Albie Sachs

Based on Wikipedia: Albie Sachs

On April 7th, 1988, a South African lawyer named Albie Sachs opened his car door in Maputo, Mozambique. The bomb hidden inside detonated instantly. He lost his right arm and the sight in his left eye. A passerby was killed.

While recovering in a London hospital, Sachs received a letter from supporters promising that his attackers would be avenged. His response would define not just his own life, but the moral architecture of a nation yet to be born. He rejected revenge entirely. Instead, he would pursue what he called "soft vengeance"—the creation of a free, non-racial, democratic South Africa built on human rights and the rule of law.

Six years later, Nelson Mandela appointed him to South Africa's first Constitutional Court.

Fleeing the Cossacks

Albie Sachs was born in Johannesburg on January 30th, 1935, to parents whose own families had fled to South Africa from Lithuania. His grandparents escaped a kind of violence that arrived as regularly as the seasons. "Every Easter," Sachs later explained, "the Cossacks would ride into the villages and say, 'The Jews killed Christ, we're going to kill the Jews.' And my grandparents and others were fleeing into the forests and basements of buildings."

The trauma of persecution shaped both of his parents into activists. His father, Solly Sachs, became General Secretary to the Garment Workers' Union of South Africa. His mother, Ray, joined the South African Communist Party and worked as a typist for its general secretary, Moses Kotane.

Kotane was Black. In apartheid South Africa, this simple fact carried profound weight.

For young Albie, watching his mother admire and respect Kotane planted an unshakeable conviction. Racism, he understood from childhood, was not merely wrong or unfortunate. It was absurd. Inhuman. Unjust.

His father expressed a singular hope for his son: that he would "grow up to be a soldier in the fight for liberation."

The Prodigy

When Sachs's parents separated, his mother moved him and his younger brother Johnny to a modest beachside home in Cape Town. There, something remarkable became apparent. Albie was academically exceptional—so much so that he skipped two grades, partly due to a wartime shortage of schoolteachers.

He began law school at the University of Cape Town at fifteen years old.

In his first year, he won a prize for English. By twenty-one, he had been admitted to the bar and begun practicing law. But this was no ordinary legal career. From the start, Sachs dedicated himself to defending people prosecuted under South Africa's racist and oppressive laws—people who had dared to oppose apartheid.

The Day South Africa Celebrated Its Chains

April 6th, 1952 marked a peculiar anniversary. White South Africans commemorated three hundred years since Dutch colonizers, led by Jan van Riebeeck, had first arrived at the Cape. Many also celebrated something more recent: the electoral victory of the National Party and the introduction of the word "apartheid" into the English language.

Apartheid literally means "separateness" in Afrikaans. In practice, it meant a comprehensive system of racial segregation and white supremacy that would govern every aspect of South African life—where people could live, work, love, and even sit.

That same day, seventeen-year-old Albie Sachs made his choice. He joined two hundred Black South Africans at a meeting in a working-class area of Cape Town to support the African National Congress, known as the ANC. The organization launched its Defiance Campaign Against Unjust Laws on that very date.

Initially, Sachs was told the Defiance Campaign was a Black campaign led by Black people. But he found his own way to participate. He led a group of young white South Africans to sit in chairs reserved for Black people at the post office—a small act of deliberate transgression against the absurd rules that governed daily life.

Three years later, in 1955, Sachs attended the Congress of the People in Kliptown. More than two thousand delegates adopted the Freedom Charter, a document envisioning equal rights for all in a future South Africa that "belongs to all that live in it, black and white."

It would take nearly four decades for that vision to become reality.

The Price of Resistance

Opposition to apartheid came with consequences that escalated over time.

First came the predawn raids by security police. Then the governmental restrictions—Sachs was forbidden from meeting with more than one person at any given time. He was banned from publishing his writing.

Then came detention.

Under the notorious 90-Day Detention Law, the apartheid government could hold anyone without charge for ninety days. Sachs spent three months in solitary confinement. Upon release, he was promptly rearrested and held for another seventy-eight days.

His third arrest, in 1966, was the worst. He later described it as the "worst moment of my life." The security team subjected him to sleep deprivation—a technique whose head officer had been trained by the French Directorate-General for External Security during the brutal Algerian War, where French intelligence services refined interrogation methods that would later be condemned as torture.

When Sachs was finally released, he was given permission to leave South Africa under one condition: he could never return.

Exile

Sachs left for England accompanied by Stephanie Kemp, who had been his client before becoming his cellmate. They married, had children, and continued their anti-apartheid work through the ANC's London branch.

His work took him across Europe, but one country remained off-limits. The United States regarded the ANC as a terrorist organization and denied him entry. This classification seems remarkable in retrospect—the ANC would later be universally celebrated, and its leader Nelson Mandela would become a global icon of peace and reconciliation. But during the Cold War, the ANC's communist allies made it suspect in American eyes.

When policy finally changed, Sachs visited the United States and attended the Trial of the Chicago Seven, invited by lawyers defending the Black Panthers. He supported Bobby Seale, one of the defendants, and later met Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton. The American civil rights struggle and South African liberation movement recognized each other as kindred causes.

The Scholar in Exile

With financial aid from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, Sachs attended Sussex University and completed his doctorate in 1970. His thesis, titled "Justice in South Africa," was published in both the United Kingdom and the United States.

In South Africa, the book was banned. Possession of it meant prison time.

Between 1970 and 1977, Sachs lectured in the law faculty at the University of Southampton. He wrote "Sexism and the Law" with historian Joan Hoff-Wilson. He also published two books drawn from his own experience of persecution: "The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs" in 1966 and "Stephanie on Trial" in 1968, which covered both Kemp's imprisonment and his own second arrest.

In 1977, Sachs moved to Mozambique, which had recently won independence from Portugal. He taught law at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, learned Portuguese to fluency, and eventually became the Ministry of Justice's Director of Research.

Writing the Rules of Revolution

During his time in Mozambique, Sachs received an invitation that would shape history. Oliver Tambo, the president of the ANC in exile, asked him to visit the organization's headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia.

Tambo had a specific request. He wanted Sachs to draft a code of conduct for the ANC.

This might seem like bureaucratic housekeeping, but it was something far more significant. Revolutionary movements throughout history have often adopted the brutal methods of their oppressors. Torture, summary execution, indefinite detention without trial—these tools of state terror can easily become tools of revolutionary terror.

Tambo wanted something different. He asked Sachs to create a document that would explicitly forbid torture and articulate the ANC's democratic principles. At a conference in Kabwe in 1985, Sachs presented the code, and the ANC adopted it as binding policy.

The significance cannot be overstated. While fighting against a system that routinely tortured and killed its opponents, the ANC formally committed itself to different standards. This decision would later help make possible the remarkable transition that followed—a liberation movement that could credibly claim the moral high ground when the time came to build a new nation.

Sachs also served as a scribe during this period, helping lay the foundations for South Africa's future constitution and providing Oliver Tambo with ongoing legal support.

The Car Bomb

Then came April 7th, 1988.

The bomb was planted by South African security forces. It nearly killed him. It did kill an innocent passerby. It took his arm and much of his sight.

But it did not take his conviction that soft vengeance was the only vengeance worth having.

After recovering in London, Sachs established the South African Constitutional Studies Centre at the University of London. He then traveled to Dublin to work on the first draft of South Africa's Bill of Rights alongside Kader Asmal, under ANC direction.

In early 1989, he went to the United States to work with Jack Greenberg at Columbia Law School and Louis Henkin at the School of International and Public Affairs. There, he attended a Law and Justice Seminar in Aspen, Colorado, moderated by Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun.

At that seminar, something unexpected happened. Blackmun's personal physician spoke about being Catholic and personally opposed to abortion—yet supporting the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized it. The physician believed his own religious convictions should not be forced upon others with different beliefs.

Sachs found this profound. The idea that one could hold sacred beliefs while respecting secular pluralism—that personal moral conviction and constitutional law operated in different realms—would later influence his own judicial philosophy.

While in America, Sachs learned to type with one hand and wrote "The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter," reflecting on his recovery and his philosophy of reconciliation over revenge.

Coming Home

In 1990, South African President F.W. de Klerk unbanned the ANC and released Nelson Mandela after twenty-seven years of imprisonment. The exile could finally end.

Sachs returned to South Africa.

He joined the law faculty at the University of the Western Cape alongside Dullah Omar and was appointed honorary professor at the University of Cape Town. He continued working with the ANC's Constitutional Committee, publishing "Protecting Human Rights in South Africa" in 1990.

That book contained a controversial paper called "Preparing Ourselves for Freedom." In it, Sachs argued that the ANC should stop saying "culture is a weapon of struggle." His reasoning was subtle but important: culture's sociopolitical impact was too complex, too full of ambiguity, to be reduced to a weapon "that simply fired in one direction."

This was not a call to abandon political commitment. It was a recognition that the new South Africa would need to embrace complexity, ambiguity, and the full range of human expression—not reduce everything to political utility.

In 1991, Sachs was elected to the ANC's National Executive Committee, ahead of the organization's first conference held in South Africa itself. He organized workshops on electoral systems, land rights, regional government, and affirmative action. In December 1992, he joined the ANC's negotiating team during the complex talks that would lead to a new constitutional order.

Building the Constitution

The negotiations were extraordinarily complex. The Convention for a Democratic South Africa, known as CODESA, eventually broke down. Talks resumed as the Multi-Party Negotiation Process, which produced an Interim Constitution.

Sachs served on Working Group Two, which tackled fundamental questions about the nature of the South African state and how the final constitution would be made.

The Interim Constitution provided for South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994. The newly elected Parliament would form a Constitutional Assembly to draft the final Constitution. The Interim Constitution also created an independent Constitutional Court to ensure fundamental rights during this transition and to certify that the final Constitution complied with thirty-four principles agreed to during negotiations.

Sachs has often been called the "chief architect" of South Africa's post-apartheid Constitution. He firmly rejects this label. The Constitution, he insists, was the product of large groups of people working over many years, culminating in the Constitutional Assembly's intense work—of which he was not even a member.

If you were to do a paternity test on South Africa's Constitution, Sachs has said, Oliver Tambo's DNA would be revealed.

The Constitutional Court

Following South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994, Sachs resigned from the ANC's National Executive Committee. The reason was principled: he wanted to pursue a position on the Constitutional Court, and he believed judges should not hold political party positions.

Later that year, Nelson Mandela selected him as a founding member of the Court.

The appointment was not without controversy. During his interview with the Judicial Service Commission, Sachs was questioned about his role in a report that had downplayed the ANC's indefinite detention and solitary confinement of Thami Zulu, a commander in Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC's armed wing. Zulu was killed in Lusaka in 1989, and the ANC never investigated who within the organization had murdered him.

Sachs felt the criticism was unfair given his central role in ending torture in ANC camps—the very code of conduct he had drafted for Oliver Tambo. But the controversy illustrated the moral complexity of the transition: the ANC was both a liberation movement and an organization that had committed its own abuses.

Beyond his judicial duties, Sachs and Justice Yvonne Mokgoro assembled the Court's art collection. This might seem like a trivial detail, but it reflected something important about what the new Court was meant to be: not just a legal institution, but a symbol of the new South Africa's commitment to humanity and social interdependence.

Landmark Cases

Sachs served on the Constitutional Court for fifteen years, participating in cases that would define the new South Africa's character.

The Prisoners' Right to Vote

When the Electoral Commission of South Africa declared that prisoners would be barred from voting in general elections, the Court had to determine whether this violated their fundamental rights.

The Court unanimously agreed: withholding the vote from prisoners was unconstitutional. It could only be justified by an Act of Parliament explicitly compatible with the Constitution.

Sachs wrote: "The universality of the franchise is important not only for nationhood and democracy. The vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and personhood."

This ruling reflected something essential about the Constitutional Court's philosophy. Even people who had violated the law retained their fundamental dignity as human beings. The right to participate in democracy was not a privilege to be earned through good behavior—it was inherent in citizenship itself.

Corporal Punishment in Schools

In Christian Education South Africa v. Minister of Education, the Court confronted a clash between religious freedom and children's rights. Some Christian schools argued that Parliament had unconstitutionally limited their religious rights by prohibiting corporal punishment.

Sachs argued that corporal punishment violated children's rights under Section 12 of the Constitution, which protects everyone from "all forms of violence whether from public or private sources."

But his reasoning was nuanced. He wrote: "Believers cannot claim an automatic right to be exempted by their beliefs from the laws of the land. At the same time, the state should, wherever reasonably possible, seek to avoid putting believers to extremely painful and intensely burdensome choices of either being true to their faith or else respectful of the law."

Sachs also noted that the case would have been enriched by a children's advocate appointed by the state. The children themselves had rights at stake, and their voices deserved representation.

Housing Rights and Ubuntu

In Port Elizabeth Municipality v. Various Occupiers, city officials sought to evict homeless people living on unused private land. The Court unanimously ruled against the eviction, supporting what they called "the right not to be arbitrarily deprived of a home."

Sachs's opinion in this case introduced a concept that would become central to South African constitutional jurisprudence: Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is a Nguni Bantu term often translated as "I am because we are." It emphasizes human interconnectedness and mutual responsibility. Sachs wrote: "Ubuntu is a unifying motif of the Bill of Rights, which is nothing if not a structured, institutionalized and operational declaration in our evolving new society of the need for human interdependence, respect and concern."

This was constitutional law infused with African philosophy—a recognition that rights exist not in isolation but in the context of human community.

Marriage Equality

Sachs wrote the Court's majority judgment in Minister of Home Affairs v. Fourie, declaring that South Africa's marriage statute was unconstitutional for defining marriage as between one man and one woman while excluding same-sex couples.

He gave Parliament one year to amend the Marriage Act. If Parliament failed to act, the Court itself would make the changes.

His reasoning centered on constitutional values of diversity and human dignity: "The Constitution acknowledges the variability of human beings [genetic and socio-cultural], affirms the right to be different, and celebrates the diversity of the nation."

This decision made South Africa the fifth country in the world—and the first in Africa—to legalize same-sex marriage. The Civil Union Act that resulted used the gender-neutral term "spouse."

Justice Kate O'Regan, while agreeing with the outcome, criticized Sachs for not taking immediate action and instead assigning that responsibility to Parliament. It was a reminder that even among those committed to the same constitutional vision, there could be legitimate disagreement about how quickly change should come.

Does the Law Have a Sense of Humor?

In Laugh It Off Promotions v. South African Breweries, the Court considered whether a company could stop someone from parodying its trademark on a t-shirt. The Court held that the damage to intellectual property rights was small and far outweighed by free speech considerations.

Sachs wrote a separate concurring opinion that began with an unusual question: "Does the law have a sense of humor?"

His answer was characteristically philosophical: "A society that takes itself too seriously risks bottling up its tensions and treating every example of irreverence as a threat to its existence. Humor is one of the great solvents of democracy. It permits the ambiguities and contradictions of public life to be articulated in non-violent forms. It promotes diversity. It enables a multitude of discontents to be expressed in a myriad of spontaneous ways. It is an elixir of constitutional health."

Here was a judge who had lost his arm to political violence, writing about humor as essential to democracy. The message was clear: freedom meant the freedom to laugh, to mock, to refuse to take power too seriously.

The Meaning of Soft Vengeance

Albie Sachs's story is remarkable not only for what he endured but for how he responded. A man who was tortured through sleep deprivation, exiled from his homeland, and nearly killed by a car bomb chose not to seek retribution. Instead, he dedicated himself to building a constitutional order that would protect everyone's rights—including those who had persecuted him.

This was not weakness or passivity. It was a strategic and moral choice. Sachs understood that cycles of vengeance perpetuate themselves. The only way to break the cycle was to build something new: institutions grounded in human dignity, the rule of law, and the recognition that even enemies shared a common humanity.

The South African Constitution he helped create is often called one of the most progressive in the world. It explicitly protects against discrimination based on sexual orientation—one of the first constitutions anywhere to do so. It enshrines socioeconomic rights to housing, healthcare, and education. It recognizes eleven official languages, reflecting the nation's diversity.

Most importantly, it emerged from a process that prioritized negotiation over revolution, reconciliation over revenge. When the new South Africa was born, it chose a Truth and Reconciliation Commission over tribunals and firing squads.

None of this was inevitable. Liberation movements throughout history have often become as brutal as the regimes they replaced. South Africa's transition was far from perfect, and the country continues to struggle with profound inequality and social challenges. But the constitutional framework Sachs helped create provided a foundation for addressing those challenges through law rather than violence.

His father had hoped he would become a soldier in the fight for liberation. He did—but his weapons were words, laws, and the radical insistence that even in the struggle against injustice, human dignity must be preserved. His vengeance took the form of a constitution, a court, and a country where former enemies would have to learn, however imperfectly, to live together.

That is soft vengeance. And it may be the only kind that matters.