing the wish that he would grow up to be a soldier in the fight for
liberation.
His career in human rights activism started at the age of 17, 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 he attended the Congress of the People
at Kliptown where the Freedom Charter was adopted. He started practice as an
advocate at the Cape Bar aged 21. The bulk of his work involved defending
people charged under racist statutes and repressive security laws. He himself was
raided by the security police, subjected to banning orders restricting his
movement and eventually placed in solitary confinement for two prolonged
spells of detention.
In 1966 he went into exile. After spending eleven years doing a doctorate at
Sussex and teaching law at Southampton he worked for a further eleven years in
Mozambique as law professor and legal researcher. In 1988 he was seriously
injured by a bomb placed in his car by South African security agents, losing an
arm and the sight of an eye.
During the 1980s working closely with Oliver Tambo, leader of the ANC in
exile, he helped draft the organization’s Code of Conduct, as well as its statutes.
Once he had returned to health after the car bomb, he devoted himself to
preparations for a new democratic Constitution for South Africa. In 1990 he
returned home and as a member of the Constitutional Committee and the
National Executive of the ANC took part in the negotiations which led to South
Africa becoming a constitutional democracy. After the first democratic election
in 1994 he was appointed by President Nelson Mandela to serve on the newly
established Constitutional Court.
He has travelled to many countries sharing South African experience in
healing divided societies, been engaged in the sphere of art and architecture, and
played an active role in the development of the Constitutional Court building and
its art collection on the site of the Old Fort Prison in Johannesburg. Author of
many books, his Jail Diary was dramatized for the Royal Shakespeare Company
and broadcast by the BBC.
Honorary Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn, he is an Appeals Commissioner of the
International Cricket Council.
International Cricket Council.
The Man Who Sang and the Woman Who Kept Silent
The work on the cover of this book commemorates the courage of Phila
Ndwandwe and Harald Sefola whose deaths during the Struggle were described
to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission by their killers.
Phila Ndwandwe was shot by the security police after being kept naked for
weeks in an attempt to make her inform on her comrades. She preserved her
dignity by making panties out of a blue plastic bag. This garment was found
wrapped around her pelvis when she was exhumed. ‘She simply would not talk’,
one of the policeman involved in her death testified. ‘God . . . she was brave.’
Harald Sefola was electrocuted with two comrades in a field outside Witbank.
While waiting to die he requested to sing Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika. His killer
recalled, ‘he was a very brave man who believed strongly in what he was doing.’
I wept when I heard Phila’s story, saying to myself, ‘I wish I could make you a
dress.’ Acting on this childlike response, I collected discarded blue plastic bags
that I sewed into a dress. On its skirt I painted this letter:
Sister, a plastic bag may not be the whole armour of God, but you were
wrestling with flesh and blood, and against powers, against the rulers of
darkness, against spiritual wickedness in sordid places. Your weapons were
your silence and a piece of rubbish. Finding that bag and wearing it until you
were disinterred is such a frugal, commonsensical, house-wifely thing to do,
an ordinary act . . . At some level you shamed your captors, and they did not
compound their abuse of you by stripping you a second time. Yet they killed
you. We only know your story because a sniggering man remembered how
brave you were. Memorials to your courage are everywhere; they blow about
in the streets and drift on the tide and cling to thorn-bushes. This dress is made
from some of them. Hambe kahle. Umkhonto.
The dress, swinging on its hanger in the breeze, reminded me of the drapery on
the Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre. So I painted a local Victory figure
moving through imprisoning grids of wire accompanied by a hyena—at once a
predator and a scavenger.
Justice Albie Sachs saw these pieces and a painting of three braziers I had
made in memory of Sefola and his friends. He suggested I combine Phila’s dress
and the braziers into a commemorative work. Eventually the dress, the dress
and the braziers into a commemorative work. Eventually the dress, the dress
painting, and the second larger canvas were all placed together in the South
African Constitutional Court.
Having the opportunity to honour the man who sang and the woman who kept
silent has been a privilege, but it leaves me with an abiding sense of shame.
Judith Mason